Kathmandu to Everest Base Camp, Part III: To Everest

Tengboche, Debuche, Pengboche, Dingboche, Lobuche. The days and villages began to blur together in a single image of short stone walls, dusty pastures, alpine scrub, lodge kitchens, squat toilets, and frigid Himalaya mornings. Walking out at dawn to wash my face and teeth by the village stream, sitting back on my haunches as the icy water rises steaming off my face and neck and I breathe hard into the thin, frigid air.

And of course, always, there was the monsoon fog. Throughout each day it perched shifty and billowing with ominous intent on the low valley walls, whitewashing the sky and hiding the Himalayan giants which I had come to admire. Until night fell. Then, with the sun retiring in a quick sigh beyond the western massifs, the fog crept down into the valley like some animate mass. Filling dale and cranny with its vaporous accretion. Doors and curtains were drawn against it. Furnaces lit.

Once -- in Pengboche -- sunrays won out against the fog over the better part of an afternoon, casting the body hydrous flooding into the Northern valley and sinking it below my horizon. For nearly half an hour, the skies were as clear as the monsoon would allow. I clambered up the highest hill near me and drained my camera batteries.

Other than that, I waited.

Before coming to the Himalaya I -- like most others, I imagine -- considered the triumph of a high peak such as Everest to be a feat of physical strength and stamina. It is, of course, but that's only a small part of the story.

Actually, the mountaineer is more monk than boxer. His principal weapons are not an iron body and nimble feet so much as patience and observation.

To acclimatize properly at the altitude of Everest Base Camp can take months -- months -- of waiting and hiking in endless circles. To someone who has paid tens of thousands of dollars and waited years for this opportunity, this time must seem interminable. But attention must be paid. He must observe every nuance and idiosyncracy of his body to know when he is ready. And when the chosen day arrives, he must observe the mountains, the sky, the air, the clouds. If he senses the slightest foreboding of the weather, he must abort; must return to waiting.

These are tribulations of the will, not of the body.

In the early days of my trek, the days were long, left me weary, and I prayed for shorter days. But in the latter days, my hikes were steep and unbearably short. An ascent of 300 meters might take only 2 hours, yet at 4400 meters above sea level meet the prescribed rate of ascent for a day. I would have no choice but to stop. I craved 6 and 7 hour days. Every hour on the trail meant one less hour whittled away in a lodge.

Acclimatization days were the worst. Twenty-four hours with absolutely nothing to do besides perhaps a short acclimatization hike and a few hours staring at an endless ashen sky. This was boredom at its most sublime. I finished half of War and Peace in a week, and filled half my journal in the same time. I ordered endless breakfasts of boiled eggs and endless dinners of steamed rice and soupy lentils. I stared at typographical maps and prayed for clear skies. I learned to wipe with my hand and a pail of water, which was a source of endless amusement.

About noon on the 7th I reached the village of Lobuche, and passed the 5000 meter mark. My ascent of Kala Patthar was near.

I waited.

Yet permit me an excursis. A tale of bravery and yearning, a tale repeated a hundred-thousand times in the high mountains.

The tale is this: the boy, the girl, the woman, the man fancies himself as intrepid as his youth and dedication. The path is shorne well, but civilization is far. Relics of heroism surround him, their names are whispered in the night: Tenzing, Hillary, Everest, Annapurna.

And nothing can stop his climb. Surrounded by giants, does he not grow taller? A heaviness descends upon him, a fatigue. But pain is his due --! What is his mission if not to overcome --?

He climbs on. The pain grows, but he will not be turned by forces which turn lesser men --! He will triumph!

But he won't triumph. He has Acute Mountain Sickness, not a sore knee. And altitude always wins. You can not push your way through it like you can a flesh wound or fatigue. You may push, but it will kill you.

Trekkers die every year from AMS. This

AMS-afflicted at Everest Base Camp
The most unspectacular place on Earth. You can tell how thrilled I am because I can barely keep my head up.

makes about as much sense as drowning in a bucket. The tortoise always wins in the mountain. The hare not only loses, he wakes up from his nap puking out his fine supper of carrots, slips into a coma from capillary pressure, and eventually drowns in his own pulmonary fluid.

Be a tortoise.

Lobuche itself was like an amateur hospital ward. Trekkers sat around moaning from headache, coughing, and dispensing conflicting and outrageous medical opinions regarding AMS. Many would descend the next day, or the next, and not have the dedication to return.

My acclimatization was definitely of the tortoise school, and so the next day I ascended to 5160 meters, to a collection of lodges known as Gorak Shep. I stowed my rucksack here and egan to ascend still higher. My destination? Base camp for expeditions climbing mount Everest.

This particular climax, once climaxed, was as climaxes generally are. Which is to say, anticlimactic.

The monsoon was growing in strength and the camp itself was totally deserted. The only signs of its former presence were limpid prayer flags, rusted food cans, ubiquitous yak dung, and the faint smell of urine hovering around wads of pink Chinese toilet paper.

By contrast, the Khumbu glacier -- rising out of the jumble of rock shards and boulders on the camp's eastern flank -- was a terrestrial relic of the most austere and forbidden beauty. Shanks and hollows rose and plunged unbidden from its endlessly smooth iceform. The sky reflected cornflower in the pockets of these crystalline undulations, and a razor stream gurgled and flouresced in the flat light.

The water was pure, I approached and drank of it. The liquid passed icy into my gullet, the coldness spreading across my breast as I filled my canteen. My hand numb and red with life where the water caressed it.

But my altitude was 5360 meters. The approach trail still higher. Too high. AMS crept in and soon had its iron grip around my skull. I gasped and stumbled. Two-hours' strenuous hike stood between me and Gorak Shep. My legs swelled with lactic acid, my legs burned for Oxygen. I supposed I would die. Or rather felt of it so. When I finally arrived at my lodge I had lost all sense of space and could only stare at my arrhythmically plodding feet. The rain slaked off my jacket and misted my sunglasses. I ate, rehydrated, and went to sleep.

3:30 AM my alarm sounded, and I set out to climb Kala Patthar. Two hours and 400 meters of ascent through fresh snow separated me from the summit. When I arrived the fog was so heavy on the mountain I could not see twenty meters in any direction. The two groups that had summitted ahead of me (awaking at what ungodly hour I can not say) gave up immediately and headed down. I was obdurate.

I could feel already the metronomic thwunk-thwunk-thwunk of an AMS headache crescending with the pressure in my temples. But I knew that if my symptoms turned severe, it was a quick 400-meter descent. Only, to go down now would be my chance at sighting Everest lost for the day, possibly forever.

The summit was my own. The temperature just below freezing. Fog languished rank and torpid on the hillside. Whisps of shadow and dawn sashayed insolently through the mist. The sun began to rise.

As these adolescent rays of light lay into the far mountain slopes, explosions rang out like pistol shots. Following these were great long ponderous peals like thunder as fresh snow burst into free-fall pounded the unwitting icesheets a kilometer or more below. Again and again, thrice a minute, the avalanches punctured the stillness of morning. The crack of a whip, followed by the roar of a breaking wave.

In contrast to the symphonic industry of the invisible mountainside, my body grew weary. No breakfast, no coffee, and several hours of daybreak climbing. I cleared from a rocky outcropping the upholstery of snow which had gathered there, sat, and lay back. Fatigue settled on me as gently as the newly-falling snowflakes which began to salt my drooping eyelashes.

"Wait!"

This was a bad idea. Yes, of course it was.

My symptoms of AMS were growing on me. This was like falling asleep after head trauma. I might slip into a coma and never waken. Everest forever beyond the horizon of my consciousness. This was the insidious onset of death by AMS.

"No..." my exhaustion cooed.

"No need to worry. Just rest your head."

And I did. I zipped up my yak-wool jacket, snuggled against my daypack, and fell fast asleep.

Exactly 90 minutes later I awoke, with the sun's strengthening light scalding a peeling quadrant of my forehead. I quickly covered my unprotected skin and stood. The sun was beginning to scatter the clouds --! And I felt great!

I left all my gear behind me save my camera and scrambled up the slippery boulderfield to the true summit. The sheer drop to certain death within inches of my either side did not interest me near so much as the expanding patch of blue on the northeastern horizon.

Within an hour I had it, marred only by the most nebulous everpresence of cloudlings: the most awesome vista of the Khumbu Himal.

To the north, directly above me, imposed Pumori, slipping by and above blackrock shelf from the very peak on which I stood. Southward, from whence I had come, reared the summits of Thamserku, Kontega, and the striking visage of Ama Dablam.

And between them? Between them lay the towering massif of Nuptse, so close I could nigh touch its embankment. And peering over Nuptse's shoulder was the summit of Mount Everest. Sagarmatha. Chomolungma. At 8850 meters, I was looking at the highest place on Earth.


I descended.

In four consecutive 7-hour days of relentless trudging, I dropped an additional 3000 meters, back to Lukla. The monsoon had rendered the valley in such a resplendant verdancy that it was shocking both to the eye accustomed to the barren alpine scurb as well as to the lung equipped for its air. Each breath was thick and heavy, like breathing Oxygen soup.

I forded a river and bemoaned my wet shoes for days. In the perpetual damp, nothing dried. I took pictures of hillside flowers, searched desperately for meat, found no meat to be had, and at eight one foggy morning flew back into the anarchy of Kathmandu.

The taxis honked, the rickshaws whistled, the dogs barked, the same whispered offers for hashish carried out the same dark alleys, and the rain dropped.

All was as it was and as it would be.

I went to sleep in a hotel, rented a mountain bike, and set out into the Kathmandu valley. Two days hence I returned. I flew to Thailand.

---

---