Adventure Himalaya

Whoops, I forgot to tell you all about this.  I wrote this article for WWU's Collegian, and it will be published in January.

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Summit of Lobuche East

Mt. Everest has always attracted a lot of people, but for me, it was one of those places I figured I would just be content to read about.  I certainly don’t have a death wish.  Then three years ago, a friend managed to interest me in going to Nepal, and long story short - I am now an SM in Nepal.  During my first couple months in Nepal, the climbing possibilities filled my brain until I rarely thought of anything else.  I finally settled on a peak just west of Everest named Lobuche East, standing at 20,075 ft.

When my dad and I loaded into a van complete with its own disco lights at 5 am on November 7, in the midst of Hindu festival celebrations, I thought I knew what I was getting myself into.  We caught a flight to Lukla (9380 ft. elev.), said to be the most dangerous airport in the world.  The landing field has a 12% grade and flights run only in good weather under visual flight rules; as they say, “We don’t fly in the clouds – some of our clouds have rocks in them!”  We landed with a cabin full of applause.  As we trekked out of town, we battled the traffic - if it wasn’t hundreds of other trekkers, it was mule and yak trains.  Two short days brought us to the town of Namche Bazaar at 11,300 ft, where we took our first rest day for acclimatization purposes.  We spent the next morning on a pleasant hike to the Everest View Hotel where we caught our first views of THE mountain.  In the afternoon we treated ourselves to a mushroom pizza and fresh bread with butter at the Namche Bakery, which turned out to be a horrible idea as we spent the entire night suffering from Montezuma’s revenge, turning our lodge into a complete mess.  Not wanting to get a day behind in our schedule, we trudged on like slugs the next day, dehydrated, and having eaten two bites of porridge.  Our guide offered lots of advice such as, “More better you to eat rice for diarrhea.”  (Yeah, I suppose so - if it’s like feeding rice to seagulls...  Do you really want me to throw up all over you?)  Without eating for about 48 hours, we continued to hike, burning up our abundant fat stores.  Our appetites eventually returned and the rest of our trekking days resumed with an uneventful tone.

On the seventh day, we reached our first high point: a peak called Gokyo Ri at an elevation of 17,585 ft.  The view was astounding and the blue-green lakes where we had overnighted even more vibrant from above.  The next day we climbed six and a half hours over Cho La Pass at 17,782 ft and on to our base camp for Lobuche East at 16,100 ft.  Our porter greeted us with peppermint tea and proceeded to cook pasta.  I was sold!  The next morning, feeling great, we skipped a rest day and headed up to high camp.  In just over an hour, we reached our high camp on a large rock ledge at 17,300 ft.  After a beautiful sunset, we settled into -20 degree sleeping bags, with down jackets situated on top and Nalgenes filled with boiling water inside.  We suffered a very cold night with little sleep and strange, lack-of-oxygen-inspired dreams.

The next day we would head out as a team of four: my dad and I along with our guide, and our porter, who was actually a fairly experienced climber as well.  By law, you are required to have a guide to do any climbing in Nepal, although in my opinion, we should have just paid someone to fill the post in absentia.  The story of how we got our guide is complicated, but in short, he did not fulfill our expectations.  Age 23 going on 14, with only 3 years of climbing experience and poor English skills, he provided a constant source of irritation.  He couldn’t set a steady hiking pace, ridiculed us to other guides when we didn’t follow his ideas (forgetting I could understand him), and strutted with an arrogant swagger that made me want to whack him with my hiking pole.  Somehow, I refrained.

All that aside, at four in the morning, November 17, we prepared to head out of camp.  Because of the altitude, putting on just the outer layers of clothing took forty-five minutes.  About 5:15 am we began climbing up the rock slabs by headlamp.  It was a nice scramble with mostly class 3 climbing and a class 4 move here and there.  The sun came up next to Everest in the east about an hour later.  At that time we reached the glacier and stopped to put on crampons and rope up.  We ascended alpine style up 40 degree slopes toward the summit.  On these steep slopes above 18,000 ft, it required three breaths for every step.  Needless to say, it was slow going.  We snacked on the false summit, where most people stop, dubbing it the real deal.  We headed on across the summit ridge with sharp precipices on both sides, wishing our guide would put in a picket or two, but he didn’t seem to understand.  By 10:30 we stood on the summit, a cornice only big enough for four or five people to stand on.  The panorama made me feel like I was on top of the world.  I was thrilled to finally reach my 20,000 ft goal!  We stayed only long enough to take some pictures and call a friend to email my mom with the news.  (Cell towers have been placed along the trekking route to the south side of Everest with the highest tower now allowing cell phone calls even from the top of Everest since Oct. 29, 2010 – so our peak was close enough to this tower to allow a call!)

On the descent, we suggested simul climbing with an occasional picket for protection.  Our guide didn’t understand.  To him, pickets meant fixed rope.  So he decided to fix a 600 ft “water ski rope,” multiple times down the mountain.  We began a tedious descent.  At one point, the porter put in an anchor that consisted of two pickets, unevenly spaced. As my dad was rappelling, the anchor holding more of the weight started popping out. "Hey, that one's coming out," I said.  He started pounding it back in with his ice tool, but it wasn’t solid.  I sat on the other picket, which had also begun wiggling.  His solution was to stick both his ice tools in a cross pattern over the pickets.  The best part came when, in all seriousness, he stated, "This is a very safe anchor."  I looked straight at him and said, "No, this is the worst anchor I have ever seen."  We eventually just down climbed while clipped in to the fixed rope.  We finally made it to high camp, cleaned up, and moved out to base camp.

We had planned to visit Everest base camp on the way down, but after seeing the empty camp from our summit, we skipped it.  Two more days and nights in the cold, without a shower (we had gone seven already), just to see an empty glacier?  We can do that back home!  The next three days were spent hiking a quick pace back to Lukla, scheming of ways to ditch our guide.  We walked like drunks across challenging suspension bridges and even managed to get held up by a five year old with a bow and arrow.  Fourteen days after we had begun, the bad weather in Lukla generously lifted for us - even though others had been stranded for eight days - and we took off down that 12% grade!  Back in Kathmandu, we bargained for a taxi ride back to my apartment at Scheer Memorial Hospital in Banepa.  Ah, the joy of a hot shower, the absence of a ridiculous guide, and the taste of home cooking!  Well, I’m working on the cooking...

Landing at Lukla

Gokyo Ri

Everest!

High Camp

Lobuche East