Just before noon on April 25, 2015, documentarian Michael Churton was filming at Everest Base Camp when the ground began to shake. A 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck Nepal. Within moments, a massive piece of ice from neighboring Mount Pumori broke loose, plunging 3,000 feet in under 30 seconds and unleashing a compression wave of snow, rock, and debris across the camp.
“It was just tons of ice — like the size of the Statue of Liberty — that dropped,” Churton, 47, who lives in Stanfordville, recalled. “It literally felt like a tsunami of rock and ice coming at us.”
As pieces of the mountain hurtled toward Base Camp on hurricane-force winds, Churton was slammed into a rock structure. He suffered a concussion and broke multiple bones in his face. His tentmate, team doctor Eve Girawong, 28, was among the at least 19 people who died that day at Everest, making it the deadliest disaster in the mountain’s history. Across Nepal and neighboring countries, nearly 9,000 people were killed and tens of thousands more injured or displaced.
Staggering and bloodied, Churton and a small group hiked several hours to the nearest village. “I was not feeling well,” he said. “You know, I had just had a traumatic brain injury.” Every step was uncertain, the path beneath him littered with debris and silence.
A businessman arranged for a helicopter to extract Churton and others. But many remained trapped higher on the mountain.
Randall Ercanbrack, 69, a fruit farmer from Utah, had traveled to climb Everest with his daughter, Haley. When the earthquake struck, they were deep in the Western Cwm — a glacial valley between Camp One and Camp Two — with an expedition led by Garrett Madison, the same group Churton was filming.
“It was just violent… a complete whiteout. You couldn’t see anything,” Ercanbrack recalled. “By the time the avalanche happened, we didn’t really know what was going on down at Base Camp.”
Ercanbrack, his daughter and the rest of their climbing group were stranded at Camp Two. The earthquake had shifted the ice so severely that the route back through the Khumbu Icefall was no longer passable.
Soon after, Ercanbrack began coughing up blood. He had developed high-altitude pulmonary edema. “I was suffocating,” he said. “There was no helicopter.” With limited oxygen and no immediate escape route, he survived the night thanks to a small supply of oxygen, steroids and medication — and to his daughter, who kept watch over him.
Eventually, after helicopters began medevacing the injured from Base Camp, they came for those stranded at Camp Two. Though gravely ill, Ercanbrack helped care for climbers in worse condition. “Even though I was in a potentially fatal situation, I was trying to help the others at Base Camp,” he said. “There were people there with trauma, internal bleeding. Everyone was doing what they could.”
Helicopters ultimately evacuated survivors from Base Camp in pairs. Ercanbrack, like Churton, returned home.
It wasn’t Churton’s first time on Everest — or his first time surviving disaster there.
One year earlier, Churton had been there when an avalanche in the Khumbu Icefall claimed the lives of 16 Sherpas — at the time, the mountain’s deadliest day.
His first trip to Everest had begun as an assignment to document the limits of human ambition, but ended instead in the shadow of its cost. In 2014, Churton was working as a producer for NBC’s Peacock Productions, assigned to help cover an expedition for the Discovery Channel. The plan was to film a wingsuit jump from the summit of Everest.
After the 2014 avalanche, all expeditions from the Nepal side were called off. No one reached the summit.
Shaken but inspired, Churton returned to New York with a new conviction. He pitched ideas, made calls, and looked for a way back — not as a staff producer, but as an independent filmmaker.
“I was unable to do it, to have someone pay me,” he said. “I decided then just to buy my own equipment and go as a one-man band. That went really well — until the earthquake. Had I known that I’d be still here 10 years later, not finished with it — it’s pretty crazy,” he added. “But it certainly has been… like the making of the documentary itself, minus the experience, has been its own kind of journey.”
A decade later, the footage from both tragedies — and the joyous and mournful moments in between — is becoming a film. “Bound to Everest” is Churton’s long-gestating documentary, expected to be released later this year.
“‘Bound to Everest’ captures the dual nature of human existence, the exhilarating pursuit of dreams intertwined with the weight of unforeseen tragedy,” he said. “In the face of devastation, resilience emerges, transforming loss into purpose.”
The film follows the Ercanbracks’ journey, life at Base Camp and the ordinary rhythms of expedition life before disaster struck. What began as a straightforward project has become something deeper: a meditation on risk, grief, and the search for meaning in landscapes where control is an illusion.
“Especially acts of God, where there’s no one to blame,” Churton said. “It’s just something that can happen, depending on what region you’re in — like an earthquake — any time, without any warnings.”
In 2016, Churton and Ercanbrack returned to Everest — not to climb or film, but to honor the fallen.
Ercanbrack and his daughter helped build a memorial for Girawong, the doctor who had been killed in the avalanche. “We helped build the monument in 2016, just above Scott Fischer’s,” he said, referencing the guide who died in a separate Everest disaster in 1996. “It was a way to make sense of what went down.”
Churton filmed the visit. “It was a very healing trip,” he said.
Churton has continued working as a documentarian. Most recently, he helped produce “Photographer,” a National Geographic series that profiles the lives and work of renowned photojournalists. The series was nominated for a Peabody Award.
Before filmmaking, Churton studied journalism at the University of Missouri. He grew up between Mississippi and St. Louis, but visited Dutchess County often, where his family has lived since 1907. His grandparents once owned the Churton store in Bangall — now Bangallworks. After decades of visiting, he moved to town permanently in 2020.
After college, Churton moved to New York City to pursue music. He bartended, took photographs, freelanced — and then, through a chance meeting, landed a job in production at Nickelodeon. From there, he moved to NBC and National Geographic. But it was Everest that redirected his life.
“Up until I was able to look at the footage, which was a month or so after the event, all you can remember was the avalanche,” he said. “But then you see how much fun every moment was leading up to it.”
He now lives in Stanfordville with his wife, Jessica Pitcher Churton, and their infant son, Michael Gregory. He often works on various film projects from home. His Everest documentary is nearly complete. Still, the mountain pulls at him.
“I’ll probably go again,” Churton said, suggesting that he would take his son too. “Maybe when he’s 10… I mean, I love going there. The people are so nice. And it just has such a special feeling when you’re there.”
Everest took him to the edge of life. Ten years later, it still calls him back.