Flying Off Everest Read Online Free PDF Page A

his eyes also brown, but liquid and bright—gleaming like a child’s. “My name is Babu.”
    The man in the motorcycle jacket quickly flashed a broad, white-toothed smile. “My name is Lakpa,” he replied. “I’m looking for a secondhand wing.”
    Babu actually knew the stranger, and Lakpa knew Babu. They had, in fact, become friendly acquaintances on a rafting trip a year earlier. Babu, a lower-caste Sunuwar, was guiding the trip, and Lakpa, a relatively high-caste Sherpa, was on holiday, sent by his employer as a perk. They hadn’t seen each other since.
    Babu knew all too well how hard paragliding wings were to come by in Nepal—typically having to be bought from visiting foreigners to avoid the government’s roughly 200 percent tax on all imported goods (hence all the old kayaks lining the streets of Pokhara). But what he heard next made him wonder if he should actually tell Lakpa he had an extra one, let alone sell it to him.
    “I crashed mine into a tree, flying in the Solu-Khumbu,” Lakpa said, still smiling. “I work as a climbing sherpa there, and I’m looking for a new one.”
    The Solu-Khumbu area, which lies just to the south of Everest in northeastern Nepal, is a dangerous place to fly, even for an experienced pilot. Babu knew this. It’s filled with powerful updrafts and crosswinds, amidst some of the highest mountains in the world. Towering black cliffs line deep, narrow valleys covered in bristling conifers. There are plenty of hard, sharp places to crash into, which is the reason that people don’t generally fly there and that the ones who do tend to get hurt. Babu had no idea whether Lakpa was an expert pilot or not.
He could just be an idiot,
he wondered.
    “You didn’t break anything?” Babu asked, a little surprised that Lakpa hadn’t died. “Never do that again,” he suggested warily, and then he recommended they take his old beginner wing out groundhandling. That is to say, unfold it and see if Lakpa knew which end was up.
    Neither of them knew the other was also thinking about flying off the top of the world’s tallest mountain soon—or the other’s remarkable backstory.

    Lakpa Tsheri Sherpa was born in Pokhara in 1976. His parents, Nima Nuru and Nima Phuti Sherpa, * who share a first name that means “Sunday” in English, named him Lhakpa, † or “Wednesday”–—after the day on which he was born. Lovingly, they gave him the second name of “Long Life,” or Tsheri. ‡ A few years later, before Lakpa can even remember, they moved their family, including Lakpa’s two older sisters, Nyima Yangji and Jangmu Lhamu, back to the family farm in Chaurikharka, south of Everest, where they soon had Lakpa’s younger sister, Nyima Doma.
    Chaurikharka is a small mountain village in northeastern Nepal, tucked into a green, forested hillside beneath the towering white peaks of the Solu-Khumbu region. Like all of the small villages in the remote 425-square-mile valley, it doesn’t have an inch of paved road. There are no buses or cars. No bicycles. Everything from potatoes to the toilets that are brought in for the tourists that come to see and sometimes climb the surrounding mountains must be carried in on foot or by yak along narrow, well-worn paths through the mountains.
    Before the Himalayan Trust § built the airport in nearby Lukla in 1964, the only way in or out of Chaurikharka had been a week’s walkthrough the mountains to the nearest road in Jiri. Today, it’s a thirty-minute light jog to Lukla, followed by a forty-five-minute hair-raising small plane ride to Kathmandu, taking off from what The History Channel officially labeled in 2010 as the most dangerous airport in the world. Still, there are no roads.
    Lakpa’s parents’ home, like nearly all of the structures in the village, was made of uneven stones, plucked from the terraced fields on which his family farmed. A small stand of evergreens behind the two-story building offered some semblance of shade from the