The whine of the flying drone was impossible to ignore when I arrived at the helipad—somewhere above my head the device was carrying three full oxygen bottles up to Camp I from a 90-foot longline.
I scanned the mountain for the drone but it was impossible to spot against the jumbled landscape of rock and ice. But I could see the pilot.
“This drone has changed our work on the icefall this year,” Jangbu Sherpa, who is also one of the Icefall Doctor’s drone pilots, told me.
Indeed, after a series of successful test flights in 2024, the drones were put into service this spring by the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee (SPCC), the non-governmental organization that is charged with removing garbage, human waste, and dead bodies from the peak. The SPCC is also the body that employs the Icefall Doctors.
Earlier this year the SPCC asked the Icefall Doctors to manage the drone in addition to their responsibilities in the icefall. Now, they operate an unofficial cargo service ferrying tools and supplies from Base Camp up to Camp I, and garbage and waste back down.
The new service has had a dramatic impact on the vast army of mountain workers who are responsible for ferrying goods up to high camps and bringing garbage down. Previously, all of this work was done by human power. During a typical season, a high altitude worker employed by an expedition operator may make a dozen trips through the Khumbu Icefall to haul oxygen tanks, tents, and food to higher camps. Each trek begins well before dawn, when the ice is coldest and most stable.
But the drone has eliminated the need for many of these trips, thus reducing the amount of risk each mountain worker faces across the span of a climbing season. The Chinese-made DJI heavy-lift craft has been busy all spring.
“What takes us three hours to hike, the drone does in three minutes,” Ang Sarki, the Icefall Doctor’s other leader, told me.
The drone will also help the SPCC enforce existing rules around garbage removal on the mountain. Each flight can bring down 35 pounds worth of trash, human feces, and spent oxygen canisters.
The flight is tricky, and spans one-and-a-half miles in distance. Due to the interruption of signal caused by the topography, it must be operated by two pilots at Base Camp, set apart by a few hundred feet. This configuration ensures an unbroken signal throughout the flight.
Despite this configuration, dangerous mountain flying conditions still exist. Earlier this spring, a drone was damaged during an emergency landing; according to the Icefall Doctors, an unexpected gusting downdraft wind struck the craft mid-flight, triggering an automatic parachute to deploy.
Upesh Upreti, Chief Drone Pilot for the Icefall Doctors told Outside, “We flew into a downdraft with winds around 45mph. The drone is programmed to automatically deploy a safety parachute whenever it loses flight control. When the parachute was deployed, we lost pilot control and it slowly landed in the icefall. When our team reached the drone we found that it was damaged when it was dragged across the ice by the heavy winds.”
While drone piloting has added a new dynamic to the job done by the Icefall Doctors, it hasn’t shifted their primary duty, which is to build the route through the Icefall. And that is still just as dangerous and demanding as it’s ever been.
