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Inside an avalanche
Film-maker Joe French thought he’d had it when he was engulfed by a wall of snow on Everest – but he survived to tell the tale
When he decided to combine his two passions – film-making and mountaineering – there was only going to be one place Joe French would end up: Everest. The world’s highest and deadliest mountain has always drawn climbers, but to conquer it with a camera too was always Joe’s mission.
In his 11 previous trips to the Himalayas, however, the intrepid Brit (who lives in Scotland with his wife and two daughters, and is a member of the Ben Nevis mountain rescue team) had only gone so far up the iconic slopes. Tragedy seemed to stalk him. In 2014, he and his team from the Discovery Channel had arrived at Everest to film a special in which US mountaineer Joby Ogwyn was planning to jump from the summit in a wingsuit (which has fabric between the arms and the body and between the legs, making the user look much like a flying squirrel) and glide 10,000ft to terra firma.
Alas, events conspired against them, fatally. When Joe’s team were due to start their ascent, Sherpa guides went on ahead to prepare the difficult path over the ice fields. Disaster struck. An ice avalanche on the Western spur of Everest killed 16 Sherpas, and what Joe’s team ended up filming was a desperate rescue and recovery operation.
‘Everyone sprang into action,’ he recalls. ‘All the mountain guides and medics know what to do. It was terrible to watch them bring down the bodies, but it was the first time I became aware of what a vital job the helicopter rescue guys do.’
The following year when he returned to Everest, it was with some trepidation. He talks of how this trip was to ‘confront some of the horror of the previous year’, but he ended up in the midst of an even bigger natural disaster – that almost took his life. The Nepalese earthquake of April 2015 claimed almost 9,000 lives, 22 of them on the slopes of Everest as the earthquake triggered another huge avalanche.
Joe was at base camp at the time, at 17,600ft above sea level, preparing for the ascent that had not happened the previous year. It was the start of the climbing season so base camp was busy. Had Joe not woken early and decided to go for a walk, he believes he would not be alive today. ‘My tent was flattened,’ he says. ‘I would have died if I’d been in there. I only survived because I decided to take a walk.’
Few live to tell the story of what it
The aftermath of the 2015 avalanche that nearly killed Joe feels like to be hit by an avalanche. Joe not only survived it but filmed it. He says when he first felt tremors he instinctively whipped out his camera, just in time to ‘see the entire mountain rush towards me. There was a moment of disbelief. I remember thinking, “I’ve got the shot”, then, “This is going to kill me”.’
He took the full force of the avalanche. ‘I was submerged by the snow,’ he recalls. ‘People think of an avalanche as like a slide. When it happens, it’s more like a bomb blast, it comes at you so fast. I remember tent poles flying, my lungs filling with snow. Then a calm descended. There was a weird sense of acceptance. I think I was bracing myself to leave the planet.’
By some miracle he managed to extricate himself from the snow, but many didn’t. ‘ The two people closest to me didn’t make it.’ His memories of that day are horrific. ‘ The injuries people suffer in this situation are like bomb blast injuries. You have people with their faces hanging off, brains blown out. People were dying in front of us. It was like a war zone, but our group was cut off from the rest of the world.’
Survivors did their best to administer first aid, and a makeshift morgue was set up. Then came the agonising wait for help to arrive from the outside world. When it did, the feeling was overwhelming. ‘I’ll never forget the sound of that first helicopter. It was barely audible at first, the faintest rumble, but then the sound builds and builds. One helicopter popped up, then another, then another. It was the most joyful experience ever.’
Joe hadn’t been back to Everest since that day until last year when he decided he had to return to film the work of the helicopter pilots who risk their lives every day to airlift injured climbers off the mountain. ‘These guys are incredible. They take those machines, which aren’t designed to go that high, and perform the impossible.’
The nail-biting six-part series follows a team of helicopter pilots as they make often treacherous missions to reach climbers in peril. ‘These guys operate on a knife edge,’ explains Joe. ‘It’s often perilous, even in good conditions. Add in bad conditions and, well, I don’t know how these guys stay so calm.’
One team of climbers get stranded after their camp is blown away by a storm and the rescue teams simply cannot find them. They’re forced to spend a night in the open, and when the helicopter does reach them it can’t land because the ice shelf on which they’re stranded is not stable enough. All eight have to be winched out separately.
He admits he was ‘crazy afraid’ going back up there, but he also feels the film needed to be made. ‘These pilots are true heroes,’ he says. ‘We all owe them so much.’ Everest Rescue, Sunday 12 March, 9pm, Discovery Channel.