{"id":9766,"date":"2015-08-20T16:57:49","date_gmt":"2015-08-20T22:57:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/?p=9766"},"modified":"2015-08-20T17:06:47","modified_gmt":"2015-08-20T23:06:47","slug":"we-radioed-to-base-camp-and-nobody-radioed-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/2015\/08\/we-radioed-to-base-camp-and-nobody-radioed-back\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cWe Radioed to Base Camp and Nobody Radioed Back\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

As Conan Bliss \u201992<\/strong> tells it, that was the first sign something was \u201cweird\u201d as a result of the earthquake he and his expedition team had just experienced while attempting to climb Mount Everest.<\/p>\n

\"Thousands<\/a>

Thousands of people in Nepal\u2019s Khumbu valleys, including sherpas who help climbers like Conan Bliss (top) navigate Mt. Everest, lost their homes in the earthquake. Rebuilding work still continues today.<\/p><\/div>\n

On the morning of April 25, the guide for Madison Mountaineering was in the middle of his crew at about 20,500 feet in the Western Cwm, between Camp 1 and Camp 2, a few thousand feet above base camp. It was snowing, so visibility wasn\u2019t good. A loud cracking noise came first, then everything started bouncing.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt felt like you were on a trampoline and some heavy person got on the other side and started moving around,\u201d he said. \u201cThe glacier was going up and down. It did a tremor and then it slowed. \u2026 But you heard all this ice, all these things crashing.<\/p>\n

\u201cBase camp was directly in the line of fire,\u201d Bliss said. \u201cThis massive ice cliff a half kilometer away came off Pumori. It crashed to the ground, then vaporized, and that caused a shock wave of wind and air. \u2026 Just hurricane force, instantly, and then that just picked up.\u00a0 It had probably snowed a foot or so in the last few days \u2014 it picked up all that snow and just blasted it.\u201d<\/p>\n

After learning from other teams that Madison Mountaineering\u2019s doctor Eve Girawong had died, their base camp tent was in shambles, and the lower valley destroyed, the team of 12 Western climbers and 14 Nepalese Sherpa staff decided to head down. How to do that, though, was a challenge.<\/p>\n

Coming back through the Khumbu Icefall was the primary option. But the \u201cIcefall Doctors,\u201d locals who are paid by permit fees to maintain the route, had lost some of their members and aftershocks made the Icefall route too dangerous to fix.<\/p>\n

A few experienced Western and Nepalese guides did what they could to fix the route, making it about a quarter of the way down from Camp 1 in one day. Then another massive aftershock hit destroying their work. Bliss says the guides returned and they said, \u201cWe\u2019re not going back in there with clients. No way. No how.\u201d<\/p>\n

At this point, the decision was made to use helicopters to get the climbers and Nepalese staff off the mountain. The Nepalese were worried about their families and villages, and everyone was concerned about the weather.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs soon as we got to base camp, this wealth of information fluttered in,\u201d Bliss said. \u201cThe media eyes were focused on this drama at Everest. And it was a\u00a0small fraction of one percent of the real tragedy that went on. Once that was apparent, we\u2019re like, this expedition can\u2019t go on. The Nepalese need to get back to their families. Restoration work needs to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

The trip was over but the work wasn\u2019t. While some expedition members stayed to help build houses in the valley (and part of him feels guilty to not be a part of that), Bliss is doing what he can from his home in Germany to help raise money to rebuild Nepal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Conan Bliss ’92 recounts a harrowing day with his climbing party on Mt. Everest the day the Nepal earthquake struck.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":9767,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[42],"class_list":["post-9766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-august-2015","tag-first-person"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/files\/2015\/08\/CC_BUL-August-p52-AlumniSnapshot-Bliss1-2015.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9766"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9782,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9766\/revisions\/9782"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}