By Moni Basu, in Kathmandu, Nepal
and Wayne Drash, in Atlanta

Kathmandu, Nepal

From the Buddhist temple high on a hill above Kathmandu, Eric Poppleton surveys the Himalayan foothills. In the valley below is the city where his Nepal adventure began. Now, parts of it are in ruin. As are the lives of people who mattered most to him.

He braces himself for the cremation ceremony that is about to begin; he tries to keep the tears from flowing but fails. His only comfort is a conviction that he is doing the right thing.
He picks up a white silk khata, a traditional Buddhist ceremonial scarf, and drapes it over the broken body of his friend, Tom Taplin. He lights candles and incense as the priests begin their drone-like chants. Eric sits cross-legged on the floor, hypnotized by the smells and sounds.
Just a few days earlier, he and Tom stood at the base camp of Mount Everest together, feasting their eyes on nature’s majesty. The longtime friends and filmmakers had laughed and talked about the documentary they were producing on the history and culture of the small tent city from where brave souls scale the treacherous mountain.
It had been an unusual spring; snow fell almost constantly for five days. Eric’s boots were wet and his feet felt uncomfortably cold. He knew he had the film he needed, so when a porter showed up at base camp, Eric asked if he could trek out with him. He had less than an hour to pack his gear.
He hugged Tom and another crew member.
“I’ll see you guys soon.”
With that farewell, Eric made his way back to Kathmandu. He was at the airport and within minutes of departure from Nepal when the earth began heaving. A short time later, he received the terrible news.
Tom was dead.
Eric could not bear to leave his friend’s body behind. This was the guy who attended the same arts college, the guy who had been climbing since he was 12 and turned Eric into a mountaineer, too. They went up the Matterhorn in the Alps and to Everest base camp. They shared meals at one another’s homes – Tom owned an extendable fork with which he would randomly pluck food off his friend’s plate. Together they watched slide after slide – 80 carousels worth — of their global adventures.
They loved everything about their journeys: nature, the camaraderie, the adrenaline rush. And in the end, they reveled over the absurdity of life with a few cold beers.

On this evening, Eric holds absolutely no regrets about the tough decision to go back up on the mountain for his friend. Yet, as he watches the monks meticulously arrange long-stemmed carnations, gladioli and marigolds on Tom’s body, he feels anxious.
He has never seen a cremation before. He cannot even imagine what it is going to feel like to watch the physical remnants of his friend burn. But he knew a cremation was the only way he could quickly reunite Tom with his wife, Cory Freyer, in Santa Monica, California. He plans to carry the ashes back himself.
After the prayers, Eric helps carry Tom’s body to the pyre, stacked high with thick logs. He touches his friend one last time.
It is dark before the first flames begin to engulf the pyre. Eric, a photographer by trade, has promised Tom’s wife pictures of her husband’s journey home.
At times, Eric struggles to click his camera. But he believes in the importance of what he is doing, in the power and necessity of documenting life and death.
He points the camera straight at his friend’s body.
“This way,” he says, “I can be close forever.”

Eric and Tom arrived in Nepal in early April with hopes of making a documentary that would help define Everest culture. With them was another friend, John Woodruff.

Eric is 55; Tom, 61. “Woody” is older and had undergone knee surgery – not exactly the profile of someone who might attempt a trek to Everest base camp. But Tom persuaded him to join the adventure.
Eric is 55; Tom, 61. “Woody” is older and had undergone knee surgery – not exactly the profile of someone who might attempt a trek to Everest base camp. But Tom persuaded him to join the adventure.

See Everest Base Camp

“He brought a 64-year-old fat guy with two titanium knees on this trip,” Woodruff said. “For Tom, it was about bringing someone he cared about.”
Eric set off with Tom and Woody to make the six-day climb with more than 600 pounds of gear.
They pitched small, yellow tents at the base camp, or EBC as they called it. Eric shot with a DSLR camera, and his duty was to catch dramatic landscape and time-lapse video. In between the intense snowfall, he captured gorgeous early morning images of the sun glistening off the Khumbu Icefall, the most treacherous portion of the trek toward Everest. The frozen river is filled with deep crevasses, and immense ice hangs 10 stories tall.
His nighttime images seemed to capture every star in the galaxy peering down on Everest.


Woody shot Tom’s interviews with Sherpas and mountaineers, including Dan Mazur, a renowned climber who has spent years scaling the highest peaks of the Himalayas.
Tom wanted to show how climbing Everest was once pioneering but had of late become part of the adventure travel circuit, Eric said. He also wanted to capture the unique world of mountain climbers.
“They go to these bizarre places,” Eric said, “and put their lives on the line.”
Eric’s love of the mountains started when he met Tom in the late 1990s. Eric had walked into Adventure 16, an outdoor and travel outfitter in California, hoping to land a job conducting photographic workshops.
“Oh, you should meet my husband,” said the woman who greeted him. “He does a lot of photography.”
Tom Taplin was a larger-than-life guy with a warm personality and ebullient smile. When he stuck out his hand, a friendship was born.
“We’ve been friends ever since we shook hands – 17 years ago,” Eric recalled.
Tom’s fun-loving personality was instilled in him by his parents, two beloved philanthropists in
Denver who dedicated their lives to helping disadvantaged children. His father, Tom Sr., helped form the Boys & Girls Clubs of Denver in 1961 and was known for making extremely generous donations, often anonymously, to the Children’s Hospital Colorado and the Denver Foundation.
His dad endowed four chairs at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center and provided scholarships to students at Denver public schools and to Metropolitan State University of Denver. His mother, Bea, continued the family’s generous gifts after the family patriarch died in 2007. He was 87; the couple had been married for 55 years.
The oldest of four boys and his father’s namesake, Tom shared his dad’s passion – but focused it on his two loves, film and the outdoors. He supported the film department at Kent Denver School and gave sizable donations to the American Alpine Club and the Altitude Research Center Foundation.
He climbed Mount McKinley; attempted to scale Aconcagua, the highest mountain outside of Asia; and trekked up Ama Dablam, one of the most beautiful peaks in the Himalayas.
He was a film student in the 1970s at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia and the glue that helped keep a group of alums tight-knit four decades later. He built a couple of remarkable homes for himself, in Santa Monica and in Evergreen, Colorado. But publicly, Tom rarely flaunted his wealth. He drove a Toyota Camry for years and years, though he recently upgraded to a BMW.
The Everest documentary was Tom’s dream project. While most stories and films have examined treks to the summit, Tom was more interested in capturing the harsh life at base camp.

That’s where he was on April 25 when the glaciers began vibrating; Eric and Woody had already descended the mountain.
After a few minutes, the earth stopped moving, but the roar of an avalanche grew louder and louder. Mountaineer Jon Kedrowski wrote on his blog that no one could see the avalanche, but they knew it was coming from the thundering sound.
It was about noon. Tom was inside his tent. Three or four others at the camp took shelter behind a boulder. A massive storm of snow and ice churned toward them, and they yelled for Tom to seek shelter with them. As he emerged from his tent, ferocious gusts of hurricane-force winds spurred by the rushing avalanche threw Tom high into the air and carried his body more than 600 feet. There was nothing anyone could do.
He is among 19 people known to have died at Everest and among thousands who died in the earthquake. The death toll continues to rise by the day. Millions are injured, homeless or frightened.
But extraordinary acts of kindness emerge from the depths of disaster. And that is the story of Eric Poppleton and Tom Taplin.
Theirs was a friendship as strong as the majestic mountain they were documenting.

The Boudhanath temple in Kathmandu is one of the oldest Buddhist monuments in Nepal. Tom Taplin and Eric Poppleton visited the site on April 4. The historic temple was heavily damaged in the quake three weeks later.