South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Virus a danger as Everest’s climbers return
KATHMANDU, Nepal — Mark Pattison played wide receiver for three NFL teams in the 1980s. Now he wants to fulfill another dream: to climb all seven of the world’s highest peaks, including Mount Everest.
To prepare, Pattison, 59, packed weatherproof outerwear, polarized goggles and ice crampons.
But he is climbing Mount Everest in the midst of a pandemic. He has supplemented his usual gear with masks, gloves and sanitizer. He took out extra insurance to pay for a rescue if COVID19 strikes.
The coronavirus is surging again in South Asia, but Pattison is undaunted. “I wanted to be there,” he said, “in Nepal, this spring, at any cost.”
Nepal has reopened Mount Everest and its seven other 26,200-foot-plus peaks in the hope of a mountain-climbing rebound. The tiny Himalayan country was forced to close trails last year, dealing its economy a devastating blow. For this year’s climbing season, from March to May, Nepal has granted more than 300 climbers the licenses needed to ascend Mount Everest. Many of those climbers hope to reach the summit,
5 ½ miles above sea level. The pandemic has made the dangerous climb — traffic on Mount Everest contributed to 11 deaths in
2019 — even more hazardous. Local officials have instituted testing, mask and social distancing requirements, stationed medical personnel at the Mount Everest Base Camp, and made plans to swoop in and pick up infected climbers.
Climbers are typically greeted in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, with
raucous parties thrown by expedition staffers.
But not this year.
“No party. No handshake. No hug. Just, ‘Namaste,’ ” said Lakpa Sherpa, whose agency is taking 19 climbers to Everest this spring, referring to the South Asian greeting.
Pattison’s group and others will set off this week toward base camp. The climbing season has drawn some high-profile mountaineers, including a Bahraini prince and a Qatari who wants to be the first woman from her nation to make the climb.
Nepalese officials have set new pandemic-era requirements for them. At the airport in Kathmandu, incoming travelers must show negative RT-PCR test results or provide vaccination certificates. Climbers initially had to get additional insurance, adding to the average $50,000 price tag to climb Everest, although the government has loosened that requirement.
Still, tourism ministry officials and expedition agencies acknowledge that Nepal has no clear plan to test or isolate climbers if one tests positive.
“We have no other options,” said Rudra Singh
Tamang, director general of Nepal’s tourism department. “We need to save the mountaineering economy.”
Expedition companies have been advised to isolate anyone with symptoms and to ensure that paying climbers and staff members are tested before setting out, Tamang said.
Among those going to base camp this week is Adriana Brownlee, a 20-year-old British national who dropped out of Bath University to pursue a career climbing the world’s toughest peaks. She said Nepal appeared safe compared with her home country but also that the risk was worth it for the Nepalis and for climbers.
“They need that support from the climbing community,” she said. “It’s good for the climbers as well, just for the sake of their mental health.”
Nepal, one of the poorest countries in Asia, is taking a calculated risk. In 2019, tourism brought in $2 billion in revenue and employed about 1 million people. For tens of thousands of Nepalis, the three-month climbing season is the only opportunity for paid work.
The damage from last year’s closure was immense. At least 1.5 million people in the country of 30 million lost jobs or substantial income during the pandemic, according to Nepal’s National Planning Commission.
Porters who usually cart supplies and gear up the peaks for well-paying foreign climbers were forced to subsist on government handouts of rice and lentils. Expert expedition guides, many of whom are members of Nepal’s Sherpa tribe, returned to their villages in the remote mountains and grew potatoes to survive.
Some believe the misery was even worse than the numbers suggest. “Tourism contribution can’t be evaluated just from a (gross domestic product) perspective,” said Shankar Prasad Sharma, a former vice chair of the commission.
In January, with the disease seemingly in retreat in South Asia, the government decided to relax restrictions on foreign entry and reopen access to the world’s most famous peak.
But Nepal’s risk now seems more fraught. Nearby India is experiencing a worrying rise in infections. A new wave could severely tax Nepal’s already-stretched health care system.
That new wave has also crimped Nepal’s ability to vaccinate its people. Desperate to meet its own needs, the Indian government has delayed exports of Indian-made doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. Nepal was forced to suspend its vaccination program before a donation of 800,000 doses from neighboring China allowed it to resume. Still, it will not be able to administer a second regimen to the 1.7 million who already received a first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine.
Despite potential problems, the climbing season kicked off at the end of March, after the first expedition left Kathmandu. From there, climbers travel by plane to Lukla, the town that serves as the starting point for the 10-day trek to base camp. Once at camp, they spend weeks there acclimating to the altitude and waiting for a window of clear weather to attempt the summit.
Sandro Gromen-Hayes, a filmmaker who documented a British army expedition of Everest in 2017, said Thamel, the area of Kathmandu popular with broke backpackers, was quieter this year.
“It was swarmed with trekkers and climbers and stoners and everything in between,” he said of his previous visit.
Gromen-Hayes, 31, came to Nepal from Pakistan, where he filmed an expedition on K2, the world’s second-highest peak, known as “the savage mountain” because of its ferocious winds. Usually bereft of climbers in winter, it saw dozens of top mountaineers who had been cooped up for months in virus lockdowns and then flocked to K2 in December to make an attempt.
Gromen-Hayes said he had been hooked onto the same rope as three climbers who were killed when bad weather forced an early end to their expedition.
Among the climbing community, “I don’t think a lot of people are concerned about the corona angle,” he said.