Without Climbing Everest, Chronicling a Solemn Descent

It was while watching Goutam Ghosh’s body slide into the fire, after a year spent frozen near the summit of Mount Everest, that I wondered — and not for the first time — just how I got there, to that little riverside crematory in Kolkata, India.

Everyone else left. I stayed, unable or unwilling to move, trying to make sense of it. A year of heartache and worry, a monumental effort to bring Ghosh home, and hours after he arrived, he was ash. I was struck by the finality of it all.

An old man stopped me on the way out and wanted to talk. The room soon filled with acrid smoke. I had to excuse myself.

Outside, back into the crowd, the gloomy mood of the day lifted slightly. People wanted to take photographs of me and the Times photographer Josh Haner. They wanted to know what we thought of India. Mostly, they wanted to know how we got there.

Good question. I imagine others will wonder the same thing after reading “Deliverance From 27,000 Feet.”

I’ve written several stories about tragedy befalling those in pursuit of outdoor adventures, from a deadly avalanche to doomed wing-suit flights. And occasionally I hear about the difficult and emotional task of recovering a body from a remote, unforgiving place.

A couple of those stories came to me in 2016, and the sports editor Jason Stallman and I pondered ways to tell them. Then we read a blurb about a doomed climbing expedition on Everest. Three people died, and the climbing season closed before two of the bodies could be recovered. Maybe next year, the story concluded, with a verbal shrug.

As a setting, Everest has been well-mined for books and movies, even reality shows. But this angle felt fresh and vital — a story that starts after hope is gone, and a yearlong wait for closure, if it came at all.

The trick, for us, was how to capture the story. In other words, how to get there.

With help from a Times colleague from India, I connected with family friends of Paresh Nath, one of the victims. We had several conversations through Skype, exploring ways to tell the story. Our bureau in Delhi passed on the name of a freelance journalist in Kolkata, Chandrasekhar Bhattacharjee, who reached the families of Ghosh and Subhas Paul, who had died, and Sunita Hazra, the lone survivor of the group.

I was teamed with Josh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer for The Times. We have worked together on some of my favorite stories, including a yearlong project about a rodeo family and a look at hunting alligators.

We spent weeks in West Bengal in February, mostly getting to know all the families. We wanted to know about the men they had lost, and why it was important for them — or, perhaps, not important — that the bodies be returned from the high slopes of Everest. We collected family photographs and downloads of cameras that were recovered from the expedition.

Photo

With Bhattacharjee’s help, we spoke to other Indian climbers and government officials, and went to meetings with the mountaineering clubs of the deceased men. As journalists often do, we gathered information without knowing what would be useful, or used, in the end.

We returned to Kolkata in early May, with a close eye on the opening of the route to Everest’s summit. We met again with all the families, and plenty of friends and officials, as hopes were raised that the bodies would be found and, somehow, brought down and home to Kolkata.

When reports came from Nepal that the route was nearly open, Ghosh’s brother Debasish set out for Kathmandu. We went, too.

The days dragged into weeks, wrenching for the waiting families. With the freelance journalist Rajneesh Bhandari as our fixer and interpreter, we tracked every rumor and development.

Each day allowed us to consider how to best report the story slowly unfolding on Everest. A reporter can convey information not experienced firsthand. A photographer cannot.

Should Josh climb Everest with the recovery team? He has climbing experience, but even the most accomplished climbers spend months preparing and weeks acclimating at Base Camp before pushing toward the summit.

Should he go to Base Camp? At 17,500 feet, it requires either a helicopter or a short flight and a weeklong uphill trek to get there. But Base Camp wasn’t where the story was; it was quite likely the bodies would stop there in a helicopter quickly, if at all, and we couldn’t afford to have Josh stranded out of position as the story shifted to other places, including India.

It was clear that the best option was to have someone else photograph the on-mountain recovery operation. But who?

The bodies were found and it was determined that Seven Summit Treks would be hired to handle the recovery. We met with Mingma Sherpa, the company’s owner. He agreed to let us hire one of his Sherpas as a freelance journalist, to record the event.

Josh bought a GoPro camera from a Kathmandu shop and met with Dawa Finjhok Sherpa, who would carry it. There were countless concerns: Would he know how to operate the camera? Would he understand the kind of videos and photographs we hoped to get? What if the batteries died in the extreme conditions? What if the camera malfunctioned, broke or got lost? What if Dawa Finjhok Sherpa’s finger obscured the images?

Josh wrote a detailed instruction manual in English and Nepali (with Rajneesh’s help). When the bodies (and Dawa Finjhok Sherpa) came off the helicopter in Kathmandu a week later, we were relieved to discover that the images were extraordinary. They became both an invaluable reporting source and, eventually, a key part of the story presentation.

The story moved quickly from there. The bodies were examined in Kathmandu, then flown to Kolkata late at night. The next morning, the bodies were driven to the homes of the families. We stationed a journalist with the Naths in Durgapur, 100 miles away, to document what happened there, while Josh and I stayed in Kolkata with the Ghosh family.

We were the only outsiders in the tiny room when family members received the body. It was loud from the wailing, and stiflingly hot. We marched with hundreds of others the several miles to the crematory. We were with the two dozen or so people in the room where the funeral rites were performed, and there as the body was moved to the incinerator.

That is how we got there. Mostly, we got there because we were curious to learn what happened. Hopefully, readers will be curious, too.