James McEachen

Lost Friends

In high-altitude mountaineering you always deal with death in one form or another.  Usually, and hopefully, only in the desiccated and frozen bodies one always finds on big mountains.  When those bodies are friends who cannot be abstracted it becomes personal.  There are two friends I lost on big mountains, but each with a different story.  Tom Taplin was the most ebullient, funny, and infectiously enthusiastic person I had ever met.  In some ways he was like Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews in his innocent fervor for all things adventurous.  Tom was killed when the 2015 Earthquake that ravaged Nepal let loose a massive wall of ice, snow and displaced air onto the unsuspecting inhabitants of Everest basecamp.  Pinjo Sherpa’s story is a very different one.  Pinjo was the most circumspect and tentative climbing Sherpa I have ever met.  Like all Sherpas, he was brave, cheerful, and always willing, but he did not particularly like the mountains, nor was he competitive with his peers.  He was happiest when he was leaving a mountain, as if he had unexpectedly survived yet another battle.  Climbing was how he supported his family and in his community it granted him status and prosperity.  When Pinjo was killed in the Khumbu Icefall I couldn’t help but reflect on his reticence, his brave acceptance of his circumstances, his sidesplitting gallows humor and his particularly sweet disposition.  He must have always known how his end would come – somewhere deep in his bones.   

Every desiccated, frozen corpse has a story.