Denied Departure

The trek was officially behind us. We’d said the goodbyes, handed out the red envelopes, eaten the farewell dinner under the golden dragon ceiling. All that was left was the easy part. Pack up, walk over to the Lukla airport, climb into our helicopter, and float back to Kathmandu in time for a hot shower and a soft bed. After two weeks on the mountain, we had earned the lazy exit.

Then we woke up and looked outside. Rain.

Here is the thing nobody tells you about flying in the Himalayas. The helicopters and the little planes can only fly VFR. That stands for Visual Flight Rules, which is exactly what it sounds like. The pilot flies by looking out the window. No flying through clouds, no trusting the instruments to thread you between two mountains you cannot see. If it is socked in, you do not go. And I can fly, so I am allowed to be smug about knowing this.

So a rainy morning at Lukla is not a delay. It is a maybe.

Nicholas and porters walking on a wet path in the rain toward the airport — Walking to the airport in the rain. Already a bad sign, and we hadn’t even gotten there yet.

We went anyway, because the airport tells you to come anyway. They handed Nicholas a fan of boarding passes for a helicopter that was not there and might never be.

Nicholas indoors holding several helicopter boarding passes, looking skeptical — Nicholas holding tickets for a flight that did not exist yet. He is doing the face. You know the face.

Just wait a little, the airport said. The sun might come out. The helicopters might make it up. We looked out the window. The sky was getting foggier, not clearer.

After about thirty minutes, D.B. explained how this actually works. The cloud layer settles down into the valley as the day goes on. Mornings are clearest. So the longer you wait at Lukla, the worse your odds get, not better. But there was a move. If we left right now and hiked straight downhill for an hour and a half, we could reach the next town, which sits low enough that the clouds were still above it. The helicopters could land there. We could still get out today.

The catch with simply waiting it out: if the weather goes bad, everyone who was supposed to fly today is stuck in Lukla too. Then tomorrow there are twice as many people fighting for the same flights. A few bad days in a row and you get a genuine traffic jam of trekkers with no way down. There is always walking, of course. That only takes about two weeks. Or you can take a jeep from the next town, which is two days across the kind of washed-out dirt roads that are somehow less safe than flying through clouds.

So we made the call. Book it downhill on foot and try to beat the weather to the next helipad. A race against the sky.

A guide leading the group down a foggy rocky path past the airport fence — D.B. leading us past the Lukla airport and down the trail to Surke. The opposite direction from the one we wanted to be going.

Nicholas and Pokin did not look convinced that the weather was going to be any better down the hill. Pokin especially, who was still sick and now hiking again instead of sitting on a helicopter like a normal recovering person.

Nicholas and Pokin on a foggy forest trail, Pokin wearing a pink mask — Two people doing the math on whether this gamble was smarter than just waiting. The masked one had bronchitis and a strong opinion.

The skies did not improve. They committed to the bit.

A rocky trail beside a stream under heavy gray sky

A misty slope seen through utility poles, sky completely gray

A muddy section of trail with a small drainage stream, gray skies above

Halfway down, the crew stopped at a trail hut to regroup and practice looking optimistic. Po On, Alice, Steve, Nicholas, and the guides, all wearing the specific expression of people who have decided that smiling at the weather might help.

The group posing in trekking gear outside a concrete trail hut — Optimism, performed. The sky did not care.

We passed loaded pack mules and the trail got properly rugged. This was not the gentle victory-lap descent anyone had pictured.

Loaded pack mules outside a stone building on a gray trail

A rugged dirt trail through forest, hikers descending under gray skies

Then Surke came into view, a village with a half-built monastery on the hill above it. Somewhere down there was the helipad that was going to save us. In theory.

Approaching Surke village on a muddy road, prayer flags and a monastery on a misty hill — Coming into Surke. The monastery on the hill is still under construction, which felt appropriately on-theme for a day that was also not finished.

We got to the airport. I use the word loosely. It is a couple of helipads, a little terminal-slash-restaurant run by a Sherpa, and a whole lot of weather. Two helicopters were on the pad when we arrived. One of them lifted off almost immediately, empty, bolting for the valley before the clouds dropped any further and taking none of us with it. The clouds were not above us anymore. They were around us. There was no version of this that counted as VFR.

A grassy helipad with a yellow H, one red helicopter parked, low clouds on every mountain — The Surke ‘airport.’ A painted H, the second helicopter still on the deck, and clouds everywhere. The first one had already bolted, empty. Not encouraging.

The porters peeled off here too. We’d already given them the proper send-off back in Lukla, dinner and tips and cookies, so this was just the practical goodbye. They were catching jeeps home from Surke, and they were not about to stand around in the fog waiting on our flight that clearly was not coming.

The group with porters near parked helicopters in heavy cloud — The last wave-off, clouds photobombing. The real thank-you happened the night before. This was just where the trail and the porters actually parted ways.

Here is where it got interesting. That second helicopter, the one still sitting on the pad, was not ours either. Ours, like most of the others, had tried to come up and been forced to turn back. But this pilot was about to make his own run for it, ducking out under the clouds toward Kathmandu before things got worse. He had room for exactly one more passenger.

That seat had originally been D.B.’s. With the rest of us grounded, he offered it up. Alice took it.

And off Alice went, alone, into a sky that was, in my professional aviation opinion, absolutely not fit for flying. The pilot swore it was clear down low and he had a line of sight out. Maybe. I am a bear who can fly under my own power, and I would not have braved that. But Alice has more nerve than sense, which I respect, and she made it.

The rest of us went inside to wait. The man running the terminal, a Sherpa who clearly does this every season, promised the sun would burn off the fog and our helicopter would land in just a little bit.

The Sherpa who runs the terminal, in a yellow jacket, inside the rustic airport waiting room — The Sherpa who runs the whole operation. He had seen this weather a hundred times and was very calm about it. We were not.

It did not.

Looking out at the foggy helipad with blue barrels, no helicopter, very thick fog — The view out the window, on repeat, all day. Blue barrels. No helicopter. Fog doing fog things.

We got drinks. We got lunch. We kept looking outside. At one point we heard a helicopter, which we should not have, and a Fishtail chopper somehow came down out of the murk and landed. Not ours. He dropped some people off, took one look at the sky toward Lukla, and parked. Too foggy to climb back up. D.B. immediately booked him to take us out instead the moment things cleared.

A Fishtail helicopter descending into extremely heavy fog over the barrel-strewn helipad, men watching — The Fishtail materializing out of nothing. Look at that visibility and tell me that is Visual Flight Rules. I rest my case.

Spoiler: things did not clear.

Our buddy Sven from the trail turned up too, also bumped from a canceled flight, also stuck, on his way to attempt the two-day jeep escape. He stopped in to say hello to the rest of the grounded.

Sven and the group posing together in the wooden airport restaurant — Sven, reunited with us under the worst possible circumstances. Misery does love company.

So we sat. And sat. The fog whited out the windows. Nicholas stopped pretending to be cheerful about it.

The group around a table in the foggy restaurant, Nicholas looking displeased — The crew, several hours into the wait. Nicholas has fully given up on the optimistic face.

There is a hard cutoff. Around three in the afternoon, the last flight has to leave with enough daylight to reach Kathmandu safely. By then the fog had only thickened. The pilot of the parked helicopter made the call: he was camping at the airport overnight and trying again in the morning.

Nicholas holding Sumi the bear with a fogged-in red helicopter behind them at the helipad — Last call. Me and Nicholas and the helicopter that was going precisely nowhere. You can see the fog. There was a lot of fog.

So that was that. We could hike three hours back up to Lukla to try our luck there in the morning, except that is three hours uphill and Pokin was in no condition for it. The weather down here was the better bet anyway, even if the forecast for the next few days looked, in the technical meteorological term, grim. Our porters had already left with the jeeps, so we had no way to move the bags even if we wanted to.

Which left the Surke airport’s accommodation. Two beds in a box. The most basic rooms I have ever lowered my standards into.

Looks like we were camping a little longer than planned.