Views from the top of the world

Andrew Towne set out to climb Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world at 29,029 feet, to overcome his fear of heights. The Grand Forks, North Dakota, native, a alumnus of the Carey JD/MBA Program, made his first attempt in the spring of 2015 from Nepal. He was thwarted by the Gorkha earthquake, a 7.8 seism that struck near Kathmandu on April 25 and caused around 9,000 deaths and destroyed more than 600,000 structures.

Around 1 p.m., he was eating lunch on a folding table in a tent at Base Camp, located on the slowly flowing Khumbu Glacier at around 17,500 feet, when he felt some light rumbling. He thought the person sitting next to him was jiggling his leg, but then he saw the eyes of his expedition leader light up, who instantly recognized what was occurring and said, “Earthquake.” Towne hurried outside the tent terrified that an enormous crevasse would open up in the ice underneath them and the earth would swallow them up whole. He heard rocks and snow falling, looked north to Everest, and saw a cloud of ice and rocks more than a quarter-mile tall rushing at him. 

“I had no idea what was in this enormous cloud, but I figured it was not good, so I ran behind the nearest bolder and ducked into the fetal position,” he says. “All my attention went to my back so that I could focus on feeling the first bit of snow and immediately taking one last deep breath in case I was going to tumble down the glacier in an avalanche.” But in an instant, the danger receded. Everest had spared him.  He stood up, brushed maybe a centimeter of snow powder off his person, and realized that he survived. He heard a crackle on his radio; it was the voice of his expedition leader confirming that his team was safe. Other parts of Base Camp were not so lucky. The thrust of the avalanche hit hardest as close as 300 feet from their tents. An ice shelf fell during the earthquake from about 5,000 feet above and smashed on a ridge atop the camp. When the ice shelf crashed into the mountain, it created a cloud of snow, rocks, and large blocks of ice raining down from high above. “The damage at Base Camp and the deaths occurred when, inside this cloud of snow, some people and tents were hit by chunks the size of tractors and maybe even some as big as a semitruck,” Towne says. “I was lucky enough that the cloud hit me, but none of the chunks of ice or rock hit me.”

Towne’s camp turned out to be one of the least afflicted sections of all of Base Camp. Within half an hour, it was transformed into a triage hospital as casualties began pouring in. “Quickly, other people started bringing their dead and dying to us,” he says. “There were doctors from other expeditions who set up a makeshift hospital and we started treating them as fast as we could.” Towne helped doctors distribute warm water bottles to patients, feed the injured, and fetched sleeping bags from other areas of the camp. With the arrival of dusk, temperatures would plummet. Wounded who were not kept warm were at a greater risk of falling into shock. As night fell, the able-bodied made sure every patient had been treated two or three times, and set up an overnight call schedule so victims could continue to receive care while the unscathed got some sleep. “We had no idea how long it would take before evacuation to a hospital could take place,” Towne says. He went to sleep nervous—and woke up to the sound of the first helicopter just after dawn. By noon the following day, all injured persons had been evacuated to hospitals in Kathmandu. Towne and his teammates began trekking away from Everest a day or two later. “My experience surviving the avalanche on Mount Everest in 2015 made me appreciate life more and realize how everything can change in an instant,” he says. “It was a tragic occurrence at Base Camp. Somewhere between 15 and 35 people were killed that day. But relative to the devastation across the country of Nepal, where many thousands of people died in the earthquake, the avalanche it triggered at Everest was trivial.” Unbowed and still fascinated by the mountain, and the Sherpa people of the Khumbu Valley, Towne returned to Everest two years later to attempt another summit. Aided by his Sherpa climbing partner, Pasang Kami, an experienced team led by WEMBA Himalaya venture leader Ang Jangbu, and his good health, he was successful. Reaching the top, he says, “felt good. It felt real good.”

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