Khumbu Kaper Trip Report: Chasing Everest in the time of COVID

Mallika, our guide Kedar, and I stumble into Gokyo, a cluster of lodges by a stunning blue lake above 15,500 feet in the Nepal Himalayas, on our last legs. The day has already involved two punishing glacier crossings, a scramble over a 17,500-foot pass, headaches and nausea, and the brutal finding that the village where we planned to sleep had already closed due to COVID-fueled lack of business. The day has also brought more beauty than humans can comprehend. The memory of the beauty fades away, though, as we realize to our horror that every single lodge in Gokyo appears closed. We drag ourselves through town to a lodge that had assured us three days before that they were open: it is locked and abandoned.

We take stock of our situation. We have no tents, sleeping bags, or stoves. Visibility is about 100 feet and while the precipitation is still rain, night will soon fall and bring snow. We have about 6 Clif bars and 8 Snickers between us. I start to consider whether breaking into a yak shed for the night is better than walking three hours downhill in the dusk to a village where we might find a room. Suddenly, a glorious puff of smoke appears from the chimney of a tucked-away lodge. Hope. We hump our packs towards the smoke, and find deliverance: a tough Sherpa lady has stayed in town to graze her yaks, and after taking one look at us she puts some tea on the dung-fired stove and points us to a bed.

We sink down, and allow ourselves to think that the hardest parts are probably over. It has not been easy, but the rewards have been great. We have had the world’s biggest, most spectacular mountain landscape almost entirely to ourselves. We have taken a chance we may never get again, and made the most of it. Here’s the story.  

FALSE STARTS [Before Day 0]

By the time we hit the trail on May 8, 2021, we were over a year late. Planning had begun in 2019, and when we convened in Humayunpur, Delhi in early 2020 for our first official trip meeting, we felt confident that we would be standing in Everest’s shadow by April. World history intervened in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic. By early March, we started worrying about the trip’s prospects; by late March, we had entirely forgotten it. Our friends escaped Delhi on the last flights before India’s massive lockdown, while Mallika and I hunkered down in Delhi.

But the vision of sky-scraping mountains was too strong to bury entirely, and the hopeful dawn of 2021 found us all in Delhi again. Planning kicked back into gear with a late April start as a target. With perfectly imperfect timing, I made it to Kathmandu just as India’s awful COVID second wave sped up exponentially.

Every morning in Kathmandu, I woke up at 5am and walked in the hills with an overly energetic trip organizer named Durga and schemed about how we could still make the trip happen. Durga is exactly 49 years old, and I know this because he frequently told me how fit he was despite his age, and how this fitness combined with hot showers and ginger tea make him COVID-proof.

As we developed our bizarre friendship over countless cups of tea and local millet raksi, both hoping for the same thing but powerless to bring it about, I got acquainted with the neighborhood and saw the brutal impact of COVID on the local economy. I met several trekking guides, who usually lead 10 treks per year but had led just one since 2020. One had learned French and made solid money specializing in trips for Francophone tourists, but was now selling snacks and drinks out of a packed roadside shop. As always, the losses were worse for those with lower positions and less money: guys who had worked as cooks or porters had given up their rooms and moved their families in with others. And though I had no way to interact with local women, they were probably facing just as many issues from the presence of their bored, frustrated husbands as they were from the lack of their incomes.

Unfortunately, all the negotiations with Durga came to nothing. Three of our seven-person team picked up the new COVID variant and were down for the count, and two others had family commitments and decided to sit tight. Then Nepal shut all flights.

Mallika was the incredible, heroic silver lining. Somehow, despite being alone in the active lockdown in Delhi, she managed to fully pack up the apartment, store all our stuff elsewhere, battle down our surly landlords as they made a final desperate grab for our security deposit, and finally talk her way through security at the Delhi airport who pulled her up because they disagreed with how the lab had formatted her COVID test result. When I saw her walking out of the Kathmandu airport into the first chilly day of real per-monsoon rain, my heart skipped a beat and I knew it would be all right. Trek or no trek. Everest or no Everest.

A PATH OPENS [Day 0: Kathmandu to Tham Danda]

We still wanted to try. The next week was full of calls, texts, and emails to every trekking company we could think of. One by one, they all admitted that a trip was impossible. The government still had the flights closed and had even made it impossible to drive out of Kathmandu. Near the point of giving up, one company owner named Chhatra sent a confident message and we decided to risk a trip through the locked-down streets to Thamel for a meeting. Luckily, we hired Raju, a famously entertaining taxi-man, who talked us through all checkpoints. The Thamel meeting went well, and we ended up agreeing on a hike in Langtang and making a classic Kathmandu ATM trip to pick up cash for the guide fees. Langtang is a secondary trekking region, highly accessible from Kathmandu but clearly less spectacular than Everest or Annapurna. We figured it was still worth it, given the circumstances.

As we forked over our cash wad, the company’s owner make an offhand comment about how they needed to book an extra Jeep because they were sending another group to Everest on the same day. We pounced. If this highly-budget group of Brazilians could be shoved in a Jeep to Everest- why couldn’t we? After a furious round of negotiation, we made a deal that would require another wad from the ATM. We were going to Everest.

Our two prep days went by in a blur of PCR tests and permit worries.  It became clear that we did not have the officially required travel permits to leave the Kathmandu valley, and Chhatra’s plan was to sneak us out at 3am before the police woke up. Reassuring. We bought out the entire Snickers stock of a neighborhood shop to calm our nerves.

The Jeep came way before dawn. We bumped over back roads up the hills surrounding the city, trying to balance our tiredness and heavy intake of motion sickness pills with the need to stay alert for a potential police stop. The stop never materialized, though, and we settled into a good road along the valleys of the calm Sunkoshi and Dudhkoshi rivers. Twelve hours in, we reached the end of the paved road at Salleri, headquarters of the Solukhumbu district which includes the world’s highest mountains.

The next six hours were brutal, inching up a rough new road at 15 km/hr, but they saved us two days of lowland hiking. The Solukhumbu is famously one of the last populated roadless regions on Earth. The tiny airstrip at Lukla is the main access to the area, and cash-strapped trekkers have usually walked six extra days from Jiri to access the region without buying a flight. The inexorable tide of modernity is slicing further each year into this vertiginous region, though. The road brings many positives: cheap fresh food from the lowlands, faster medical care, an easier way for urban migrants to visit their families. It also threatens to erode the quality of the remote natural splendor that underpins the region’s strong tourist economy. Critically, the topography and the cut-rate funding mean that the road’s construction and operation are already causing countless landslides, and continue to do so. We saw massive swathes of forests ravaged every few hundred meters below the road, where chunks had fallen in. We avoided thinking about it too much, and simply took advantage of the road until it ended in a pile of rocks, where a rough-and-ready lodge was ready to capitalize on batters travelers. 

HITTING THE TRAIL [Days 1-2: Tham Danda to Tok Tok]

The first day on a new trail is always exciting. Our route led up the green, steep-sided valley of the Dudhkoshi (“Milk River”), whose milky-blue waters race straight down from Everest. The massive Himalayan scale slowly sunk in as we picked our way around the valley’s ridges, making ant-like progress in a land where each unnamed tributary commands a sub-valley with walls two thousand meters high. The weather degraded, and the mood gradually descended into an all-out grind.

Mule trains were mainly to blame. They were interesting at first, as young Sherpa guys shouted, cajoled, and whipped them up the trails like modern cowboys. Driving the mules is one of the region’s many examples of hard work with little pay. Business owners uphill in Namche Bazar pay about Rs 30 (25 cents) per kilo; each mule can carry 60 kg; and one cowboy can drive about 10 mules, meaning a total payment of $150 for the three days of work. The mule’s owner would take most of that money, and the cowboy would have to spend a chunk of the rest on food which is so expensive above the roadhead in the Khumbu.

So, we respected the cowboys and appreciated their underpaid work that would lead to affordable meals and lodging further uphill. But we cursed the way the mules’ sharp hooves and active metabolisms turned the trail into a slippery river of mud and shit. We cursed even harder when trains going in opposite directions turned into massive jams that forced ten-minute breaks. We eventually made it to Surkey village, set in a beautiful green valley, and collapsed for the night in a nice wooden lodge.

The morning brought relief. After a tough, drizzly hour on mule-broken trail, the mule route branched off to the Lukla airstrip and we continued straight up the valley. The trail immediately dried out, and the walking became easy and smooth as stunning villages revealed themselves across the valley. We eventually popped out into a fantastic area filled with impressive Mani stones (boulders with the Tibetan Buddhist mantra “Om Mani Padme Hum” deeply inscribed in Tibetan characters) and chuckling streams. We continued past well-built houses with healthy gardens, prayer wheels, stupas, and walls of Mani tablets, which gave a strong feeling of traditional pride and wealth. This was Muhsey village, which most hikers miss because they fly into Lukla. We felt lucky that the lockdown forced us to pass through it.

We eventually rejoined the main trail from Lukla to Everest Base Camp (EBC), which brought a whole new level of development. The valley of the Dudhkoshi provides flat ground for tourist infrastructure on the first part of the trail, and locals have taken advantage. The full range of accommodation was evident, from true “teahouses”, where families had added rooms to their home to accommodate trekkers, to luxury complexes with helipads and fountains. Still, most were closed because they had no business. Other than the Brazilians who were hiking on a similar schedule to ours, we met no other hikers headed uphill. Only stragglers coming down. Mallika and I wondered if we had been too bold in coming at such a marginal time, especially when Kedar kept updating us of tightening regulations in the Khumbu. Anyway, the only thing to do was forge ahead. We bedded down at a village called Tok Tok.

“TEAHOUSE TREKKING:” HOW LONG HIKES WORK IN NEPAL [Interlude]

By hiking towards Everest Base Camp, we were fully throwing ourselves into the layers of history and infrastructure built up since the 1960’s by Nepal’s trekking industry. Since then, the main trekking areas in Nepal (and specifically the Khumbu (Everest) region) have built up the world’s greatest stock of trekking-dedicated infrastructure. What started as a tradition of Sherpa families extending the hospitality of simple food and a warm place on the floor, has turned into a massive network of lodges available up to 16,500 feet and offering pizza, deep-fried Mars bars, and hot showers.

It is by far the most comfortable place in the world to hike to such an altitude. This comes at a price. Since everything must be carried up by mules, yaks, and humans, it is hard to avoid spending $20 per person per day on food, an unthinkable sum in lowland Nepal. The money comes into perspective, though, when you realize that many of the high “villages” are actually just collections of hotels built just to serve trekkers. Nepali entrepreneurs have put in massive effort to ensure we can see Everest and sleep in a warm bed on the same day.

There are many fascinating and infuriating details in the system. A big one is the guide. It is normally possible to trek independently in the Khumbu, but the government required all trekkers to have guides in COVID times. We hired Kedar, who fit in well with the tradition of Nepal trekking guides: extremely nice, fully committed to giving the clients a good time, and with incentives substantially misaligned with the clients’. One example of the incentives part is how, rather than letting us choose which lodge to stay in, Kedar spent hours each day on the phone negotiating with various lodges to see which would give him free board in exchange for bringing a couple tourists for the night. I don’t know if Kedar knew that we knew this. It never became a big issue.

Another funny detail is how lodges charge low room rates only if you eat all your meals there. They recoup their money not by making all the food uniformly expensive, but just by price-gouging at breakfast. At high altitudes, an all-you-can-eat dinner of rice, lentils, and veg costs no more than a single breakfast pancake. To be fair, that pancake is pretty thick.

All in all, trekkers in the Khumbu of the 2020’s miss out on some of the authenticity of Sherpa culture and discovery of lesser-known routes that might have existed twenty or forty years ago. But they still get the big mountains, which are as special as ever, and they get support so committed and earnest that it can bring a tear to the eye.

INTO THE REAL MOUNTAINS [Days 3-5: Tok Tok to Milingo via Namche Bazar]

A hike towards Everest involves passing several points that feel like metaphysical barriers. For us, the first of these was a terrifyingly high and wind-blasted suspension bridge called Larja Dobhan. We had come up the main Dudhkoshi valley to its confluence with the Bhotekoshi, “River from Tibet,” eponymous with the legendary Bhotiya people that live across the high Himalayas. A hill rises straight from the confluence to an alpine bowl that contains Namche Bazar, economic capital of the Khumbu. The hill is so famously steep that we ate an 11am lunch before trying it, at a restaurant where Mallika entertained a Sherpa toddler into shrieking delight with a game of peek-a-boo.

To get onto the hill, the trail crosses the open-slatted bridge hundreds of feet above the river. Chastened by Kedar’s story about how a yak had knocked a Canadian hiker off the trail to her death on the rocks below, we strapped our hats to our packs, tried not to look down, and crossed. The wildly flapping prayer flags and view up the massive valley made it exhilarating.

A few tough hours later we made Namche, which has the hotel density of McLeod Ganj, India; the fancy sportswear stores and corresponding clientele of Telluride, Colorado; the stupa and genuine civic pride in Buddhist religion of Boudha, Kathmandu; and even Talkeetna, Alaska’s extreme outdoor sports hub vibe, with some potential for rowdiness. It boasts a real North Face store, a fake Walmart, and the well-advertised World’s Highest Live Music Bar, alongside normal Sherpa households and a military encampment.

Namche’s helipad must be Nepal’s busiest. At least 20 helicopters passed us on the day we hiked up to town, revealing the massive amounts of money in Khumbu’s tourist economy. A 15-minute ride from Everest Base Camp down to Namche might cost $500 (in a country where $1,000 is a reasonable annual income); but after spending $50,000 to summit Everest, most climbers call it a bargain. Of course, the real money is in rescue flights, when the helicopter company trekkers’ insurance $5,000 or more for a flight to Kathmandu. There are strong rumors that opportunistic trip leaders and clinics sometimes force slightly sick trekkers onto these flights. Still, the choppers unquestionably save lives and bring necessary goods into the region.

Any discussion of the Khumbu economy would be incomplete without mentioning porters. While mules, yaks, and choppers do some heavy lifting, local men still move the toughest loads over the trickiest, highest trails. There are basically two kinds of porters employed in the Khumbu. The first and smaller group are attached to trekking and climbing expeditions and move the tourist’s gear. This group’s jobs are difficult but not impossible, because the trekkers, climbers, and organizing companies look out for them to an extent.

The other, much larger group of porters has a truly impossible job. They work for hotels and other businesses in the mountains, hauling food and building materials uphill. Some of their loads are hard to believe. Examples we saw included 6 20-foot-long metal girders, 26 large empty water jugs, 4 tanks of cooking gas, 10 8×5 foot plywood boards, and tremendous sacks stuffed with gear of all kinds. No porter carried less than 100 pounds, and some were above 200.

At that weight, each second carrying the load causes substantial pain and the goal is to translate pain into cash by moving between breaks as fast as possible. The available cash is not much, and the need to buy food at altitude deeply erodes earnings. Kedar thought porters might make Rs 300 ($2.50) per kilo for a six-day carry from Namche to EBC, so hauling a massive 110-pound load could make you $120 but you would have to spend at least $60 on food. Still, portering is a reliable job that can seasonally bring in some cash for small-scale farmers and laborers, and there are organizations in the Khumbu trying to lend support and medical care. While every Khumbu tourist benefits from porters’ sweat and pain, seeing old men moving huge loads is a harsh reminder of global inequality.

We took an acclimatization day at Namche, hiking up in the morning to a stunning ten-second view of Lhotse peeking through thick clouds. The glimpse of the world’s fourth-highest mountain was a startling reminder of the giants that surrounded us, lurking out of sight. Cloud swept through in midday to blanket Namche, but cleared just in time for a fantastic sunset that shocked us by revealing 20,000-foot giants Kongde and Tamsherku hanging right above the town. We climbed back up the hill, giggling like kids, trying to soak in the reality that we had arrived in a landscape beyond imagining.

The fantastic display was mostly a tease, as we hiked through low clouds all the next day. Highlights included stunning blooms of pink and red rhododendron, some nice birding with a mixed flock on a forested hillside, intricate Buddhist artwork at Tengboche Monastery, and another sliver of clarity at sunset that revealed Tengboche set against Kongde’s impressive bulk. We stayed in an under-construction hotel that the owner had rushed to finish in time for the trekking season, only to get very little business as COVID shut off tourism. The obviously high level of investment and empty dining hall were reminders of the risks that the whole industry is facing.

PAST THE TREE LINE [Days 6-8: Milingo to Lobuche via Dingboche]

Another dawn in soupy cloud gave way to a wonderful day among increasingly huge mountains. You only get one chance to listen to your favorite song, or watch a great movie, for the first time. You have to drink in the moment fully. The feeling is the same with an awe-inspiring mountain. As we pushed up the valley, passing beautiful Mani walls and yak enclosures, we knew that the massive spire of rock and ice called Ama Dablam (“Mother’s necklace”) was just to our right, hidden only by shifting wisps of cloud. We bided our time, and suddenly its very summit was there, higher than seemed possible. As we walked past weathered rock chortens, prayer flags, and other beautiful items of high-mountain Buddhism, the clouds played with us and showed a bit of Ama at a time. Our moment finally arrived when both summits came into view, a stupefying sight that felt too good to be true. Mallika and Kedar walked up to a far-off chorten for a shot that captured our elation.

We passed 13,000 feet and a town called Pangboche, which is the last real Sherpa village inhabited year-round on the route. Above this it would only be tourist lodges and seasonal yak camps. The edge of town had an especially beautiful alleyway of Mani walls that faced directly onto the wall of Nuptse and Lhotse that hides Everest. The Nuptse-Lhotse wall is one of the highest mountain ridges in the world, and it looks like it, with gale-force winds blowing snow and mist like a comet off its side. We hiked on, headed straight towards the wall.

The trail continued onto a high plain, and the last few trees in the river valley faded into scrubby brush. Just at this crossing of another metaphysical barrier, three monks appeared across the plain, coming our way, spinning prayer staffs as they returned to their monastery from al alpine retreat. Kedar told us that the lack of trees to produce oxygen would make it harder to breathe going forward, and I thought about how such a different line of thinking than my own could lead to the same conclusion.

Dingboche, a former summer camp with lodges now built between many of the low stone walls that divide yak enclosures and potato fields, was our stop for the night. The clouds had pressed in during the afternoon but sunset gave us another magical show, with golden and yellow rays striking the stupendous mountain slopes as the weather cleared. Mountains this big always feel close, and it is hard to tell which is highest when the clear freezing air makes each one seem a stone’s throw away. Sunset gave us a visual answer, as Lhotse’s spiky summit and wind-driven slow plume hung onto the light longest. We performed some kora of the town stupa as the sun slid away. The eyes of Buddha, looking out with acceptance in every direction, underscored the harsh beauty of the place. As the cold drove us back into the lodge, the last hints of cloud vanished and the snow peaks stood like sentinels, their white slopes glowing in the purple dusk.

The morning brought our first perfect weather of the trip. It was another acclimatization day, so we walked packless past 15,000 feet on a ridge above the town. The mountain scenery was beyond description. The biggest, sharpest mountains we had ever seen totally encircled us, each with a different personality: the sharp mass of Lhotse, Island Peak like a small turtle, Baruntse and even Makalu showing their bulk from twenty miles away, Ama Dablam still the unrivalled crown jewel, Kangtega and Thamsherku presenting a spiky vertical wall, Kongde looming down the valley, and the Tabuche-Cholatse-Arakamtse-Lobuche peaks like the fangs of some otherworldly monster’s jaw. Each of these mountains is more than 6000m/19,700ft high. The ridge walk was hot, exposed, dehydrating, and so spectacular that we forgot about all of that. We just tried to burn the sight into our memory.

The hike to EBC bends the mind because it repeatedly brings you to a place that seems unbeatable, beyond human comprehension – and then asks you to go further. The next day we were up early and had a deeply enjoyable hike up a gentle ridge, working our way past each fang of the giant jaw we had seen a day earlier. It was unimaginable that we could keep going higher into this forbidding land, and yet we were.

This trip report would bog down unbearably if it discussed food anywhere near as much as we did on the trail. But that day’s lunch was special. We downed a genuine Swiss Rosti and the trip’s best Sherpa Stew. Lodge menus in the Khumbu are funny because they are surprisingly detailed, with lots of excellent options, but they are almost the exact same every time. The result is that hiking to EBC is like going to the same restaurant 16 days in a row. It is unclear whether the altitude and limited ingredients necessitate the sameness, or Nepali lodge owners just think they have collectively found the final solution to the tourist palette. Either way, we left that lunch spot with an extra bounce in our step.

We burned off the lunch fast, climbing a rocky pass past the remnants of a descending Everest expedition, yaks carrying North Face duffels and bearded climbers bringing up the rear. The top of the pass was deeply moving. Stone chortens decked with whipping prayer flags against the knife-like backdrop of Cholatse seemed to announce yet another passage into the deeper mountains.

The pass is also the site of memorials to many climbers who have died on Everest and the area’s other giant peaks. They are mostly stone chortens with plaques, and the sheer number of them tells a story of the human cost that counterweighs the fame and fortune won in the high abodes of rock and ice. Nepalese legend Babu Chiri Sherpa has a memorial here, along with brash American guide Scott Fischer, and more than a hundred others. There are some poignant inscriptions. Liu Xiangyang’s plaque reads “Like a comet blazing across the evening sky, gone too soon.” Dorjee Khatri Sherpa, Then Dorjee Sherpa, and Phur Tempa Sherpa have “Gone but never forgotten. We are watching your families for you. Your friends from the Mountains.”

The place put us in a pensive mood It must do so even more for the climbers, all of whom pass this point on their way to the summit, just as they pass corpses of climbers who died on the mountain whose bodies are too difficult to move. How is one supposed to feel, surrounded by memorials for so many who died too young, reminiscent of a battlefield? Were they just idiots who threw their lives away in an ultimately pointless quest? What about the ever-increasing numbers who continue to climb, with the two deadliest ever events occurring in 2014 and 2015? Everest is in fact “safe” by big-mountain standards, with a 6% death rate (ratio of deaths to successful summits). The terrifying Annapurna has a rate nearing 40%, with over 60 deaths for about 200 successful ascents. These rates are not secrets. Everyone who gets on the mountain knows exactly what game they are playing. In the end, Mallika put it best: we call soldiers heroes for dying in wars that are probably pointless, and so dismissing these climbers as fools is a double standard. We all want to live in a society where people can chase their personal destinies, whatever they are. As we worked through this tangle of emotion, another helicopter cheerily buzzed up to Base Camp.

THE VALLEY AT THE END OF THE WORLD [Day 9: Lobuche to Everest Base Camp]

After the pass and the memorials, we came into the high rock-filled valley of the Khumbu Glacier. Intimidating peaks loomed above everywhere, and no plants or rivers softened the scene. We pushed to a tiny collection of hotels called Lobuche for the night and watched the ridge of Nuptse, 2 miles long and 25,000 feet high, catch the dying sun.

We crawled like insects further up the valley the next morning. The trail passes through dynamic, jumbled rocks shoved up by the titanic glacier, and we were exposed and overheating in the harsh landscape above 16,000 feet. Mallika was also feeling nauseous. This altitude is genuinely challenging for almost everyone, and despite our careful pace and acclimatization we were feeling the effect of only having half the oxygen we breathe at sea level. Nevertheless, we made it to a tiny outpost called Gorak Shep, inhaled some food, and set off for the final leg to Everest Base Camp.

Feeling better without packs, we realized that we were nearing the end of the world. The valley leading to Everest terminates in a sheer snowy wall thousands of feet high, with massive peaks arranged along it like sentinels. It looks impassable, and because it forms the closed border between Nepal and China-controlled Tibet, it truly is. At the end of this valley, there are only two ways to go: back the way you came, or up the trail to the Everest summit through a scary mess of sharp ice and crevasses called the Khumbu Icefall. We felt a deep sense of privilege to be in one of the world’s extreme places.

Unexpectedly given the remoteness, the final stretch of trail to EBC was the most crowded of the trip. Porters and yak trains came by frequently bringing supplies up and down from the expedition headquarters, and sun-blasted guides and climbers funneled past for exercise. Eventually, the torturous rocky path brought us in sight of colorful flotsam and jetsam splayed for most of a mile on the mess of rocks below the snow wall at the valley’s head. The world’s highest tent city, Burning Man of the Khumbu, every gear advertiser’s wet dream, Base Camp for the most expensive, over-commercialized, and still most irresistible climb in the world.

Everest Base Camp is our species’ most bizarre testament to our ambition, willpower, and hubris. In this valley at the end of the world, each expedition has dozens of massive tents set up to let the climbers wait out the two to three months needed to climb the mountain in as much comfort as possible. We weren’t allowed to go into the camp itself (one issue with having a guide is that they make you follow rules), but could still see kitchen tents overflowing with equipment, dining hall tents the size of houses, shower and toilet tents, at least three helipads, and even the lounging climbers themselves. Kedar told us that expensive wine, vacuum-packed meats, imported chocolates and more were a staple of every expedition. If we can create all of this at 17,500 feet, what can we not do?

Commercialization on Everest is a topic at least 30 years old, but it simply keeps getting more extreme every year. The argument on one side is basically that the large number of wealthy but inexperienced mountaineers shouldn’t be on the mountain, since their slow pace and mistakes make climbing more dangerous for everyone and leads to supermarket-type lines above 27,000 feet. The other side says that no one has more of a right to the mountain than anyone else, that Everest climbing supports many jobs, and that modern technology and well-run expeditions make it reasonably safe. I highly recommend satirical “interviews” written by Mark Horrell lampooning both the purists and capitalists in the debate.

The growing climber numbers and climbing permit fees (now at least $11,000 per climber) show which side is winning. What seems clear, though, is that anyone who climbs Everest these days is in it for money or fame, rather than some abstract love of challenges. There are other mountains literally within sight of Everest that are also above 8000 meters, and are vastly cheaper, cleaner, less crowded, more technically challenging or in Cho Oyu’s case much easier if that’s your taste, and just less fueled by excessive businesspeople. But Everest is the highest one, and it will always turn the most heads if you drop its name in a bar.

Mallika experienced one more nasty side of the EBC zone in the form of subtle but structural racism. All of outdoor culture is still too much of a white man’s game, the overall extreme atmosphere of Everest climbing takes this to the next level. Nepali climbers are now the unquestioned best in the world at super-high altitude after summiting K2 in winter. Their clients, however, who pay these Sherpa guides the big bucks and regularly require them to risk their lives in rescue attempts, are mostly white guys. Mallika got weird looks from climbers and others on the trail, who clearly did not know how she fit in as a brown woman. She had been dealing with some level of challenge all trip, as COVID had no ensured there were no fellow woman trekkers around, and most people working in the Khumbu tourist scene are men. Our need to work with a male guide also exposed her to hurtful assumptions about her trekking experience and skills. Still, the EBC zone was when this racist, sexist underpinning of the entire system came out at its worst.  

That night, Mallika and I had some serious logistical work to do. Most lodge rooms in the Khumbu are just big enough to accommodate two single beds. At Gorak Shep, which is basically a lunar outpost with fast-diminishing drinking water that bubbles up in tiny pools and indoor space at a premium, hotels cram three miniscule beds into each room. We decided that the freezing night at 16,500 feet was too dangerous to sleep through alone, so we stacked one bed vertically behind the door and shoved the other two together. Surprisingly, the lodge owner never came up to check on the obvious sounds of remodeling. We slept soundly, knowing that it would be the most comfortable night of our lives at such altitude.

THE CRUX OF THE ADVENTURE [Day 10-11: Gorak Shep to Gokyo via Dzongla and Cho La Pass]

Kala Patthar, meaning “Black Rock,” might be the world’s most famous insignificant hill. It is a bump on the southern ridgeline of dazzling 23,400-foot Pumori Peak, with no more than 30 feet of prominence. It matters because it is right next to the Gorak Shep lodges, tops out at above 18,000 feet, and provides a clear view of the Everest summit, which is blocked from view at Base Camp.

Everest, in fact, is much harder to see than the world’s highest peak should be. Hidden from the south by Nuptse, it does not even have a traditional name in any Nepali language because no one could see it. Tibetans always recognized its supremacy, though, and rightly called it Chomolungma, “Goddess Mother of the World.” British surveying in the 1800’s (a wild story in itself) slowly proved that it was highest. The Brits first called it Peak B, then Peak XV, then named it after the guy leading the survey, George Everest. Not to be outdone by this orgy of naming, the Nepali government started calling it Sagarmatha, Nepali for “Goddess of the Sky,” in the 1960’s. No matter what you call it, the mountain is far higher than any other at 8848.86m, but it is not particularly visible or impressive from ground level anywhere in Nepal.

Kala Patthar was our first real chance to see the top of the world, but the weather ended up too cloudy. We still did the hike, and greatly benefited from COVID as we were all alone. Usually, dozens of hikers go up around dawn every day in trekking season. We crossed 18,000 feet in absolute silence as snow fell lightly and clouds rolled up the long glacial valley below us. The solitude gave a real sense of discovery, as large turquoise lakes above 17,000 feet appeared in a hanging valley, and the glacier’s great buckling formations showed themselves.

We beat a retreat in thickening snow down the brutal valley, eventually hitting green grass as snow turned to rain. Our route looped around a steep ridgeline, past scurrying Snowcocks which by a weird quirk of fate I had seen years before in Nevada, and brought us in sopping clothes and poor spirits to Dzongla after a long trail day. Kedar had brilliantly foreseen that all six lodges in the trekking settlement would be closed due to lack of business. He negotiated with a lodge owner to walk up from Dingboche and open a place up for the night just for us. We tossed ourselves into beds, totally spent.

A few hours later, the Himalayas picked us up with a characteristically spectacular sunset show. We had seen no peaks all day, arrived at the lodge immersed in soupy cloud, and had no idea that Dzongla had any view at all. We were so, so wrong. Cholatse popped out first, hanging directly above us, and then Ama Dablam stole the show. Like a mirage, the tumbling clouds parted to reveal snow slopes rising to a dagger-sharp point. The full face caught the afternoon sun while the roiling clouds stayed dark, making Ama seem like the supreme mountain of all existence. The whole trip was worth it for this single moment.

 Our task the next morning was the intimidating Cho La pass. Cho La is the easiest way between Everest’s Khumbu Glacier watershed and the valley of the Gokyo Lakes and Ngozumpa Glacier, which flow from Cho Oyu, the world’s sixth-highest peak. The word easy is wildly inappropriate, however, in the case of a slender 17,500-foot high gap between jagged peaks which requires scrambling on steep rock and crossing a glacier. We wanted to see the Gokyo lakes because they are extraordinarily beautiful, and provide a slightly less commercialized retreat to Namche than the main EBC trail. So we crossed our fingers for good weather, bought hard-boiled eggs to eat on the trail for a whopping two dollars each, and hit the trail by 5:30am.

By 2:30pm, we had regained a sense of terra firma and had a chance to process the insanity that had occurred over the previous nine hours. The first 30 minutes were supremely beautiful, winding up a sloping meadow with clear streams, electric-blue birds, and snow peaks for company. The meadow ended abruptly in a sheer wall, which we scrambled our way up hundreds of feet of loose talus to bypass. Above 16,000 feet with full packs, this was hard enough.

It got harder. Mixed rock and snow transitioned to knee-deep snow and then the glacier. Cho La’s glacier is safe for trekking due to predictable crevasse locations, but still means walking uphill through sometimes hip-deep snow. This time COVID made our road harder, since the trekking crowds generally pack down a trail which makes for easier walking. Instead, we had only a few sets of days-old footsteps to follow, and frequently postholed past our knees, draining energy quickly. Metal stakes pounded deep into the ice at regular intervals by the national park or local government were our saviors. After more than an hour on the glacier, blasted by reflected sunlight, we gained the rocky top of the pass and beheld the next row of awe-inspiring mountains.

The down-climb was pure white-knuckle action. A slippery mix of snow, rock and ice on the nearly sheer slope made footing difficult, and I fell repeatedly. On top of the energy drain from post-holing up the glacier, picking my pack and myself up from these tumbles was exhausting. Mallika was battling a headache while facing the same set of challenges, and her steady pace amazed me. Once again, solid trail-building saved the day as we had stout cables as handholds on the toughest parts. Slowly, slowly, we picked our way down past the snowline and into a rockfall zone below the talus slopes. Unable to take a break due to the high risk, we dug deep and pushed ourselves down into lower meadows. Finally, we dragged ourselves up a secondary ridge that nearly reached 17,000 feet, spent less than ten seconds congratulating ourselves for finishing the last real climb of the trip, and started down.

We were in mediocre shape, with low energy levels and continuing headache for Mallika, but hoped to be almost done for the day. The pass funneled us into a long, narrow gorge that spat us out at a collection of six lodges called Thagnak. In normal times, every lodge would be open and nearly full in mid-May. When we rolled up, the only people left in town were a woman closing up a restaurant who refused us a room, and a single lodge’s skeleton staff who told us they were all feeling sick and had no bedding available. Lacking sleeping bags, we knew we would freeze without blankets.

We were nine exhausting hours into the day and two hours across a gnarly glacier to the next lodges at Gokyo, but there was no choice but to press on. We bought some soup from the lodge staff, enjoyed a few sunny minutes before a light drizzle rolled in, and hiked towards the Ngozumpa Glacier.

Most trails in the Everest region are impressively well-built, but the way across the glacier is not a trail. Instead, it is a general route that changes with each year, each storm, and each buckle of the gargantuan ice-sheet. New meltwater lakes appear at unexpected points, hundred-ton masses of rock and ice collapse into themselves, and the solid ground at the glacial edge is constantly subject to disastrous landslides.

We walked onto the glacier in an increasing drizzle and immediately lost the barely visible path that previous groups had smoothed out across the rock. Once again, Kedar proved his skills, picking it up again within minutes. Even on the path, it was a mile of utter grind in what became a real rainstorm. At another time it would have been a beautiful walk. The melt-ponds were all kinds of surprising colors, from milky gray to mouthwash green, and the rare views of huge ice walls beneath the dirty rock were fascinating. Unfortunately, we were not in the mood. Through luck and Kedar’s careful watchfulness, no disasters happened. We completed a terrifyingly sketchy climb up a wet dirt slope on the glacier’s far side, and hiked through hills to Gokyo. The sight of a pristine blue lake abutted by cozy lodges gave us a victorious feeling, and I had tremendous respect for Mallika, who had pushed through multiple physical issues in the highest and toughest day of hiking in our lives.

Sadly, the feeling of victory did not last long. We used our final spurt of energy to walk through town to a lodge that we thought would be open. We had even confirmed this just three days before with management. In the age of COVID, though, nothing is certain, and our long-awaited lodge was just as closed as everything else in town.

We are back at the point where this story started. Dazed, confused, hungry, cold, wet, finally understanding the folly of our confidence to travel to the Khumbu despite lockdowns.

Then, as if delivered by the hand of God, there was the puff of smoke, and the kind Sherpa lady, and warm tea, and sleep.

COMING DOWN, WITH A VIEW [Days 12-14: Gokyo to Tok Tok via Dole and Namche]

Any mountain endeavor is bound to incur days lost to bad weather. After traversing Cho La pass and Ngozumpa Glacier, we spent a day mostly sitting inside, watching soggy snow coat the Gokyo Lake, happy just to have a roof over our heads. A quick hike up to the next pristine lake in the watershed provided a brief diversion.

The following morning provided a quick weather window that I jumped all over, hiking up 2,000 feet by 7am to drink in the famous view from Gokyo Ri, a hill next to the lake. In classic Khumbu fashion, this relatively insignificant rise in the landscape still reaches above 17,500 feet and reveals four of the world’s six highest mountains: Cho Oyu, Everest, Lhotse, and Makalu, along with countless others. We had a 15-minute window of absolute clarity, which was enough to understand that this place is more special than any altitude statistics can describe. It may simply be the best view in the world. The Gokyo lakes glistened in absolute calm below; prayer flags and a golden Buddha inside a rock chorten brought the spirituality; Everest finally laid its claim to dominance; unknown lakes inspired future adventure; and the serene bulk of Cho Oyu added stability to the scene.

Nor did the rest of the day disappoint. Our route took us down the alpine valley, passing two more lakes and coming back into view of Thamsherku’s immense wall. After Cho La, the smooth descent felt effortless, and we floated past raging glacial torrents as mists danced through the snow peaks above. Small brushy plants started appearing, then solid bushes, and finally the first real trees we had seen in six days. The sun was out, the down jackets packed away, and the atmosphere tropical.

The Gokyo valley has escaped some of the main EBC trail’s aggressive commercialization. We passed through yak-herding villages with emerald-green fields separated by low rock walls and guarded by huge Main stones. Isolated homesteads dotted the neighboring slopes and occupied precarious ledges of flat ground in the narrow river valley. Viewed from afar, the scene seemed to reveal the Khumbu’s disappearing rural charms.

The one disruption to this pleasant walk was our only real guide-trekker flare-up of the trip. Mallika made an offhand comment that we were taking longer than the expected 2.5 hours to reach our lunch spot, Macchermo village. Kedar immediately started yelling that any delay was our fault because we were taking photos and had even had to backtrack slightly due to a dropped camera case. The situation defused slightly but, as I was hiking next to Kedar some time later, he launched into a defense of his honesty and offered to call the company office right then so they could vouch for him. He also vaguely threatened to end the trip right away. We talked, managed to communicate that there was no real anger on either side, and ultimately put it to bed. I guess that he felt threatened and his professional competence called into question. The intensity of that feeling makes sense because guides rely heavily on happy clients leaving tips and positive online reviews. Still, it was surprising that Kedar felt that way in that moment, because we had been discussing times and distances in the same way all trip. Chalk it up to an interesting interaction across culture, language, and the always-delicate guide-client relationship reaching higher stakes in the big-money context of the Khumbu. When we got to Macchermo for lunch, we looked at the watch and saw that the walk had taken exactly 2.5 hours.

We made it to our planned lodge in Dole, another charming yak town, but learned that the lodge owner had taken a casual twelve-hour round-trip walk to Namche to buy vegetables. Searching through town, we got lucky again when a Sherpa woman happened to be at her empty lodge and let us in as the sole customers. We accessed our room via an alley dominated by a massive but gentle Jopyo (yak-cow hybrid), whose collected dung fired the stove that kept us warm that night.

The morning was crystal clear, and the scale of Thamsherku and Kangtega down the valley was astonishing. We gradually wrapped around a ridge and then up a steep pass back into the familiar Dudhkoshi valley. Mong, the tiny village nestled at the top of the pass, provided yet another unimaginably beautiful vista. A perfectly positioned stupa gazed out towards the reappearing figure of Ama Dablam, which from this angle looks like an idealized dream of what a jaw-dropping mountain should be, rather than anything that can actually exist on this Earth. Gazing over this slpendor, enjoying the warm sun, entertained by rosy-cheeked toddlers playing on their rooftops, Mallika and I knew that it was good to be alive.

As we flew down towards Namche, the weather held miraculously clear and we finally saw the mountain that this trip was supposed to be about. Lhotse’s spiky peak dominated the valley head twenty miles away. As we progressed across the ridge, something even higher came into view and I actually thought it was Nuptse hitting us with some tricky perspective. With each step, though, it became more obvious that this peak was tremendously high, jutting past the limit of what seems possible even in this land of giants. It was Everest, Chomolunga, Sagarmatha. We were looking at the highest point on the surface of the planet.

You need to go very far away from big mountains to appreciate their immensity. With enough distance, all intervening ridges and peaks drop into insignificance, but the giants just stay the same size. That is how it was for us with Everest. We walked for hours in its shadow, taking hundreds of pictures, passing the beautiful memorial stupa for legendary first summiter Tenzing Norgay, enraptured by Ama Dablam’s beauty and waterfalls on the face of Thamsherku. As each new beauty slid by, Everest stayed right there, seeming to only reach higher above the Nuptse ridge and assert greater dominance over all it surveyed. We were extremely lucky because such clear weather is rare so close to monsoon. After two weeks near the sky goddess, she had finally decided to show herself as a parting gift.

Namche passed in a flash, a business town now prematurely closed for the season, although we did manage a few souvenirs from proprietors who were in their shops doing “internal work.” We wanted to reach the low river valley that night and pushed ourselves hard downhill, catching one final view of Everest’s summit between trees on a ridgeline famous for its role in a battle between Tibetan and Gurkha armies years ago. The amazing bridge ushered us out of the realm of the giants, prayer flags flapping their adieu, and we slogged two more hours in the dusk to Tok Tok. It turned out to be our longest day on the trail: 4,500ft/1,400m of total descent over 15 miles and 40,000 steps. We were exhausted, and I had picked up a sunburn and a tweaked quad; but the low-valley comforts of free phone charging and hot showers were more than enough of a reward.

FINALE AND REFLECTION [Days 15-16: Tok Tok to Kathmandu via Lukla Airport]

I have always found the last day on the trail bittersweet. There is a sense of accomplishment, relief to get rid of the heavy pack, and excitement to share tales of the adventure with others. On the other hand, outdoor adventures bring an addicting sense of progress, of solving concrete problems every day. The prospect of returning to normal life can feel like a wall looming ahead. This bittersweet feeling intensifies on longer and more immersive trips, and we had just spent two full weeks in another world.

The walk down the Dudhkoshi to Lukla was full of swirling emotion. Each beautiful Mani wall and prayer wheel we passed seemed significant. Even mule jams felt amusing. The green valley soared around us, revealing Khumbila, a mountain revered as a God of the Khumbu, as our final peak of the trip.  The sun baked us as we walked. A little girl showed off her tiny puppy, and porters loaded with ramen packets trundled by.

Every hotel and restaurant in the thickly developed valley was shuttered, and there were no officials at the permit checking office. Only a few groups of climbing guides with helmets bobbing on their packs joined us on the trail. We were leaving the Khumbu just as the last vestiges of hope in the season’s tourism flickered away.

The day happened to be a local Buddhist festival. Men put up huge strands of prayer flags while monks chanted and played music, all blaring horns and impressive percussion, within monastery walls. One well-appointed monastery had a large photo of its old Lama and his new incarnation, a four-year-old boy from further down in the Solu hills. The old man and the little boy looked regal and happy, and we speculated with deep fascination about how the boy was chosen, what his childhood would be like, and how the aged Lama felt to hold a reincarnation of himself in his arms.

Finally we reached Lukla and set down our packs for the last time. We had our first tastes in two weeks of both meat and alcohol, got harassed by local street dogs so aggressively that we had to hit them with rocks, and had some momos on the generosity of Kedar’s dime. Lukla was another reminder of the economic hardship of disrupted tourism, but many townspeople seemed to be enjoying the chance to take back their city from rowdy foreigners. The bars on the main street were abandoned, but the street itself was full of cricket and soccer and gossip and life.

 Two more hard tasks remained: the flight back to Kathmandu, and the determination of Kedar’s tip. Lukla is a ridiculous airstrip. Apparently, Everest summiter Edmund Hillary built it in the 1950’s to bring construction materials into the region for hospitals and schools, but failed to convince local farmers to sell him prime flat land. He forged ahead and set up a short, down-sloping airstrip ending in a cliff. An endless supply of 14-seat planes and choppers now ply this famously dangerous airport every day in the high season, and somehow avoid disaster. There are many stories of bad weather stranding tourists in Lukla for weeks, but our flight showed up on time. Then it picked up a bunch of cargo instead of us, left, came back, did it again, and finally opened its doors to us hapless passengers. The tiny plane’s bouncing around in every breeze, plus the tightly packed bodies and stifling facemasks, had us quickly reaching for the “sanitary bags.” The impoverished central hills of Nepal slid away below us, with no Everests of their own to attract tourists, and we touched down to the locked-down city.

Half an hour later, we said goodbye and thank you to Kedar on a dusty street in the terrific Boudha neighborhood where we had stashed the articles of our normal lives. How can you adequately thank someone who has been dutifully by your side for 16 days, has always tried hard to support you, and has genuinely done a great job? The customary answer is a healthy tip, but since there is secrecy by design about the right amount, deciding this is an emotional wrangle. We wanted to honor Kedar’s hard work, but avoid feeing the cycle where trekking company owners can pay their guides unfairly low salaries by cajoling tourists into giving huge tips. We handed over what we thought was right, grabbed our packs, and headed into Boudha’s alleys.

A final tabulation shows that we walked about 115 miles, cumulatively ascended over 13,000 feet, topped out at 18,000 feet in altitude, saw four of the world’s six highest peaks, ate at least ten plates of Dal Bhat and 15 bowls of Rara noddle soup, took over 1,000 pictures, and came out pretty much intact. Most impressively, Mallika jumped straight into a full workday on the same morning we got back to Kathmandu.

That evening we climbed to our rooftop for a glorious sunset, joined on other roofs by shouting kids and Tibetan grandmothers and dignified monks, all of us staring together toward the mountains. The prayer flags of Boudha flapped in a breeze coming straight down from the high abodes of snow. Mallika and I agreed that seeing the top of the world had not lessened the pull of the high peaks. The experience had just thrown more gas on our fire. We would be back.**********