I remember the shaking.
The vibrations were so severe that I could not stand up. After a few seconds, the soil beneath my feet liquified, and the village I was standing in began to spin like one of those sketchy teacup rides at an American county fair.
I also remember the noise. In an instant, the planet itself became a giant subwoofer, reverberating a terrible deep groan.
After a few seconds, the houses in the village began to collapse. Walls sheared off and crumbled, roofs fell into the potato fields, and the air became choked with dust. As the tiny stone wall I crouched behind fell around me, I looked up to see the bed I had slept in just an hour earlier hanging cantilevered into space on a beam, held aloft by a pile of rubble on my pillow.
It was April 25, 2015, and I was in Chaurikharka, Nepal, a small village near the town of Lukla, about 40 miles south of Mount Everest. The earthquake itself lasted for about 50 seconds, which is likely less than the time it’s taken to read this far into my story. Fifty seconds is also more than long enough to fully panic three or four times.
It’s been a decade since the Nepal earthquake, a shallow 7.8 magnitude tremor which killed almost 9,000 people, displaced millions more, and reduced huge swaths of the country to rubble. You have probably read about the quake and its impact on Mount Everest. The tremor dislodged a huge chunk of ice that crashed down on Base Camp killing 15 people immediately—seven died in the following days—and injuring more than 70.
Ten years later, Nepal’s infrastructure has been rebuilt, and the scars on Everest have been covered up. But those 50 seconds of rumbling are still clear in my head—as are the scenes that I witnessed in the days afterward.
This past Friday, April 25, I returned to Chaurikharka for the first time since the earthquake. I went there there to begin my trek from Lukla to Everest Base Camp, where I’m reporting on the climbing season for Outside. But I also wanted to stand in spot where, just a decade earlier, the course of my life shifted.
The post Lessons Learned During the 2015 Nepal Earthquake appeared first on Outside Online.
