On the morning of April 25, Evanston residents Heidi Hoppe and Jay Twery were part of a trekking group that had been hiking six days and had already made it about two thirds of the way to the Mount Everest Base Camp, their ultimate destination.
Temperatures were near freezing and it was snowing. “Everything was normal. We were having a good day,” Hoppe, an architect, recalled.
Then, around 11:30 a.m., as the group was making its way along a three-by-six foot walking path, Hoppe suddenly felt dizzy — a feeling she first associated with altitude sickness.
“All of a sudden it seemed I couldn’t find the earth; the ground wasn’t where it was supposed to be,’ she said.
“I was falling and couldn’t find the earth. I looked ahead and my two companions were falling to the ground as well, and one of them said: “This is an earthquake. So I looked up above us and on the mountain — there was this big outcropping of rock. I was afraid it would fall and I looked at it and just said, Run! And we just ran down the path, which by now was shaking.”
Twery, walking about 30 yards behind Hoppe, said he felt shaking and then “heard a rock slide right below me.
“There was a little gap in the rock right near me,” he said. “I kind of walked underneath it, hoping if anything fell from above it would go over me. So I kind of ducked in there, but I could feel the shaking because I was leaning against the rock.”
“It was kind of like two separate shakes. There was a lull and then it started shaking again. My vision was kind of shaky. I don’t know how to describe it.”
The shaking they experienced was later ascribed to a 7.8 magnitude earthquake, estimated to have killed more than 8,000 people and injuring more than 16,000 others. It was the first of two major earthquakes to hit the region. The second was a 7.3 magnitude quake that struck Tuesday, May 12, killing dozens more.
The epicenter of the first quake was the village of Barpak, in the Gorkha district of Nepal and its effects were far flung with casualties occurring in the adjoining areas of India, China and Bangladesh. The earthquake triggered an avalanche at the Everest Base Camp, killing 18 people.
At the time, “we had no idea what had happened,” said Hoppe, 62, a self-described “armchair mountaineer” who had spent six months planning the trip. “We didn’t know if it was a single isolated event or whether it was an actual earthquake. Maybe it was an explosion somewhere. We just started to walk forward.”
Twery, 58, said he had a sense it was an earthquake they had experienced. Still, “we had no idea how bad things were.”
Continuing north toward base camp, they got an early inkling of the devastation while visiting the village of Pangboche, where the group was scheduled to have lunch.
“We went into the tea room and met other people who said there had been an earthquake,” Hoppe recalled. “The tea room had been shaking and there was some damage in that town. Then we started to find out the larger picture.”
After lunch “we hiked up to the village of Pheriche, which was almost totally destroyed,” she said.
The group stayed overnight in Dingboche, “where a lot of people coming down from above told the guide it was not safe heading further up,” said Twery.
That evening Twery said he and Hoppe, fellow members of the Evanston Bicycle Club, had discussed what to do.
“My heart said ‘Go up higher; my brain said go down,” said Twery, a retired chief information officer for a financial firm and an experienced hiker. “I guess it’s good to think with your brain in a situation like that.”
Also, they didn’t want to jeopardize the guide team and porters traveling with them, he said.
At the time, with cell phone communication spotty or non-existent, there “was no information to make a decision,” he said.
On the way back, Hoppe, with her expertise as an architect, was invaluable. “She kind of did a once over on buildings before we decided to stay or not,” Twery said of his friend.
“There was no way out except just walking,” said Hoppe, who is a cyclist. Meanwhile, the area was hit by a number of aftershocks.
The destruction “was all around you,” she said.
* In Khumjung the second place they stayed, “the Sherpa family below us had lost their son who was a chef at the base camp with a New Zealand group looking to climb Mount Everest,” Hoppe said. “So the monks there set up a big white tent and burnt juniper branches and chanted. For the two days we were there they continued to chant.”
* In Namche, “The tea room [a lodging place] was damaged and there were reports that significant aftershocks were expected during the night so we slept in a tent outside,” she said. “We met two people who were on a summit attempt of Mount Everest. They were at a camp — one of the first camps above the base camp — and they had lost three of their climbing colleagues in the avalanche and they had lost all their gear. They had to be airlifted by helicopter out of camp down to base camp and then they walked out.”
* In Khumjung they spent some time helping others residents rebuild their stone walls, using existing stone from collapsed buildings, Hoppe said.
“There were no aid workers anywhere in the villages at all,” she said. “We just saw some people and asked them if they wanted help. There was nothing organized of any sort.”
The region’s buildings were almost all made of “piled up stone, much like you’re building a stone wall,” she observed. “There is no mortar. There is no reinforcement. When a building starts to shake there’s absolutely nothing whatsoever holding it together. All that stone just collapses; whereas with wood, it can flex.”
Twery was impressed “to see all the people, how they deal with the adversity and tragedy around them and their good spirit. Nobody really waited for the government to help. They just started repairing and going on with their lives.”
She is concerned about the effect on that spirit, after Tuesday’s quake, which triggered more landslides and collapsed buildings.
The second earthquake occurred in a town where Hoppe and Twery slept outside in a tent during their expedition.
Hoppe, who has been in contact with people in the country about building temporary shelters, is concerned that the event coming less than three weeks after the last earthquake could change the attitude of the people.
“It’s going to be what next? There’s going to be this big fear that this is just going to go on and on,” she said.
As a girl, Hoppe said she had been devoted to reading about climbing and Mount Everest.
“I’m a cyclist, so I have a lot of endurance and I pretty much felt I could do this trip.”
She is close with Jay’s wife, Jill, and good friends with Jay, so “I said, ‘We’ve got to do this.”
“Of course, the exhilaration and joy of the initial journey was changed after the earthquake in the face of all the tragedy around us and our dashed hopes,” she said, “but in many ways the experience of being in Nepal during the return journey was deeply beautiful and moving.
“I think a big part of my heart is still in Nepal.”
Twitter: @evanstonscribe
