I saw Himalayas dance, says Noida’s Everest boy
India’s youngest Everest summiteer Ar jun Vajpai was making his third attempt to climb Mount Makalu (8,463 metres), the fifth highest peak in the world, when the Nepal quake struck. Unforeseen incidents and poor weather conditions had prevented the last two attempts, but this time it was a 7.9 magnitude earthquake that Vajpai was up against.
Vajpai came back to his home in Noida’s Sector 51 on Tuesday, ten days after the horror. The 21-year-old described the quake as the “most shocking experience” of his life. “I can’t describe what I saw. I always had a very different picture of the mountains in my mind. This time everything changed,” Vajpai, who scaled Everest at 16, told Hindustan Times.
Vajpai, the only Indian on Makalu this year, is the person who recorded the first and only video about climbers stranded on and around the Himalayan giant soon after the quake. “On the morning of May 25, I was with three other climbers, two Spanish and one Austrian in a communications tent. When it shook, we thought we were having high altitude sickness. When the shockwave intensified, that’s when we realised it was an earthquake,” Vajpai said.
Vajpai says avalanches are a common sight during expeditions, but what he saw this time was “just unbelievable”. “If you take a small piece of ice and try breaking it, you’ll hear a very distinct noise. Now imagine the noise of metric tonnes of ice crashing down on you. When a mountain as huge as this shakes, and chunks of ice break, with crevasses opening up all around you, you know what you’re going through. I saw the entire Himalayas dance in front of me.”
Vajpai and his team took a unanimous decision to help get their sherpas and porters to safety. “That’s when we began our rescue mission. We did an inventory of our supplies, how many porters and sherpas we could send for the rescue of stranded climbers, and so on,” Vajpai said.
By then, he had already sent out the first video from Makalu, and the families of the climbers there had been reassured. “That’s when I suddenly get a call from my mother asking why I didn’t take a video of the avalanche. Seriously? There were huge blocks of ice as big as 400 metres wide and 700 metres tall coming right at us. When you face an avalanche, you run for cover, and not your camera. But I still managed a video,” said Vajpai.
Surprisingly, Vajpai and his team didn’t call for rescue and he has an explanation to it. “I have been trained all my life to fight such situations. I was here and it was my call. There are people who had to deal with these and had not asked for them. We didn’t want the rescue forces to waste their resources on somebody who chose to deal with such hostile circumstances. People down there needed it the most.”
As Vajpai and his team began descending from the advance base Camp at 19,000 feet, they saw their route had been completely destroyed. One climber from Spain saw the ice cracking and a crevasse forming right between his feet. They were finally rescued by the Nepal Army on May 4.
Asked about the disaster on Everest, he said, “I don’t understand the Everest craze. There are people who have summitted Everest five times. What is wrong with them? Around 1,500 people scale the mountain every year. The size of the base camp there has had to be increased because of this rising footfalls. Give that mountain some rest. We show ourselves prepared for all kinds of calamities and this is nature’s way to humble us,” he adds.