On April 18th, 2014, a 14,000-tonne block of ice broke free above the Khumbu Icefall and killed sixteen Sherpa guides. It was the deadliest single disaster in Mount Everest's history. What followed wasn't just a rescue. It was a reckoning: a fight over $400 funeral payments, a historic strike, and the first time in ninety years that the world's most famous mountain went silent.
TW: Mass death, descriptions of fatal injuries
For more information on the 2013 Sherpa and Climber conflict, check out Kyle Hates Hiking’s video:
The EXACT Moment 100 Everest Sherpas Finally SNAPPED (caught on camera)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNpyaGlnjO4
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TRANSCRIPT
Mount Everest is one of the most dangerous places on earth that people dare to venture to. In fact, this year’s everest climbing season just came to an end, and there were five fatalities, 3 of them Sherpas, the people who ensure the safety of other climbers.
It made me think about the most dangerous season on the mountain 2014, where the highest number of sherpas died in a single event. And that’s why today, i want to tell you about the worst day on everest, the Khumbu (Koomboo) Icefall Avalanche.
As always, this is heart starts pounding, I’m kaelyn moore. If you have a dark curiosity and enjoy things like Everest misadventures, mysterious disappearances, and dark history. You are just like me. I upload once a week so make sure you’re subscribed.
It's a few minutes past six on the morning of April 18th, 2014, and the sky above Everest is still dark.
Jon Reiter, a forty-nine-year-old mountaineer from Northern California, is slowly picking his way through the Khumbu Icefall on Mount Everest
Now, this part of the mountain is basically a river of ice that spills off the south side of Everest between Base Camp and the higher camps above. It’s one of the most dangerous, if not THE most dangerous sections of the ascent to Everest’s peak.
But Jon’s not the only one there that day. Around him, the headlamps of maybe fifty other climbers bounce and sway in the dark. They're roped in, moving single-file through a maze of crevasses and teetering ice towers — some as tall as five-story buildings. These features are connected by aluminum ladders lashed together over gaps you don't want to look down into. When you’re on the icefall, you HAVE to stay focused
But this isn’t Jon’s first rodeo. He’s been here before and He knows the deal. He knows You cross the icefall in the dark, before the sun hits and the whole thing starts to shift and groan as it melts under the sun’s rays. You watch where you step. You don't linger. And you try not to think about what's hanging over your head. As long as everything goes to plan, you’ll be ok. But this morning, things were not going to plan.
Because this morning, there's a bottleneck. Somewhere ahead, at a section the climbers call the "popcorn field" — named for the way the ice blocks bulge and shift like kernels in a popcorn maker — the route is backed up. A ladder had been damaged by a small avalanche the night before, and a long line of Sherpa guides hauling loads of gear had stacked up, waiting.
And that’s when Jon hears something. A loud crack. He looks up. And he sees it — a massive section of the ridge above them, breaking away, and hurdling straight towards them
In the spring of 2014, roughly 334 foreign climbers from 41 countries had been issued permits to attempt Everest, with about 400 Nepali support staff working alongside them. The climbing season was just getting underway. Sherpas had been making their first load-carrying runs through the icefall for a few days, bringing supplies to the base camps that were higher up the mountain
The mood at Base Camp that spring was already complicated, to say the least. The year before in 2013 — there'd been an incident on Everest that made international headlines.
On April 27th, three elite European alpinists — Swiss climber Ueli Steck (OO-lee SHTEK), Italian mountaineer Simone Moro, and British climber Jon Griffith — set out from Camp 2 on an expedition that wasn’t guided by Sherpas, they just wanted to do their own thing.
But that day, a team of Sherpas was up there fixing ropes- ropes that every guided client on the mountain depended on. The Sherpas had asked the Europeans not to climb above them while they worked.
The Europeans climbed anyway, off to the side of the fixed route. And then, according to the Sherpas, ice knocked loose by the climbers fell and hit one of the rope-fixing team below. The Europeans disputed this… They said they were on snow, not ice, and nowhere near the Sherpas' line. But it didn't matter. The damage was done.
By the time the three Europeans descended back to Camp 2, a large group of Sherpas had gathered and were waiting for them. What happened next was a full-blown brawl at 21,000 feet. I’m talking Punching, and kicking, and throwing rocks at each other. The Europeans said their lives were threatened. Other Western climbers stepped in to physically separate the two sides, and the three men eventually left Base Camp entirely.
It was the first physical fight between climbers and Sherpas anyone could remember on Everest, and both sides agreed on at least one thing. It was probably the result of years of resentment that had been building.
And so when Jon reiter arrived in the 2014 season, tension was already at an all time hig
Jon built custom homes in Sonoma Valley. He was the Father of two boys. And he'd been working his way through the Seven Summits — the highest peak on every continent — for years. On Aconcagua ah-kohn-KAH-gwah in Argentina, he'd had to be helicoptered off the mountain when he couldn't breathe near the summit. Doctors found a tumor in his lungs and performed a double lobectomy. Just Nine months after surgery, he was standing on top of Vinson Massif (VIN-sun ma-SEEF) in Antarctica. Then, he summited Elbrus el-BROOS in Russia, Puncak Jaya POON-chak JAH-yah in Indonesia, he went back and finished Aconcagua. That left one mountain. The big one. Everest was his last.
He'd already tried once, in 2013 but was turned back when an ice bridge collapsed and cut off the route. So this was attempt number two. To prove he could do what the doctors said might be impossible.
He wasn't doing it alone. like every client on the mountain, Jon had a personal climbing Sherpa assigned to him — a guide whose job was to climb at his side, manage the route, and, when it came down to it, keep him alive.
His name was Dawa.
Dawa is one of the most common names in the Sherpa community — it basically means "born on a Monday" — and there are a few different men in this story who carry a version of it. But this Dawa, Jon's Dawa, is the one who climbed beside him.
And to understand who Dawa was — who all of these men were — you have to understand the Sherpas.
The Sherpa are an ethnic group from the high valleys of the Solukhumbu (so-loo-KOOM-boo) region of Nepal, in the shadow of Everest itself. They've been part of expeditions on this mountain since the very first attempts in the 1920s. Generations of living at altitude made them extraordinarily strong in the thin air — stronger than just about any flatlander could ever hope to be. And over the decades, that strength turned into an industry. If you were going to climb Everest, you were going to climb it on the backs of Sherpas.
And the pay was real. A climbing Sherpa could earn somewhere between three and five thousand dollars in a single two-month season. In a country where the average person earned a fraction of that in a whole year, it was life-changing money — enough to build a house, send your kids to school, lift an entire extended family.
But it came at a cost. Guiding on Everest was, by some measures, one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. A Sherpa working above 17,000 feet on the mountain, was 10 times more likely to die than a commercial fisherman — which is the most dangerous, non-military occupation in the U.S. according to the CDC.
And the most dangerous part of it — the part the Sherpas had to cross over, and over, and over again — was the Khumbu Icefall.
Picture a glacier — a massive, slow-moving river of ice — pouring off the side of Everest through a steep, narrow gap, at around 18,000 to 19,000 feet. As that ice flows downhill, it cracks and shatters and buckles into enormous blocks called seracs. Some are the size of cars. Some are the size of houses. Some are the size of apartment buildings. And they are not stable. They lean. They shift. They topple over and crash down with no warning at all. Threaded between them are crevasses — deep, dark splits in the ice, some of them hundreds of feet deep.
There is no way to climb Everest from the south, the most popular route, without going through it.
And crossing it is its own kind of nightmare. You're inching across those aluminum ladders — bouncing, flexing, lashed together over a black crevasse you can't see the bottom of — in the dark. Ladders that plenty of people have fallen from. And the ice is loud It cracks and pops and groans as it shifts under its own weight. Climbers describe lying in their tents at Base Camp and listening to the icefall calve and collapse in the night, and knowing they'd have to walk back into it before dawn. There's a reason it's considered one of the most feared stretches of terrain in all of mountaineering.
Now, the route through the icefall doesn't just exist. Every season, a special team called the Icefall Doctors goes in first, before anyone else, and builds it. they fix ropes, and laying aluminum ladders across the crevasses. They find a path through the maze, and they mark it. And then everyone else follows that path.
Before any client sets foot on the upper mountain, somebody has to haul all the gear up there — the tents, the food, the oxygen bottles, the fuel, the rope — load after load after load, up through that icefall and on to the higher camps. And the people doing that hauling were the Sherpas.
A climbing Sherpa might cross the Khumbu Icefall twenty, twenty-five times in a single season, ferrying loads. And that’s what Jon was watching ahead of him in the dark on the night of April 17th–the lines of Sherpas with loads on their backs, moving up into the seracs.
The night before the climb up the icefall, a British doctor named Sophie Wallace was lying in her tent at Everest Base Camp. When she heard something very concerning outside of her tent.
Sophie was the base camp physician for one of the expedition companies. And that night, she kept hearing avalanches. Small ones, going off all over the valley, the way they did all day, every day. Up in the high peaks around Base Camp, snow was always sliding down the mountain.
But sometime before she finally drifted off, she heard one that was louder than the rest. A deeper rumble. Bigger.
What Sophie didn't know — what nobody knew yet — was that that particular avalanche, the loud one, had done something. High up in the icefall, near the top, it had taken out one of the ladders the climbers used to cross the deep cracks in the ice.
A few hours later, in the pre-dawn hours of April 18th, Jon Reiter and his group got up, geared up, and started climbing.
This is how it's done on Everest. You move through the most dangerous terrain in the coldest part of the day, because that's when the ice is most frozen in place. By the time the sun comes up and warms everything, the whole mountain starts to move under your feet.
A team of Sherpas had reached the missing ladder in the dark and gone to work repairing it before the paying clients got there. But while they worked, the line behind them grew. And it started forming a bottle neck of people
Jon looked above him and started getting a bad feeling, because they were all directly underneath a massive serac hanging off a part of the mountain called the West Shoulder.
And this was a rule he had been taught. When you're underneath something that could fall, you don't stop. But there they were, stuck until the ladder was repaired, more and more people bunching up together. Until there were about 25 people
And then, somewhere around 6:30 in the morning he heard the sound of a faraway cannon firing. And then the rumble of the mountain hurtling towards his group
About 300 meters above that line of waiting men — roughly a thousand feet straight up — a serac on the West Shoulder had released. A single block of ice that's been estimated at around 14,000 tonnes, that’s over 30. Million. Pounds.
a chunk of frozen mass weighing as much as thousands of cars, coming down in ice blocks the size of trucks.
The men in that bottleneck didn't have anywhere to go. They were crammed together and there was nowhere to run. Jon couldn’t believe what was happening. He actually reached for his camera, thinking he should film it. And that's when Dawa — his guide, the man climbing at his side — yelled at him. Get down. Get down. And shoved him, hard, in behind a block of ice,
What happened next you can’t comprehend unless you’ve lived it. A tsunami of ice rushed the group, sounding like a low flying jet. Before the worst of it hit, snow flurries kicked up reducing visibility to 0. Everything was white nothingness like purgatory, and thats when the ice chunks started burying the climbers, starting with the men working on the ladder and then hitting the rest of the bottleneck.
For a minute, it was impossible for anyone to catch their breath. And then…. It was silent.
When it was over, the handful of people who were buried looked out to see a blanket of fresh snow and ice, and a few scattered limbs of their companions peeking through.
The disaster zone stretched more than 200 vertical meters down the mountain — from the highest buried man to the lowest. And victims were scattered throughout. And the only thing they could do was start trying to dig people out.
Any sherpa that could ran towards any sign of life they could find and started scooping away the snow and ice with both hands. One Sherpa remembered saving one climber, but as he got pulled out of the snow, he saw more underneath. They were too far down to be saved, though. And time was running out. Climbers could suffocate under snow, and so those closest to the top needed to be prioritized. In total, 8 people were pulled from the snow, alive, and rushed back to basecamp.
Jon was one of those people. Dawa sherpa saved his life by pushing him behind the block of ice, and he was able to make it to base camp as a rescue was gearing up. Not only were they going to have to try and rescue those buried under the snow, but there was an even bigger group beyond where the avalanche had happened that now had no route to get back down. The worst day in the History of Mount everest was just getting started.
For a few seconds after the cloud passed, there was a strange quiet. And then the radios at Base Camp came alive.
Dr. Sophie Wallace — the base camp physician who'd heard the loud avalanche the night before, was one of the first people to start preparing When the radio calls came in.
And it turned out that Base Camp, that spring, happened to be full of doctors. As word spread, they converged on the medical tent — an emergency physician from Oxford, a cardiologist from Quebec, a trauma surgeon, an orthopedic surgeon, a couple more emergency doctors, another cardiologist, an anaesthesiologist. A full trauma team, assembled by pure chance at 18,000 feet. They split into groups, turned a dining tent into a field hospital, and made numbered wristbands out of duct tape to keep track of patients.
Then they sent help toward the mountain. A team went up on foot. A helicopter ferried a second team — including a paramedic who'd summited Everest five times — up to the top of the accident site, carrying an emergency kit Sophie had packed
The first patients to come down were the lucky ones. Scalp cuts from falling ice. Bruised ribs. Banged-up limbs. They got stitched and splinted and sent to the dining tent to be watched.
But then the critical patients started arriving. Three of them.
The first had badly broken legs and was hypothermic — he'd been trapped in the ice for hours. They splinted him, warmed him, got fluids into him.
The second was a Sherpa, complaining of Severe chest and back pain. Soaking wet and freezing. His heart was racing, and his oxygen was dangerously low.
And the third was the worst. He was pinned so deep in the ice that the helicopter couldn't land near him — so they long-lined him out, dangling him on a cable beneath the aircraft and lowering him down to the clinic. He came in with blood in his mouth, his face badly injured, but conscious — awake enough to answer questions. Across his belly was a band of bruising in the exact shape of his climbing harness, where it had caught him like a seatbelt in a car crash. They cut him out of his frozen suit, got him stabilized, and flew him toward Kathmandu — no medical escort, just a sleeping bag and hot water bottles, because there was no time for anything else.
And then there were the ones the doctors couldn't help.
This is the part of Sophie's account that's almost impossible to read. One of the three helipads at Base Camp had been set aside as a place to receive the dead. And one by one, the helicopter brought them — each body suspended on a sixty-meter line beneath the aircraft, flown the length of the valley in full view of everyone in camp, and lowered gently down.
Twelve times.
The bodies still had their helmets on. Some still wore their crampons. Their faces were covered with the buffs — the cloth scarves every climber wraps against the wind. Sophie and the others numbered each one with duct tape, recorded what they could, and confirmed what was, by then, painfully obvious. Then the climbing teams came, one at a time, to find their own — recognizing them by the matching scarves their company had handed out at the start of the season.
Of the sixteen who died, nearly all were Nepali guides, most of them ethnic Sherpas, a few from other mountain communities. Not a single foreign client was among the dead.
And it was thanks to men like Dawa Sherpa, who spent the rest of the day digging, pulling the bodies of his friends out.
The bodies of Men from the same villages, who'd grown up together, who'd climbed together for years.
And then Dawa came back down to find Jon. He told him that he'd wanted to stay by his side, to finish the climb with him, the way he was supposed to. But he couldn't.
"Jon, I just can't go back up that hill," he said, trying to hide his tears so the other Sherpas didn’t see.
By the end of that first day, thirteen bodies had been recovered. One more was found the next morning — spotted by a single leg sticking out of the ice, upside down on a fixed rope — but he was buried too deep to free, and the icefall had become too dangerous to keep trying. Three men in total were never recovered at all. They are still up there, somewhere in the ice, to this day, and they join the hundreds of other bodies still left on the mountain.
That night, Jon sat at Base Camp and wrote in his blog, trying to make sense of it. "Of course we are all asking ourselves that serious question," he wrote. "Why are we here?"
That was a question the whole mountain was about to be forced to answer.
Jon, for his part, had already landed somewhere on it. Watching what the Sherpas had just been through — watching men like Dawa lose their friends and then climb back up to dig them out — he had no interest in pretending the season could just continue. As he put it later: "All their income just died on that mountain." And then: "How selfish would it be, when you look at that, to say, 'I want to climb Everest this year?'"
But not everyone saw it that way. And what happened over the next several days at Base Camp turned a tragedy into a reckoning.
It started with the response from the Nepali government. Because here's what the families of the sixteen dead were initially offered for their loss: forty thousand rupees. About four hundred dollars. Per family. Meant to cover funeral costs.
Four hundred dollars, to men that had spent their lives bolstering the tourism industry that became the country's biggest money maker.
Everest is an industry. I talked about this in the last Everest episode I did about Everest’s Death Zone. The Nepali government pulled in millions of dollars a year in climbing royalties, the vast majority of it from Everest. A single foreign climber's permit cost around ten thousand dollars. And the full price for a guided trip up the mountain? Anywhere from thirty thousand to seventy, eighty, ninety thousand dollars per client. Not to mention how much tourists spent in the local economy when it came to boarding, eating, buying mementos.
And so The men who made all of that possible were insured, by law, for about ten thousand dollars if they died doing it.
And now, having lost sixteen of them in a single morning, the government's opening offer to the families was four hundred. You can see why that upset people.
The Sherpa community's response was grief. And then it was fury.
On April 21st, Buddhist monks cremated the recovered guides in Kathmandu. Photos from that day show the daughter of one of the dead, a man named Ang Kaji Sherpa, weeping over his body. In another part of the city, a teen girl waited for the body of her uncle. "He was the only breadwinner in the family," "We have no one to take care of us." she said.
One of the widows, a woman named Nima Doma, whose husband Chhiring Ongchu was among the dead, put it like this: "What can you do when the main pillar of your house is not there?" She had small children, and no idea how she was going to feed them or keep them in school.
And so, for the first time in the history of the mountain, the Sherpas said: enough.
Led by the Nepal Mountaineering Association, they drew up a formal list of demands and gave the government a deadline. They wanted real compensation for the families — ten thousand dollars, not four hundred. They wanted a relief fund, a memorial to the dead, better rescue services, and medical coverage for guides hurt on the job. And if those demands weren't met, the Sherpas at Base Camp would refuse to climb. They were going on strike.
Think about how unprecedented that was. For more than ninety years — since the very first expeditions hired Sherpa porters in the 1920s — the mountain had taken its dead, and the work had always, always continued. The Sherpas grieved, and they went back up. That was the deal. That was how it had always worked.
Not this time.
Now, it wasn't simple, and it wasn't unanimous. The Sherpa community was split. Some were adamant that no one should climb — out of respect, and to finally force a change. Others desperately needed the season's income and didn't want to walk away from it. And there were the foreign clients too, some of whom had spent the better part of a hundred thousand dollars and didn't want to go home with nothing. One of them, a 67-year-old American who'd hoped to become the oldest person to summit, described younger climbers going tent to tent, trying to pressure people into keeping the season alive.
Then, on April 23rd, there was a big meeting at Base Camp between the Sherpas and the Western expedition leaders.
Whatever exactly was said in that meeting, the result was the same. The government scrambled — it raised the insurance payout by fifty percent, promised a relief fund, promised to pay for the dead men's children to go to school. Officials flew up to Base Camp to try to calm things down.
But it was over. One major company that had lost five of its Sherpas in the avalanche had already canceled the season. Others followed. About half the teams started packing up. And as the Sherpas walked off the mountain — many of them simply unwilling to set foot back in the icefall where their friends had died — there weren't enough people left to keep the route running anyway.
For the first time ever, the spring climbing season on Everest just... stopped.
An Australian filmmaker named Jennifer Peedom had come to Everest in 2014 to make a documentary about a famous Sherpa named Phurba Tashi, who was going for a record-breaking 22nd summit. Instead, her cameras ended up capturing all of this — the disaster, the grief, the strike. The film became the first major documentary to tell the Everest story from the Sherpas' point of view.
And Phurba Tashi — the man at the center of it, with more summits than almost anyone alive — listened to his family, and never climbed Everest again.
Jon Reiter went home to California in 2014 without his summit. And for a while, he wasn't sure he'd ever go back.
But Everest was the last mountain on his list. And so, the next spring, Jon returned
It was April 2015. His third attempt on the mountain. He was finally going to achieve the goal he set out to with his second chance at life.
But then, On April 25th, 2015, at a few minutes before noon, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Nepal.
The earthquake's epicenter was near a village called Barpak, in the Gorkha district, more than 220 kilometers, around 140 miles, west of Everest. It came from the same place every earthquake in this part of the world comes from: deep underground, the Indian tectonic plate is grinding north into the Eurasian plate, and has been for fifty million years. That slow-motion collision is the reason the Himalayas exist at all. It's what shoves Everest a few millimeters higher into the sky every single year. And on April 25th, 2015, a chunk of that pressure let go all at once. The ground shook for something like fifty seconds.
High above Everest Base Camp sits a ridge running between two peaks — Pumori and Lingtren — draped in hanging ice. When the shaking reached it, it shook that ice loose. A mass of it broke off and fell from roughly 900 meters up — well over half a mile straight above the camp.
But here's the part that made it so deadly. An avalanche that big, falling that far, doesn't just slide. It pushes the air in front of it into a blast — a wall of wind and pulverized ice moving like a bomb's shockwave. So what tore through Base Camp wasn't really a wave of snow and ice like in 2014. It was a pressure wave. It picked up tents — with people inside them — and hurled them across the Khumbu Glacier toward the icefall. It flattened the middle of the camp, the busiest part, and left the lower end strangely untouched
And then — for the second year in a row — Jon found himself in the middle of a rescue on Mount Everest. This time, he didn't leave when others did. He stayed at Base Camp, helping move the injured toward the helicopters. he helped line up the bodies of the dead for recovery — and then caught a ride on the helicopter that carried them down to Lukla, the little mountain airstrip, for the journey home to their families.
And he wasn't the only one who'd seen it before. a lot of the people at Base Camp that day in 2015 were there because of 2014. They'd come back. The disaster that had sent everyone home the year before had drawn them all back to try again. This actually was the year that Nasubi was there, if you remember our episode from way back when on the most evil reality show in all of history
Somewhere between 700 and 1,000 people were on or around the mountain when the earthquake hit. At least 22 of them died on Everest that day — though the exact number has been reported differently in different places, anywhere from 18 to 24. [VERIFY] Across Nepal as a whole, nearly 9,000 people were killed as a result of the earthquake
One of the survivors at Base Camp was a man named Joe Raftis, from Toronto. He was there in 2015 — and he'd also been there in 2014. He got buried in the snow but lived; people just a few meters away from him did not. And here's a detail that's almost too much: Joe Raftis had also been at the finish line of the Boston Marathon in 2013, and finished the race just before the bombing. Three mass casualty events in three years.
But the thing that stuck with me most — the thing Jon Reiter noticed, having now lived through both disasters a year apart — was about the Sherpas. And how they'd changed.
In 2014, after the icefall avalanche, it had taken the Sherpas four days to make the decision to leave the mountain.
In 2015? Two hours after the earthquake — with their entire camp in ruins around them — the survivors were already heading down.
The demands they had made the year before ensured that they would have better disaster preparedness the following year.
The 2015 season, like the one before it, was canceled. And Jon Reiter went home, again, without his summit.
Sixteen men went up into the Khumbu Icefall before dawn on April 18th, 2014, to make a mountain safe for someone else to climb. And they never came back down.
Their names were: Mingma Nuru Sherpa — MING-mah NOO-roo
Dorji Sherpa — DOR-jee
Ang Tshiri Sherpa — AHNG CHEE-ree (the "Tsh" is a "ch" sound)
Nima Sherpa — NEE-mah
Phurba Ongyal Sherpa — POOR-bah ONG-yal
Lakpa Tenjing Sherpa — LAHK-pah TEN-jing
Chhiring Ongchu Sherpa — CHEE-ring ONG-choo (the "Chh" is a slightly aspirated "ch") Dorjee Khatri — DOR-jee KHAH-tree (breathy "k" on Khatri)
Then Dorjee Sherpa — TEN DOR-jee
Phur Temba Sherpa — POOR TEM-bah
Pasang Karma Sherpa — PAH-sahng KAR-mah
Asman Tamang — AHS-mahn TAH-mahng
Tenzing Chottar Sherpa — TEN-zing CHOH-tar
Ankaji Sherpa — ahn-KAH-jee
Pem Tenji Sherpa — PEM TEN-jee
Ash Bahadur Gurung — AHSH Bah-HAH-door GOO-roong
There's one more thing I want to leave you with, on a little bit of a happy note. In 2019 — five years after the avalanche — two of the women who'd been widowed by Everest did something amazing. Nima Doma, whose husband Chhiring Ongchu died in the icefall that morning, and another widow named Furdiki Sherpa, whose husband had died on the mountain the year before — they trained together, and they climbed together, and in 2019 they summited everest together, kind of taking back the mountain that had taken their husbands.
"The death of my husband," "is not the end of my life." Furdiki said,
If you want to spend a little more time with this one, I'm going to be over on Patreon this week digging into the Sherpa documentary and the widows' climb on Footnotes.
Until then — stay curious. OOOoooOOOO