Michele Battelli: ‘It was the loudest noise I’ve ever heard. It felt like the whole mountain was coming down’
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Version 0 of 1. Exactly two weeks before the devastating Nepal earthquake struck on 25 April, I hugged Michele Battelli goodbye at Everest base camp. I’d trekked up with him and a group of aspiring summiters to write a piece about the human cost of climbing Everest: a year previously, they’d been at camp two, above the icefall, when an avalanche struck and killed 16 Sherpas. Battelli and his two friends, Dan Fredinburg and Florian Nagel, who all worked at Google, had been the last climbers through the icefall before the avalanche struck in 2014. They’d all felt “incredibly lucky”, he says. “It could easily have been us.” They’d been spared and, though it was a terrible end to the climbing season, they were determined to try again this year. “We just felt very strong. We felt we could do this.” Unofficially at least – Battelli won’t confirm it – they were planning to make headlines. A Google Street View camera was going to accompany them to the summit. And that was where I’d left them. Instagramming their rotations – the practice climbs up through the icefall – and hanging out with their more reserved, mostly British team-mates. Dan, the extroverted social media addict who sported a purple down jacket and had until recently dated a celebrity – the actress Sophia Bush – had a habit of being the centre of attention. Related: Nepal earthquake: why I had to return to a devastated country in crisis And then the earthquake struck. The epicentre was near the town of Gorkha and it’s now known that it killed 9,000, injured 23,000 others and left hundreds of thousands homeless, and this was just the first quake. More devastation followed in a second major quake, two weeks later. Battelli has spent the past decade or so working as a senior engineer in Silicon Valley, but recently relocated to London, where he takes up the story of what happened next. “I was in Dan’s tent. It was our rest day and we were on his computer swapping photos when the earth began to shake. I didn’t even realise it was an earthquake at first but then the second wave came and we heard a huge crack beneath us and that’s when we were like, ‘Let’s get out of here’. I was fully dressed because I’d come from my tent so all I had to do was put my boots on. I put my boots on and jumped outside and the earth was shaking. “Base camp is on ice so it was really moving. I saw Flo come out of his tent and we were just looking around. There were very low clouds so we couldn’t see any of the peaks. And then two seconds later, we heard, I’d say it was the loudest noise I’ve ever heard in my life. It really felt like the entire mountain must be coming down. And because of the 2014 avalanche, we were all looking toward Everest. Everyone was staring at Everest, but nothing was coming down. “And then I turned the other way, and that’s when I saw it. You know how you watch these movies where you see this big tsunami coming toward you? It was like that. It was enormous… more than 400 metres high.” That’s taller than the Shard, I point out, Britain’s tallest building. “Yes. It was just massive. And it was coming directly toward us and then I heard Flo saying: ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’ He started running the other way and my instinct was to do exactly the same. We ran and there was a little ditch in the slope of the hill and it was really just a few seconds when I felt the airwave that was ahead of the avalanche push me down. I was breathing snow and I could feel the pressure of the snow starting to pile up and I thought, Oh God, I’m going to get buried. “It felt like for ever but it was probably a minute and then everything was quiet. I stood up and shook the snow off and Flo came out of the snow as well and I went back up the hill to look for Dan. Everything was white. Where all the colourful tents had been, there was nothing. I was calling: ‘Dan, Dan, Dan.’ I went back down the hill and eventually I saw him, curled up in a ball.” We’d spent many nights sharing a tent. You really get to know someone when you share a tent on the side of a mountain He never made it out of his tent. “He was right behind me, he handed me my down jacket as I got out of the tent, but I’m not sure if he hesitated to find something or what...” He was killed instantly. “We tried to revive him but then Rachel, one of the doctors, came. She held her fingers to his neck and said: ‘He’s gone.’” They had been best friends. “We learned to climb together. We’d spent countless nights together sharing a tent. You really get to know someone in a very deep way when you share a tent on the side of a mountain.” Twenty-two people died on Everest as a result of the quake, its deadliest ever day. And though events at base camp captured many of the early headlines – apart from anything else, it was one of the few places that had working communications; it would be weeks before help reached some of the more remote regions – it was a tiny fraction of the pain and trauma being felt elsewhere. How did he feel when he discovered the extent of what happened in Nepal? “We were just numb. It had been like a war zone up there. We didn’t know we’d survive the first night. There were aftershocks and avalanches all through the night. It took us eight, nine days to walk down the mountain and then find a plane to get us back to Kathmandu. I think, having lost someone… it probably made it easier to empathise. There were so many people affected.” They stayed another week to help. “We had all this cash, which were tips for the Sherpas – thousands of dollars – so we just spent all that.” They took drinking water to hospitals, supplies to an orphanage and sourced medicines for a Gurkha charity. Nine months on, his life has changed completely: he’s married his fiancee, left Google and now works for a startup. Was that a reaction to Dan’s death? “The wedding was already planned,” he says. But it’s obviously been quite a year. There was something of a media circus following Dan’s death. He’d dated a celebrity, worked for Google and was killed on Everest. It had all the elements of a news maelstrom and so it proved. It was an Instagram sort of death. Dan went from being a Google engineer to an action-figure adventure hero. Thousands of pounds were raised and a foundation in his name was set up, livedan.com. “Some of his friends held a big party celebration but it didn’t feel right to us. We were still processing the thing ourselves. One thing I know, though. Dan would have loved it.” |