When Tila Says Run, You Run

I hear inaudible shrieks of a language I do not understand. But panic is universal, and it’s not sounding good. I am not sure what the yelps of Nepali are saying, but I can assume it’s not, “Look at the beautiful view to your right!” This mutual understanding to run comes before I see the rocks. They have only begun to ripple above me like an early warning signal. But I waste no time. “Run” is the only bit of words that my brain registers, and I follow instructions promptly.

My feet sink in each boot-molded pit in the snow. The pressure of this new pace is too much for the slow steps that have preceded it. And despite moving faster, I feel slowed down by this added gravity against me. Less than an hour before, I had seen an avalanche from the safety of the other side of Tilicho Lake, minutes after we had reached the summit. It thundered louder than what I could have ever imagined a peaceful force of nature, calm just seconds before, could create. I think about this as I run. 

For the past four months, I had been researching, interviewing, and pre-reporting on how climate change affects the people living in some of the highest places on the planet—and how this is all intertwined with the mountaineering and trekking industries that exist there.

Growing up in a ski town in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, I thought I understood how climate so deeply affects mountain livelihoods and industries. But in Nepal, a country that produces very little of those CO2 emissions, they were feeling the effects of our heating planet by the extremes, incomparable to their contributions to the issue.

I had spent the last week speaking with teahouse owners, mountaineering guides, and locals of the Manang District. I had heard stories of flooded homes, schools, crops, guesthouses, and subsequent means of income from the now unpredictable and often turbulent weather patterns. An older couple in Tal had explained to me that they crawled on their hands and knees to escape a flood that destroyed much of their village three years prior. But shortly after my visit to Tal, all of those stories I had read about and the countless interviews I had conducted became real. The tragic reality that was once words on a page had amounted to human lives not too far from where I was. 

A late, post-monsoon storm had raged through Nepal during my time reporting and trekking along the Annapurna Circuit Trail. The issue is complicated, but much of it in the high mountains revolves around a main shift in the climate—it is raining and snowing at the wrong times and in the wrong places. The effects of the storm were nationwide. I woke up in a teahouse in Ngawal, at almost 12,000 feet, to a white ground and the glassy eyes of the owners as they watched their harvest for the year buried under the wet snow. I sat next to these grieving Nepali people for the 24 hours that we were snowed in. I could not understand any of the dialogue around me as we sat by the fire of the kitchen stove.

But similar to the shrieks of panic from rockslides, the tones of pain are universal. So I sat as the sole outsider and listened to the heartbreak that I understood in the silence within pauses of a language I did not understand. More than any pre-reporting interview held on Zoom could convey, I was witness to the raw human impacts. No longer abstract statistics of glacial-outburst floods or rising temperatures—this feeling could not be quantified.

From a guesthouse in Manang the next day, my trekking guide, Tila Roka, and I watched videos of fragments of homes rushing through the river that had now become synonymous with Kathmandu. The numbers that came with these images made the issue feel more real; they were the death toll of those who had been killed in the floods or were now missing. But the most eerie part of all of this was the days that followed. While the effects of the floods still raged below, the clouds parted in the mountains, and only ideal-weather days followed. Within a day of a storm so relentless that it turned our hands to prunes, we were now above river level. It felt selfish to be above the threat that raged below. I felt almost disconnected from the lives lost in Nepal and the consequences of climate on an entire country. Until the rocks came hurtling down. 

During our pre-dawn start on the tail that morning, I asked Tila what to do if a rock slide did occur. “That is why we move quickly in these loose sections,” she said.

I explained that what I meant was, what do we do if it does happen, not how to prevent it. After hesitating just a second too long, Tila mumbled, “Cover your head.”

So there I was, running from loose rock and avalanches that had increased in frequency over the past few days. This was due to the snow falling too early during the storm, melting too quickly under the late September sun, and loosening itself, which was, in this case, onto me. So, while it was now sunny above, the effects still came rattling down the mountain. The innocent pieces of earth that I had stepped on for the past week had become the enemy. 

No one had made it to Tilicho Lake—the highest-elevation lake in the world—in the four days prior to us because of this storm. This descent pattern of “run,” “stop,” and “OK, we are safe here, but definitely don’t stop moving” became an ungraceful dance until we were back at the Tilicho Base Camp. Unscathed. 

I had embarked on this 14-day adventure with my two trekking guides, local reporting partners, and translators—Tila and Sabi Tilija Pun. The week before I left, I spent time in central Nepal’s Pokhara and Lwang, filming at an all-female mountain and trekking guide training camp that Tila and Sabi had once attended. It was run by the nonprofit Empowering Women of Nepal, which also owned the first female guiding company in Nepal, 3 Sisters Guiding and Trekking. I hung out with girls, many my age, from all over the country who were training to become certified trekking guides. The program started in 1996 as a means to give opportunities to rural women of Nepal who might never otherwise leave their village, learn to read and write, or make any sort of independent income. Tila and Sabi both participated in this training camp 13 years and one and a half years ago, respectively.

The significance of this limited opportunity for women in Nepal became clear the second we began the trek—no one on the trails thought Tila and Sabi were guides. I noticed it little by little, small cues. It was first a local person greeting us immediately in English or asking Tila and Sabi where they were from. But soon, these minor hints throughout the first few days of the trek amounted to a larger understanding. Trekkers and locals alike saw a Nepali man on the trails and assumed they were a guide or porter. These same people saw a Nepali woman on the trail and assumed they were a tourist or local trekker. It was no one's individual fault but rather a product of the male-dominated industry and the preconceived notions that come with it when much of the representation that we see in the mountains is male. It is a history of an industry and years of representation, or rather lack thereof, that causes people not to associate a female guide with being that, a guide.

Tila and Sabi seemed unbothered by this. They would simply respond to anyone in Nepali, and I would watch the recipient’s brain slowly put together the pieces in their mind that did, in fact, make it possible for these women to be guides. While Tila and Sabi were used to this, I was not. It made me angry that, as a society, we default to putting women in a box of what profession they could or couldn’t be. I was angry that no one viewed them for the work that any male guide was equally certified to be doing. And I was angry that Tila and Sabi were not angry because they were so used to this. 

The female-to-male guide discrepancy became very apparent in the teahouses each evening. Often, the male guides gathered by the fire, chatting and laughing. Tila and Sabi would always sit together but apart from the rest of the guides. They alternated between showing each other videos from their Facebook feed or quietly listening to the male guides' conversation and translating the updates on trail conditions or guide gossip to me. They were the unassuming, overlooked, quiet bystanders. This was also their power. 

We did not see another female guide during the 14-day trek. 

I observed over the two weeks that these women were entering this male space and the stereotypes that came with it with grace—even as we tripped over our own feet while dodging falling rocks. However, when rocks are hurtling down at you on the side of the mountain, gender disappears. The rocks don’t care who you are. So you shut up and listen to Tila. And you run.