181. Mount Everest Horror: The Khumbu Icefall Avalanche

On April 18th, 2014, a 14,000-tonne block of ice broke free above the Khumbu Icefall and killed sixteen Sherpa guides. It was the deadliest single disaster in Mount Everest's history. What followed wasn't just a rescue. It was a reckoning: a fight over $400 funeral payments, a historic strike, and the first time in ninety years that the world's most famous mountain went silent. TW: Mass death, descriptions of fatal injuries For more information on the 2013 Sherpa and Climber conflict, check out Kyle Hates Hiking’s video: The EXACT Moment 100 Everest Sherpas Finally SNAPPED (caught on camera) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNpyaGlnjO4 If you would like to find out more and donate to the Juniper Fund with me, please find the link here! https://www.thejuniperfund.org/ Subscribe on⁠ Patreon⁠ https://www.patreon.com/heartstartspounding to become a member of our Rogue Detecting Society and enjoy ad-free listening, monthly bonus content, merch discounts and more. Members of our High Council on Patreon also have access to our weekly after-show, Footnotes, where I share my case file with our producer, Matt. You can also enjoy many of these same perks, including ad-free listening and bonus content when you subscribe on Apple Podcasts. Follow on⁠ Tik Tok⁠ https://www.tiktok.com/@heartstartspounding?lang=en and⁠ Instagram⁠ https://www.instagram.com/heartstartspounding/ for a daily dose of horror.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kaelyn Moore?

  Welcome back to another episode of Heart Starts Pounding. As always, I'm your host on this morbid adventure, Kaelyn Moore. Recently, the spring climbing season of Everest came to a disastrous end. At first, it seemed like this was going to be the most successful Everest season ever. A record 1,008 climbers summited the mountain, the highest ever recorded. Lak Bashirpa summited for an 11th time, setting a record for women. Only five people died this season, which is low for the amount of visitors there were, but the success was almost completely overshadowed by a disaster and the scandalous fallout that happened on the final day. A 52 year old Sherpa named Hillary Dawa Sherpa had just helped his Polish client reach the summit.

• 0:44Kaelyn Moore?

  They were coming down with another Sherpa and his client from the UK when the Polish client started running out of oxygen. At some point during their descent, Hillary Dawa Sherpa became separated from the group and disappeared. The next day, May 30, the company they were climbing with, Himalayan Traverse, was notified that Hillary Dawa was missing. No search operation was launched until days later after his family started begging them to search. His employer did not launch an immediate rescue, no ground team went back up, and the managing director initially confirmed Dawa had been left alone, but sent no organized search before the route closed. Meanwhile, back in Kathmandu, Dawa's wife, Damu, had begun

• 1:27Kaelyn Moore?

  his funeral rituals. When all of a sudden, on June 4, Hillary Dawa Sherpa was found crawling along the rocks and ice at the foot of the Khumbu Icefall, suffering from extreme frostbite, but alive. With no access to food or water, he descended from 25,000 feet to 17,500 feet all by himself. He survived by chewing ice for water and finding a few chocolates in his pockets. This entire event brought up a bigger conversation about Mount Everest and especially the Sherpas. And while this is still an ongoing investigation, it made me think of the deadliest day for Sherpas in all of Mount Everest's history, the Khumbu Icefall Avalanche.

• 2:10Kaelyn Moore?

  And so that's the story that I want to tell you about today. This will be our last episode before we dive into Dark Summer, the first week of July. I can't wait to share with you what we've been planning. We're off next week, but think of it as a binge week where you can sign up for a free trial on Apple or Patreon and catch up on our bonus episodes. Recent bonus episodes include Deep Ocean Mysteries and Conspiracies, The Horrors of Route 66 for its 100th birthday. And then later this month, we're going to be talking about the missing and murdered scientists recently. At least 10 individuals connected to sensitive US nuclear and aerospace research who have died or disappeared in recent years. I'm very eager to get into that one. That was suggested by the community at large. There's

• 2:52Kaelyn Moore?

  a lot of interesting stuff to hold you all over until Dark Summer starts, but for now, let's get into today's episode.

• 3:00Kaelyn Moore?

  It's a few minutes past 6:00 on the morning of April 18th, 2014, and the sky above Everest is still dark. John Ryder, a 49-year-old mountaineer from Northern California, is slowly picking his way through the Khumbu Icefall on Mount Everest. Now, this is a part of the mountain that's basically a river of ice that spills off the south side of Everest between base camp and the higher camps above. It's one of the most dangerous, if not the most dangerous section of the ascent to Everest's peak. But John is not the only one there that day. Around him, he sees headlamps of maybe 50 other climbers that are bouncing and swaying in the dark. They're roped in, moving in a single file line through a maze of crevasses

• 3:43Kaelyn Moore?

  and teetering ice towers, some as tall as five-story buildings. These features are connected by aluminum ladders that are lashed together over gaps that you definitely don't want to look down into. When you're on the icefall, you have to stay focused. But this isn't John's first rodeo. He's been here before. He knows the deal. He knows that you cross the icefall in the dark before the sun hits and the whole thing starts to shift and groan as it melts under the sun. You watch where you step, you definitely don't linger, and you try to not think about all of the ice structures hanging over your head. As long as everything goes to plan, you'll be okay. But this morning, things were not going to plan. Because that morning, there was a bottleneck.

• 4:28Kaelyn Moore?

  Somewhere ahead of John, at a section that the climbers call the popcorn field, it's named for the way the ice blocks bulge and shift like kernels in a popcorn maker. That route is backed up. A ladder had been damaged by a small avalanche the night before, and a long line of Sherpa guides hauling loads of gear had stacked up behind it. They were all waiting for that ladder to be fixed. And as he's waiting, that's when John hears something. A loud crack. He looks up and he sees it. A massive section of the ridge above them started raking away and hurtling straight towards his group. In the spring of 2014, roughly 34 foreign climbers from 41 countries

• 5:12Kaelyn Moore?

  had been issued permits to attempt Everest, with about 400 Nepali support staff working alongside them. The climbing season was just getting underway. Sherpas had been making their first load-carrying runs through the icefall for a few days. They were bringing supplies to the base camps that were higher up the mountain, Camps 1 and 2. The mood at Base Camp, which was below the icefall, was already complicated that spring, to say the least. So the year before, in 2013, there had been an incident on Everest that made international headlines. On April 27, three elite European alpinists that included Swiss climber Uli Steck, Italian mountaineer Simone Moro, and British climber John Griffiths, they set out from Camp 2 on an expedition that wasn't guided by Sherpas. They just wanted to go do their own thing.

• 5:58Kaelyn Moore?

  But that day, a team of Sherpas was higher up the mountain fixing ropes, ropes that every guided client on the mountain depended on. The Sherpas had asked the Europeans to not climb above them while they worked, just for safety. But the Europeans climbed anyway. Went off to the side of the fixed route. And then, at least according to the Sherpas, ice that had been knocked loose by the climbers fell and hit one of the Sherpas fixing the ropes below. Now, the Europeans disputed this. They said that they were on snow, not ice, and they were nowhere near the Sherpas line. But it almost didn't matter at that point. The damage had been done. And by the time the three Europeans descended back to Camp Two, a large group of Sherpas had gathered and were waiting for them.

• 6:40Kaelyn Moore?

  And what happened next was a full-blown brawl at 21,000 feet. I'm talking punching and kicking. They were people throwing rocks at each other. The Europeans said that they felt like their lives had been threatened. Other Western climbers had to step in and physically separate the two sides. And the three Europeans eventually left base camp entirely. It was the first physical fight between climbers and Sherpas that anyone could remember on Everest. And both sides agreed on one thing. It was probably the result of years of resentment that had been building between climbers and Sherpas. And so, when John Ryder arrived in the 2014 season, tension was already at an all-time high. But John probably wasn't thinking about all of that.

• 7:23Kaelyn Moore?

  He was just excited to try and summit the mountain again. John built custom homes in Sonoma Valley, California. He was the father of two boys, and he had been working his way through the Seven Summits, which are the highest peak on every continent, for years at this point. When he was climbing Aconcagua in Argentina, he had to be helicoptered off the mountain when he all of a sudden couldn't breathe near the summit. That's when doctors found that there was a tumor in his lungs. They performed a double lobectomy. And just nine months after the surgery, John was standing on top of Vinson Masif in Antarctica. And then, he summited El Brus in Russia, Puntakjaya in Indonesia, and then, he went back and finished Aconcagua.

• 8:04Kaelyn Moore?

  That left just one mountain on his list, the big one, Everest. He had already tried it once before in 2013, but he was turned back when an ice bridge collapsed and cut off the route he was trying to summit. So this was his attempt number two, to prove that he could do what the Doctors said might be impossible. And he wasn't doing it alone. Like every client on the mountain, John had a personal climbing Sherpa that was assigned to him. A guide who was supposed to climb by his side, manage the route. And when it came down to it, keep him safe. His name was Dawa Sherpa. Now, Dawa is one of the most common names in the Sherpa community. It means born on a Monday. There's a few different men in the story that carry a version of it.

• 8:49Kaelyn Moore?

  But this Dawa, John's Dawa, is the one that climbed right beside him. And to understand how important Sherpas like Dawa are, you have to understand where they're coming from. So the Sherpa are an ethnic group from the high valleys of the Solakumbu region of Nepal. They've been part of expeditions on Everest since the very first attempts in the 1920s. Generations of living at altitude made them extraordinarily strong in the thin air, stronger than just about any flatlander could ever hope to be. And over the decades, that strength turned into an industry. If you were going to climb Everest, you were going to climb it on the backs of the work that the Sherpa had done. And the pay wasn't bad either.

• 9:31Kaelyn Moore?

  A climbing Sherpa could earn somewhere between $3,000 and $5,000 in a single two-month season. And in a country where the average person earned just a fraction of that in an entire year, this was life-changing money. It was enough to build a house, to send your kids to school, and to support your entire extended family. But this also came at a cost. I mean, guiding on Sherpa was, by some measures, one of the most dangerous jobs in the entire world. A Sherpa working above 17,000 feet on Everest was 10 times more likely to die on the job than a commercial fisherman, which is the most dangerous non-military occupation in the United States, according to the CDC. And the most dangerous part of the job, the part that the Sherpas had to cross

• 10:14Kaelyn Moore?

  over and over again, was the Khumbu Icefall. Now, picture a glacier, a massive, slow-moving river of ice pouring off the side of Everest through a steep, narrow gap at around 18,000 to 19,000 feet. As that ice flows downhill, it cracks and it Shatters and it buckles into enormous blocks called saraks. Some of these are the size of cars, some are the size of houses, some are even the size of entire apartment buildings. And they're not stable. Sometimes they'll lean, they'll shift, they topple over and crash down with no warning at all. Threaded between them are these crevasses, deep, dark splits in the ice, and some of them are hundreds of feet deep.

• 11:00Kaelyn Moore?

  There is no way to climb Everest from the south, which is the most popular route, without going through this part of the mountain. And crossing it is its own kind of nightmare, as I'm sure you can imagine. Picture yourself inching across an aluminum ladder over a black crevasse that you can't see the bottom of, in the dark. Ladders that plenty of people have fallen from. I read a report that said at least 50 people have died at this part of the mountain. And most of those bodies are still there. There's a reason that it's considered one of the most feared stretches of terrain in all of mountaineering. And this route doesn't just exist. Every season, a special team called the Icefall Doctors goes in first before anyone else.

• 11:41Kaelyn Moore?

  And they build it. They fix ropes, they lay those aluminum ladders across the crevasses. They'll find a path through the maze and then they mark it, and then everyone else that summons the mountain that year has to follow that path. Before any client sets foot on the upper mountain, someone has to haul all of the gear up there. The tents, the food, the oxygen bottles, the fuel, the rope, load after load after load up through that icefall and onto the higher camps. And the people doing that were the Sherpas. A climbing Sherpa might cross Khumbu Icefall 20 to 25 times in a single season. And that is what John was watching ahead of him in the dark on the night of April 17th, before he summoned it himself the next morning.

• 12:25Kaelyn Moore?

  He was watching the lines of Sherpas with loads on their backs, moving up into the saraks. Now, that night before the climb of the icefall, a British doctor named Sophie Wallace was lying in her tent at Everest Base Camp. When all of a sudden, she heard something very concerning outside of her tent. Sophie was the base camp physician for one of the expedition companies. And that night, she kept hearing avalanches, really small ones that were going off all over the valley, the way that they did all day, every day. Up in the high peaks around base camp, snow was always sliding down the mountain. It was to be expected. But sometime before she finally drifted off, she heard one that was louder than the rest. It was a deeper rumble, something bigger.

• 13:11Kaelyn Moore?

  And what Sophie didn't know, and what nobody knew yet, was that that particular avalanche, that loud one, had done something. High up in the icefall near the top, it had taken out one of the ladders that the climbers used to cross the deep cracks in the ice. And so, a few hours later, in the predawn hours of April 18, John Ryder and his group got up, they got their gear ready, and they started climbing. And that's how it's done on Everest. You move through the most dangerous terrain on the coldest part of the day, because that's when the ice is most frozen in place. By the time the sun comes up and warms everything up, the whole mountain starts to move under your feet. A team of missing Sherpas had reached that missing ladder in the dark and got to work repairing it before any of the paying clients got there. But while they worked, the line behind them started to grow.

• 13:55Kaelyn Moore?

  Those paying clients started showing up, and it started forming a little bit of a bottleneck. And this started making John a little bit nervous. And so, he looked above him and saw that they were standing directly underneath a massive serac that was hanging off a part of the mountain called the west shoulder. And this was a rule that he had been taught. When you're underneath something that could fall, you don't stop. But there they were, stuck until the ladder was repaired, more and more people bunching up together, until there was about 25 people around him. And then, sometime around 6:30 in the morning, he heard the sound of a faraway cannon firing, and then the rumble of the mountain hurtling towards his group.

• 14:38Kaelyn Moore?

  About 300 meters above that line of waiting men, roughly 1,000 feet straight up, a serac on the west shoulder had released. A single block of ice had been estimated at around 14,000 tons. That's over 30 Million pounds. A chunk of frozen mass weighing as much as a thousand cars coming down in ice blocks the size of trucks. And the men in that bottleneck did not have anywhere to go. They were all crammed together and there was nowhere to run. John couldn't believe what was happening at first. He actually reached for his camera, thinking to himself that he should film this. And that's when Dawa Sherpa screamed at him. Get down, get down. And he shoved him as hard as he could behind a block of ice.

• 15:22Kaelyn Moore?

  And what happened next, you can't comprehend unless you've lived it. A tsunami of ice rushed the group, sounding like a low-flying jet. Before the worst of it hit, snow flurries kicked up, reducing visibility to zero. Everything was just white nothingness, like purgatory. And that's when the ice chunks started burying the climbers, starting with the men working on the ladder and then hitting the rest of the bottleneck on the way down. For a minute, it was impossible for anyone to catch their breath. And then it was silent. When it was over, the handful of people who weren't buried looked out to see a blanket of fresh snow and ice and a few scattered limbs of their companions peeking through.

• 16:04Kaelyn Moore?

  The disaster zone stretched more than 200 vertical meters down the mountain, from the highest buried man to the lowest, and victims were scattered all throughout. The only thing that those who weren't buried could do was start digging. Any Sherpa that could ran towards any sign of life that they could find and just started scooping away the snow and ice with both of their hands. One Sherpa remembered saving one climber, but as he pulled him out of the snow, he saw that there were more people underneath. But they were too far down to be saved, and time was running out. Climbers could suffocate under the snow in just a few minutes, so those closest to the surface needed to be prioritized. In total, eight people were pulled from the snow alive and then rushed back to base camp.

• 16:47Kaelyn Moore?

  And John Ryder was one of those people. Dawa Sherpa saved his life by pushing him behind the block of ice, and he was able to make it to base camp as the rescue started gearing up. Not only was this rescue team going to have to try to rescue those buried under the snow, but there was an even bigger group of people beyond where the avalanche had happened that now had no safe route to get back down the mountain. The worst day in the history of Mount Everest was just getting started.

• 17:20Kaelyn Moore?

  Dr. Sophie Wallace, the base camp physician who had heard the loud avalanche the night before, was one of the first people to start preparing when the radio calls came in about the avalanche. And it turned out, in some twist of fate, that base camp that spring happened to be full of doctors. As word spread, they converged on the medical tent. They had an emergency physician from Oxford, a cardiologist from Quebec, a trauma surgeon, an orthopedic surgeon, and a couple more emergency doctors. They also had a cardiologist and an anesthesiologist. It was basically a full trauma team that was assembled by pure chance. They split into groups, they turned a dining tent into a field hospital, and they made numbered wristbands out of duct tape to keep track of the climbers as they came in.

• 18:03Kaelyn Moore?

  Then they sent help towards the mountain. The first team went up on foot, then a helicopter ferried a second team, which included a paramedic who had actually summited Everest five times. The first patients to come down were the lucky ones that were close to the surface. They mostly had scalp cuts from falling on the ice. They had bruised ribs, some banged up limbs, but they got stitched and splintered and then were sent to the dining tent to be watched. But then, the critical patients started arriving, and there were three of them. The first had badly broken legs and was hypothermic. He had been trapped in the ice for hours. They splintered him, they warmed him up, and they got some fluids into him. The second was a Sherpa who was complaining of severe chest and back pain. He was also soaking wet and freezing, his heart was racing, and his oxygen

• 18:48Kaelyn Moore?

  was dangerously low. And then the third was in the worst shape. He was pinned so deep in the ice that the helicopter couldn't land anywhere near him, so they had to long line him out and dangle him on a cable beneath the aircraft and then lower him down into the clinic. Across his belly was a band of bruising in the exact shape of his climbing harness, where it had caught him like a seatbelt in a car crash. They cut him out of that frozen suit, they got him stabilized, and then they flew him off the mountain as fast as they could. But then, there were the victims that the doctors couldn't help. And this is the part of Sophie's account of what happened that day that's really hard to read. One of the three helipads at base camp had been set aside as A place to receive the deceased. And one by one, the helicopters started bringing them in.

• 19:33Kaelyn Moore?

  Each body was suspended on a 60 meter line beneath the aircraft, flown the length of the valley in full view of everyone at camp. And then the body was gently lowered down, and that happened 12 times. These bodies were described as still having their helmets on. Their faces were still covered with their buffs. The cloth scarves that every climber wraps against the wind. Sophie and the others numbered each one with duct tape as they came in and tried to identify each of them. And then other climbing teams came, one at a time, to find their own, recognizing them by the matching scarves that their company had handed out at the start of the season. Of the 16 who died that day, nearly all of them were Nepali guides and most of them ethnic Sherpas, a few from other mountain communities.

• 20:18Kaelyn Moore?

  Not a single foreign client was among the dead. And that was because of men like Dawa Sherpa, who protected their clients. And Dawa Sherpa spent the rest of that day and the next three days afterwards, digging and pulling bodies of his friends out of the snow. The bodies of men that came from the same villages, who'd grown up together, who had climbed together for years. And then Dawa came back down to find John. He told him that he wanted to stay by his side and to finish the climb with him the way he was supposed to, but he just couldn't. "John, I just can't go back up that hill," he said, trying to hide his tears from the other Sherpas. By the end of the first day, 12 of the bodies had been brought down to base camp. One more was found the next morning, spotted by a single leg sticking out of the ice,

• 21:03Kaelyn Moore?

  but he was buried too deep to free and the icefall had become too dangerous to keep trying. Three men in total were never recovered at all. They are still up there, somewhere in the ice to this day, and they join the hundreds of other bodies still left on the mountain. That night, John sat at base camp and wrote in his blog, trying to make sense of all of this. He said, quote, "Of course, we're all asking ourselves that serious question. Why are we here?" And that was a question that the whole mountain was about to be forced to answer. John, for his part, had already landed somewhere on it. Watching what the Sherpas had been through, watching men like Dawa lose their friends and then climb back up to dig them out, he had no interest in pretending that the season could just continue on.

• 21:48Kaelyn Moore?

  As he put it later, all of their income just died on that mountain. How selfish would it be when you look at that to say, "I want to climb Everest this year." But not everyone saw it that way. And what happened over the next several days at base camp turned a tragedy into a reckoning. It started with the response from the Nepali government, because here's what the families of the 16 dead were initially offered for their loss. 40,000 rupees, which is about $400. Per family, meant to cover the funeral costs and really nothing else. $400 to men that had spent their lives bolstering the tourism industry that had become the country's biggest moneymaker. Everest is an industry. I talked about it in the last Everest episode I did about the Everest death zone.

• 22:34Kaelyn Moore?

  The Nepali government pulled in millions of dollars a year in climbing royalties, the vast majority of it from Everest. A single foreign climber's permit costs around $10,000, and the full price for a guided trip of the mountain was anywhere from $30,000 to $70,000, $80,000, even $90,000 plus per client. Not to mention how much the tourists spent in the local economy when it came to boarding, eating, buying mementos. And because of this, the men who made all of that possible were insured by law for about $10,000 if they died doing this job. And now, having lost 16 of them in a single morning, the government's opening offer to the families was $400. You can see why this upset a lot of people.

• 23:16Kaelyn Moore?

  The Sherpa community's response was grief at first, and then it was fury. On April 21st, Buddhist monks cremated the recovered guides in Kathmandu. Photos from that day show the daughter of one of the dead, a man named Anj Kaji Sherpa, weeping over his body. In another part of the city, a teen girl waited for the body of her uncle. She said he was the only breadwinner in her family and that they had no one to take care of them afterwards. A woman named Nima Doma, whose husband was cheering on Chu, put it like this, quote, "What can you do when the main pillar of your house is not there?" She had small children and no idea how she was going to feed them or keep them in school. And so, for the first time in the history of the mountain, the Sherpas said, "Enough."

• 24:06Kaelyn Moore?

  Led by the Nepal Mountaineering Association, they drew up a formal list of demands and gave the government a deadline. They wanted real compensation for the families. $10,000, not 400. They wanted a relief fund set up, a memorial to the dead, better rescue services and medical coverage for guides that had been hurt on the job. And if those demands were not met, the Sherpas at base camp would refuse to climb. They were going on strike. And think about how unprecedented that was. For more than 90 years, since the very first expeditions hired Sherpas in the 1920s, the mountain had just taken its dead and work had always continued. The Sherpas would grieve and then they would go back up. That was the deal. That was how it worked on the mountain. But not this time.

• 24:51Kaelyn Moore?

  These deal points weren't necessarily unanimous amongst the community, though. The Sherpas were split. Some were adamant that no one should climb, out of respect and to finally force a change. And others desperately needed the season's income and they didn't want to walk away from it. They just couldn't. And then there were the foreign climbers as well, some of whom had spent a better part of $100,000 on this trip and didn't want to go home with nothing. One of them was a 67-year-old American who had hoped to become the oldest person to summit the mountain. And he described seeing younger climbers going tent to tent, trying to pressure the Sherpas into keeping the season going. And then, on April 23rd, there was a big meeting at base camp between the Sherpas and the Western Expedition leaders. We don't know exactly what was said in the meeting,

• 25:36Kaelyn Moore?

  but after it happened, the government scrambled. It raised the insurance payout. They promised a relief fund, promised to pay for the dead men's children to go to school. Officials flew to base camp to try to calm things down so they could keep the season going. But by that point, it was just over. One major company that had lost five of its Sherpas in the avalanche had already canceled the season and others soon followed. About half of the team started packing up. And as the Sherpas walked off the mountain, many of them simply unwilling to set foot back in the icefall where their friends had died, there weren't enough people left to keep the route running anyways. So for the first time ever, the spring climbing season On Everest just stopped. An Australian filmmaker named Jennifer Peetum had come to Everest in 2014 to make a documentary

• 26:21Kaelyn Moore?

  about a famous Sherpa named Furbatashi, who was going for a record-breaking 20-second summit. And her cameras ended up capturing all of this, the disaster, the grief, the strike. And the film became the first major documentary to tell the Everest story from the Sherpa's point of view. And Furbatashi, the man at the center of the documentary, with more summits than almost anyone alive, listened to his family at the end, and he never climbed Everest again.

• 26:49Kaelyn Moore?

  John Ryder went home to California in 2014 without his summit. And for a while, he wasn't sure if he'd ever go back to the mountain. But Everest was the last mountain on his list. And so, the next spring, he returned. It was April of 2015. It was his third attempt on the mountain. He was finally going to achieve his goal that he set out to with his second chance at life. But then, on April 25th, 2015, a few minutes before noon, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Nepal. Now, the earthquake's epicenter was more than 220 kilometers, or 140 miles west of Everest. It came from the same place that every earthquake in that part of the world comes from, deep underground where the Indian Tectonic Plate's grinded into the Eurasian Plate.

• 27:34Kaelyn Moore?

  That slow-motion collision is the reason that the Himalayas exist at all. It's what shoves Everest a few millimeters higher into the sky every single year. And on April 25th, a chunk of that pressure let go all at once, and the ground shook for something like 50 seconds. High above Everest's base camp sits a ridge running between two peaks, Pumori and Lingtron. It's draped in hanging ice. And when the shaking reached it, it shook all of that ice loose. A mass broke off of it and fell from roughly 900 meters up, well over a half-mile, straight above the camp. And here's the part that made this avalanche so deadly. An avalanche that's that big and falls that far, it doesn't just slide, it actually pushes the air in front of it into a blast.

• 28:19Kaelyn Moore?

  It's basically a wall of wind and pulverized ice moving like a bomb's shock. Wave. So what tore through base camp wasn't really a wave of snow and ice like it was in 2014. It was actually a pressure wave and that wave picked up tents with people inside of them and hurled them across the Khumbu Glacier towards the icefall. It flattened the middle of the camp, the busiest part, and it left the lower edge strangely untouched. So for the second year in a row, John found himself in the middle of a rescue on Mount Everest. And this time, he knew what to do. He stayed at base camp, helping move the injured towards the helicopters, and he helped line up the bodies of the dead for recovery. But he wasn't the only one on

• 29:02Kaelyn Moore?

  the mountain who had seen this before. Actually, a lot of people at base camp that day in 2015 were there because of 2014. They had actually come back because the season had been canceled. And 2015 was actually the year that Nasubi was trying to summit Everest. If you remember the episode I did way back on the most evil reality show in all of history, that kind of weirdly ties into this episode. Somewhere between 700 and 1,000 people were on or around the mountain when the earthquake hit, and at least 22 of them died on Everest that day, though the exact number has been reported differently in different places. So it's somewhere from 18 to 24. Across Nepal as a whole, nearly 9,000 people were killed as

• 29:45Kaelyn Moore?

  a result of the earthquake. And one of the survivors at base camp was a man named Joe Raftis from Toronto. He was there in 2015, and he had also been there in 2014. He got buried in the snow, but he lived, even though people just a few meters away from him did not. And here's kind of a wild detail about his story, but Joe Raftis had also been at the finish line of the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. He finished the race just moments before the bombing happened. He survived three mass casualty events in three years, and his story is just so wild to me. And the thing that stuck with me most when I was reading about the 2015 avalanche was actually something that John Ryder noticed about the Sherpas that day, about how they had changed,

• 30:27Kaelyn Moore?

  basically. In 2014, after the icefall avalanche, it had taken the Sherpas four days to make the decision to leave the mountain. But in 2015, two hours after the earthquake, with their entire camp ruins all around them, the survivors were already heading down. The 2015 season, like the one just before it, was canceled, and John Ryder went home again without his summit. While I was researching this episode, I actually couldn't tell if John ever went back and completed his Summit of Everest. I don't believe he has. But John, if you're watching this episode, will you please email me and tell me if you ever did? Sixteen men went up into the Khumbu Icefall before dawn on April 18, 2014, to make a mountain safe for someone else to climb, and they never came back down.

• 31:10Kaelyn Moore?

  Their names were Mingma Nuru Sherpa, Dorji Sherpa, Angchiri Sherpa, Nima Sherpa, Hurbal Anya Sherpa, Lakpa Tenzing Sherpa, Shirin Angchu Sherpa, Georgi Kachri Sherpa, Ten Dorji Sherpa, Por Temba Sherpa, Pasang Karma Sherpa, Asmong Tamang, Tenzing Chatar Sherpa, Angkanji Sherpa, Temtenji Sherpa, and Ash Bahador Gurum. And there's one more thing that I want to leave you on because this is a sad story, but I do have a little bit of a happy note to end on. In 2019, five years after that first avalanche, two of the women who had been widowed by Everest did something amazing. Nima Doma, who I mentioned earlier,

• 31:55Kaelyn Moore?

  whose husband had died in the icefall that morning, and another woman named Fardiki Sherpa, whose husband had died on the mountain the year before, they trained together and they climbed together. And in 2019, they summited Everest together, kind of in a way, taking back the mountain that had taken their husbands. "The death of my husband is not the end of my life," Fardiki said. That is all I have for you today. Thank you for joining me on another episode about Everest. I will say, and I do want to shout out everyone who reached out to me after the last episode on Everest that I did, I got a lot of really great reading material from some people who are... Ardent adventurers and wanted me to learn a little bit more about the mountain. And I will say I have a brand new appreciation for those who do try to summit Everest,

• 32:40Kaelyn Moore?

  even though it is still something I would never do myself. And I don't think I fully understand why people want to do it. I think I did learn a lot. So, thank you to everyone who reached out and I hope that you enjoyed this episode about it as well. If you want to join me on the High Council tier over on Patreon, I do a show called Footnotes where I give a little bit more context about this week's episode, usually with my sibling Leo. This week, we're going to be talking a little bit more about the women's summit that they did together. So, join me there if you want to hear a bit more. As always, join me here next week for another episode. And until then, stay curious.

• 33:16Kaelyn Moore?

  Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by me, Kayla Moore. Heart Starts Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Our associate producer is Juneau Hobbs. Sound design and mix by Red Rome Creative. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jordan again, and the team at WME. Have a heart pounding story or a case request? Check out heartstarts pounding.com.

• 33:35Kaelyn Moore?

  Do you want more Darkly Curious stories in your life? Sign up for our Patreon for free and get access to a rotating shelf of bonus content, our weekly Rogue Detecting Society newsletter, and the HSP Book Club. Paid members also get monthly bonus episodes and archive access, which I think is more than 40 episodes at this point. You also get a cool jinx sticker after your first three months. And you can check it all out with a free seven day trial. Link in the bio or go to patreon.com backslash heart starts pounding. Well, whatever you do, stay curious.