Everest Avalanche – A Personal Reflection

Author: Hugo Searle, High Adventure Expeditions Leader.

One of the scariest moments I’ve had on a mountain happened at Camp 1 (C1) on Everest in 2012 when I watched the biggest avalanche I’ve ever seen fill the Western Cwm and come barreling towards me.

It was mid morning on a gloriously sunny Himalayan day, the kind when the sky is the deepest blue. I had just arrived at C1 after carrying a load up from basecamp and I knew I would have at least two hours to relax before the rest of my team arrived. The sun shone down and reflected off every surface of the cwm, making my tent warm and toasty. My thermometer was showing 30c (86f). I took off my boots, gloves, down jackets and trousers. I opened both doors at the front and back of the tent to allow the cool breeze to blow through and settled down for a cozy nap.

[pullquote align=”left|center|right” textalign=”left|center|right” width=”30%”]”I watched as it reached the valley floor and turned towards me …”[/pullquote] You hear a lot of avalanches when you’re climbing on Everest. Sometimes they make good photos if you’re quick, but they very rarely (this was 2012) come near the camps. Suddenly I heard an almighty whoomp. A sound of enormous bass and volume. This was clearly a bigger avalanche than usual. I thought I might get a good picture, so despite my snuggled warmth, I sprung quickly to my knees and looked out of the tent up the valley towards the Nuptse face (where the sound had come from). To my amazement there was a simply massive avalanche tumbling down the near vertical, mile-high Nuptse face. I watched as it reached the valley floor and turned towards me, mushrooming out to be a quarter of a mile wide.

My amazement at this incredible sight turned to stone cold fear as I suddenly realised that I was dead center in its path. It was hundreds of meters wide, hundreds of meters high and still growing. It wasn’t going to stop before it got to me, it was going to steamroller right over me.

I knew it would hit me in seconds, I didn’t have the right clothing on, I didn’t even have boots on. I was about to get swept up in a maelstrom of snow and ice in my socks and thermal underwear! I didn’t have time to put anything on, grab anything or even get out of the tent. What did I have time to do? I knew I must act, I must do something. The only thing I could think of was to zip up the tent door.

Now I’m sure you’re laughing at that idea, because we all know that a million tonnes of snow and ice will not be repelled by a zipped tent door, but it gets worse. What always happens when you try to close a zipper in a hurry? Yes, the zipper got stuck! The avalanche was almost upon me, I couldn’t see the sky, just a towering churning, massive cloud only meters from me. So I did the next best thing to zipping up the tent door, I held it in the closed position. The avalanche hit.

[pullquote align=”left|center|right” textalign=”left|center|right” width=”30%”]”I was suffocating, my mouth full of snow …”[/pullquote] I was instantly thrown backwards across the tent, pushed down to the floor and covered by a raging torrent of wind, snow and ice crystals. I was suffocating, my mouth was full of snow, my nose, ears and eyes were packed with snow and I was being beaten like I was in the rapids of a raging river. I kept trying to push myself to my hands and knees to make space above the drifting snow to breath, but I kept getting hammered back down.

The fear was gone now. Emotionless action was all I could manage. I told myself that I was “probably going to die, but that I should keep fighting until the end.” I kept trying to get clear of the snow, kept fighting to breath. Slowly the rage abated and suddenly it stopped. I found myself on my hands and knees, still in my tent with sprindrift hissing through it. I crawled out to desolation.

Around me all the other tents were either gone – whipped over the ice fall and buried forever, or broken, shredded worthless hulks. The sun was out and all was quiet, save the hissing spindrift and some distant cries from other climbers who had survived and were looking for each other.

I survived because I had both doors of my tent open. The avalanche was able to pass through my tent. If I had had even one closed door, I believe my tent and I would have been picked up and thrown into the great crevasses of the Khumbu Ice Fall. I knew I had to dig my tent out before the sun melted the two feet of snow that had been left inside of it. I also had to find my boots and clothes, but I had survived.

The next day I was able to view the debris field of the avalanche. There were chunks of ice the size of small houses down to the size of a loaf of bread strewn all over the valley floor. Half a mile wide and a couple of miles long. Amazingly the large ice chunks all settled out of the churning avalanche before it hit me. Any one of those chunks, big or small, would have killed me instantly, but the closest one to my tent (the size of a small car) was about 50m away. I was hit by the wind, snow and crushed ice.