Part I - Gokyo to Cho La to Everest Base Camp

My cousin Nick and I meet up for the first time either of us
could remember away from Christmas Eve, in Kathmandu

Getting to Lukla was a piece of cake. Blaze’s flight was scheduled after mine but he magically arrived a half hour before and scoured the town looking for me until my plane landed. I didn’t have enough money because of stupid debit card rules so I got a cash advance at the bank. Details.

12% graded runway in Lukla

Blaze and I only met two days before leaving but we made the best trekking partners. We pushed each other in equal amounts, took care of each other, made fun of each other and riffed off of the other’s jokes. He was not in fact filming underground pornography in Kathmandu and Malaysia as I had been told but was filming and working with an organization that led non-violent conflict resolution workshops in Bhutanese refugee camps, among other places. The upshot is he’s a professional photographer with a substantial SLR so he took great pictures.

Namche Bazar

The first day was long. I wanted to stop early as per the recommendations of Lonely Planet but Blaze convinced me that we should make the push to Namche Bazar so we arrived exhausted at 7 pm all but begging for dal bhat. We took our sleep satisfied. The next day was the recommended acclimatization day so we hiked up to the little village of Thame (3900m) and back. It was a long day hike but beautiful and we did our first path-finding and met a guy who had summited Everest four times. (We ended up meeting several other people who had also summited Everest and Lhotse but it isn’t so impressive when you meet them in the Himalayas…it’s still cool, but, you know, they’re a little devalued.)

Yaks before the Gokyo turnoff

Ama Dablam 

The next day we hit the trail and made the long climb to lunch in Mong La (3975m). Blaze ate an uncooked pancake for breakfast and started feeling sick on the way up. He nearly collapsed when we got to the top. We walked an hour down the hill after lunch and he fell on his bed at 2, woke briefly for dinner and slept through until 7 AM. I spent the evening with two Kiwis and a Nepali woman who lived with her family on the way to Thame but attended Laurelhurst Elementary and University in Wellington, NZ. They taught me the Nepali card game Callbreak and I won Rs 30 before losing back half. I woke up to Blaze happily eating a granola bar, good sign, so we headed out.

A picture of a picture of Ama Dablam advanced base camp

On our way we met a man with a potato chip bag full of boiled potatoes. He offered us some and told us he owned a guesthouse in Gokyo, that his cousin owned one in Dole and that we could stay for free. Great! We walked the last hour with him behind a trail of yaks and became the lone guests at the Cho Oyu Lodge. Blaze started going downhill again that night and the next day he was no better, a cocktail of raw pancakes, altitude sickness, and this weird virus/allergy from a jackfruit that made his hands burn and peel. So we stayed another day. I climbed several hundred meters on a lonely trail above the village and spent a wonderful few hours exploring among stunted juniper bushes and rhodies, sneaking up on a herd of yaks and sketching the landscape in my journal. Most of the next 8 hours was spent in 14^th century England reading World Without End.

My climb above Dole. Cho Oyu in the background, 6th
highest mountain in the world

Blaze and the Danish Guy above Machhermo

Blaze was on the mend the next morning so we got up to Machhermo by 10:30. (Because the Gokyo valley is quite steep, we could only go a few hours per day to avoid altitude sickness.) After being alone in Dole for two days we thought it would be nice to have company so we followed the crowd to the Yeti Lodge. (Apparently a Yeti attacked a woman and some goats in Machhermo in 1974!) It was actually a bad place – they skimped on dal bhat and rats chirped under the floorboards for several hours. We met the Danish Guy for the first time – he told us he walked for four weeks from Jiri to Lukla (the helicopter did it in 45 minutes) and a group of Canadians who, especially the French one with pointy eyebrows, seemed to like Blaze more than me for no good reason. There was a daily Acute Mountain Sickness (AMS) lecture at the Machhermo health clinic that we attended put on by European doctors, one of whom we had met on the trail escorting a yak-chasing Shih Tzu back to Dole. A blizzard picked up as we walked over but it melted quickly under bright blue skies. We took pictures of Yaks. That night a thundersnowstorm rolled in.

Baby yak in the Machhermo afternoon blizzard

5 AM. Three inches of snow. Shit. Back to sleep. 5:30. Fuck it. At 6:15 we were the first ones on the trail, once we found it. Blazing a trail all alone through fresh powder under bright blue skies – man it was good. It was Blaze’s favorite day and would have been mine too if I’d eaten more than a Snickers and two hardboiled eggs. We followed the footprints of a porter along a dirty roaring river that snuck out under the Ngozumpa Glacier. Almost as soon as it emerges from beneath the ice the pristine runoff from the Gokyo Lakes joins the glacial torrent.

My camera broke temporarily but this is exactly what it
looked like from the top of Gokyo Ri

Looking across at Cho La Pass

There are six holy lakes in a straight line along the moraine. The first is quite small but surrounded by cairns and with snow on the ground it looked like thousands of little people watching us. Erie. The next two lakes were quite big. The village of Gokyo is build on the moraine on the banks of the third lake – it looks like a resort and we could have stayed a week. The guesthouse gave us free hot mango juice on arrival, a free room, outstanding dal bhat and free coconut biscuits when we left. It was our gold standard and though every older woman is didi, our Didi was from the Namaste Lodge. We walked to the fourth lake but I was still quite fatigued so we walked back and watched yaks mating. Our trip was thus complete. That night we met a man that looked like the devil incarnate and an Israeli girl who had come from Cho La pass that day, where we were headed the next. The girl had taken a rock to the head and was vomiting from her concussion on the pass and all night in her room. Outstanding news for us. (She ended up getting airlifted to Kathmandu.) I also wished my Mom a happy mother’s day. I had a headache and what felt like growing pains in my legs but with a hearty dal bhat and some sleep I was good to climb Gokyo Ri the next morning.

Top of the pass!

The doctors in Machhermo said it’s common for people to have irregular night breathing at high altitudes, like your body forgets to take a breath and you wake up winded. I experienced it each other next three nights and it was a pain to be half awake but be out of breath because you weren’t conscious enough to regulate your breath. Anyway, climbing up Gokyo Ri, the 5370 meter HILL rising above Gokyo was steep, obviously, and the views were fogged in so we couldn’t see Everest. The clouds weren’t going to lift and I was freezing my balls off so naturally just as we came down the clouds parted. We weren’t about ready to go back up so we were content with gorgeous views of the first three lakes and the enormous glacier we were about to cross.

We did so around 1. It was actually quite cool, up and down and up and down over piles of rock and around little lakes. The only eventful part was meeting a guy from Vancouver about an hour in and chatting about happy hour in Seattle. On a glacier. In the Himalayas. We stayed in Dragnag. It snowed in the evening and didn’t stick. I finished my 1200 page book so I didn’t have to haul it over the pass. We created the Team Ukraine joke but it’s been repeated so many times to blank faces that I won’t tell it again. We alone thought it was hilarious.

Our path intersecting with the EBC trail cutting across the
right of the photo

In the morning we leached onto two Spaniards and their guide over the 5330 meter Cho La pass. I’d been nervous about crossing the pass for some days. Should we find a guide? Is it safe to go alone? Would there be too much snow? All of those worries disappeared when we got to the top. The last 200 meters up was a breathless, pathless rock scramble. Every few steps I had to stop and ease the burning in my legs but it was fine, just really hard. I fell on Blaze with my pack still on and sat for a while basking in the sun and the satisfaction that comes from accomplished goals. It was the last challenging thing I had to do in Nepal and the capstone of my trip, and I was proud of myself. From there we walked over a little section of a big glacier, down the other side of the pass and were all alone with the yaks across a flat valley surrounded by snowy mountains. This was my favorite day. We got to Lobuche by three o’clock after several more hours of tired, lonely trekking. Our path merged with the Everest Base Camp trail about 30 minutes before Lobuche and we joined the stampede. We saw more people in 10 minutes than we had all day.  

Halfway up Kala Patar, Everest is the short black peak to
the left of the bigger-looking one, Nuptse

It another long day but it was a relief to know the pass was behind us. We arrived in Gorek Shep by 9 o’clock, the last village before EBC. Most people get up at 4:30 to climb Kala Patar and see Mt. Everest up close but the weather was good so we took advantage and made the climb to 5550 meters. (The next two days were completely socked in all day – nobody saw anything, so we were extremely lucky.) Everyone had descended already so Blaze and I were again all alone. We saw Mt. Everest. It was really, Really cool. I can’t describe why it was so great, but it was.

Everest through prayer flags atop Kala Patar

Everest

Entrance to Base Camp

Memorials to fallen climbers

Once we came down at noon and ate our third meal we figured we should just cram in base camp and head home early the next day so dragged our asses two hours up there, took a ton of pictures to prove we’d see it and headed back before Blaze’s head exploded from his altitude headache. It was six months to the day since I’d arrived in Pamohi.

Blaze eating apple pie in Tengboche after we learned that
the mobile bakery in base camp closed down for hygienic reasons 

From there we just tried to get the hell off the mountain. We descended 1300 meters to Tengboche and almost kept going to Namche but stopped because it didn’t matter. Through the window of our guesthouse we could see a long trail climbing steadily along the mountain across the valley. I thought, man, what a windswept, badass trail. Only basasses must walk there. When I looked at the map though it was the trail to Mong La we had taken nine days before where Blaze almost didn’t make it on his raw pancake stomach. We are those guys! We made a quick walk to Namche the next day, showered for the first time in mrmrmrmr days and had our first, second and third beers of the trek. We spent the afternoon drinking espresso. Lukla was farther than we thought and the strap on the right side of my pack was suddenly killing me. The bridges were still missing 10%-20% of the bolts that held them together but it didn’t matter – we would soon be in Kathmandu for momos, moonshine and massages.

Blaze and I walked through the Lukla arch and finished out trek. We hugged…