The plan was to get a slightly earlier start. Instead of rolling at 8:30 we were going to start hiking at 8:00.
This didn’t happen.
Renee had a rough night. She had a severe splitting headache. She was nauseated. She was a mess. It was an easy decision to evacuate her by helicopter. Shawn, of course, went with her. She told me that she had miscalculated her AMS score the day before and she shouldn’t have ascended yesterday. Not good. We all said good bye. It was great to hear that instead of leaving Nepal, they planned on waiting for the rest of the crew in Kathmandu. So we would see them again. We wanted to see them off, but when we were ready to go the helicopter was still refueling in Lukla. Jim called it, we couldn’t wait and we needed to start hiking.
The Lobuche Helipad
It was a cold night and lots of people had frozen water bottles and frozen Camelbacks. People showed ingenuity in working around this:
- Lots of water bottles strapped to packs that day. If you are going to use a CamelBack, always have a Nalgene or two in reserve if it springs a leak or freezes.
- Future experiment: How much vodka would you need to add to the CamelBack to lower the freezing temp to around zero?
- Good suggestion from Kelly: after taking a drink from your CamelBack, blow back into it in order to blow the water back into the reservoir and so it doesn’t remain in the tubing where it is prone to freezing.
The hike continued the climb on the lateral moraine of the Kumbu glacier. It was hard hiking the loose talus of the moraine. We had frequent climbs, some of them prolonged, and we were hiking from 15,500 to 17,000 feet so the air was pretty thin.
We had some fluffy white clouds chasing us up the mountain all day.
As we climbed higher and higher we finally saw the Kumbu glacier. It isn’t a clean glacier like you see in Alaskan glaciers. The Kumbu Glacier, at least below Gorek Shep, is covered with gravel. The glacier blends right into the surrounding terrain of loose talus and skree. However, periodically the disguise would fail and you could see the ice poke through the gravel and reveal the deception. We were hiking next to a massive slow flowing river of ice covered by a thin veneer of stone.
Besides the domesticated mammals that were common on the lower mountain we saw very little animal life in the Himalayas. Today was an exception as we ran into a family (flock) of Himalayan Snow Cocks.
We hiked a solid four hours and rolled into Gorek Shep at around 12:30. The weather started deteriorating toward the end of the hike and while we were eating lunch it started to snow. During lunch we were informed that the trip to basecamp was a six-hour round trip, and that even if the weather was good we wouldn’t be able to make the trip to EBC today. So the new plan was to wake up early and go to EBC on fresh legs tomorrow. Not doing EBC today meant that Kalapatthar was off the table. No views of Everest for us.
Gorek Shep in all of its glory (with helicopter)
The hot shower? Fake news.
loading the stove with dried yak dung. The tea houses would only have a stove going in the evening. Since we were going to be there during the day, we had to pay them a few hundred rupees to light the stove early.
Note that inside, around a stove everyone has their down and hats on. It was cold.
What was frustrating to me was that even if we had hit our original depart time of 8 AM we would have arrived at Gorek Shep at noon, add an hour for lunch and then 6 hours for round tripping it to basecamp and back and it becomes clear that it would not have been enough time to make it without headlamps. For this plan of Lobuche to EBC and then back to Gorek Shep for dinner and sleep to work we needed to start at dawn (6 AM). By starting at 8 AM, which got pushed to 8:30, Kalapatthar was never going to happen.
So the rest of the day was rest. Just chill in the highest teahouse in the world. And chill we did. It was really cold. Ben and I explored outside a bit as the weather improved in the afternoon. We found the famous “This way to Everest Basecamp” sign.
We came inside, had some popcorn. Then I went to our room to nap before dinner. The morning had been hard and just resting at 17,000 feet was exhausting. That’s when I found out our room was not exactly “in”the teahouse, but rather in an annex just outside the teahouse. Now I had gotten used to shared bathrooms down the hall from my room, but now using the bathroom meant going outside and walking to the main teahouse. Not cool, especially as nighttime temps were falling below zero.
Gorek Shep feels like it is on the edge of the world. No WiFi. No cell service. Even our GPS stopped broadcasting. They did not offer any electricity for charging phones. Gorek Shep is the world’s highest teahouse and felt like the end of civilization.
Tomorrow we have a hike, from Gorek Shep up to EBC and then down to Pheriche, a distance we spent two days hiking up. Push day.