Everest Photos

Being that I am still here in Kathmandu where the internet moves at a snails pace I am not going to bother trying to type up a full diary of the past twenty five or more days. Instead here are a few photos of the trek to Everest Base Camp. Im sure I'll be adding more in the days to come along with more stories to accompany them but in the meantime this will have to do.
(click on the photos to enlarge them)

Here we have the entrance to a monastery in the village of Tengboche. This is already about eight or nine days into our trek. We took a bus from Kathmandu to a town called Jiri. The next morning we started hiking. Six days later we passed Lukla which is where most people fly into to start their trek. A couple of days after that we hiked up here to Tengboche. This is where Casey also exploded from the suspected altitude sickness that turned out to be food poisoning. He was feeling like shit for a while and had vomitted outside once or twice. He came back in to the dining area of our guest house where some helpful souls were trying to lend him a hand when he suddenly lurched forward and sprayed whatever liquid he had left in his stomach onto the floor of the dining room. Then repeated this action a few times into a large metal pot which was procured rather hastily by the incredibly nice woman who ran the place. At this point we decided to take Casey back down the mountain a few hundred meters thinking it was altitude sickness.

I came back up to Tengboche the next morning to meet up with Ali and let him know what was going on. This was supposed to be an acclimatization day a anyway so we were going to hang out in the village and let our bodies adust to the altitude. We decided to take a walk up a little side mountain since we had nothing better to do. It was only a few hundred meters up this bump on the ascending ridgeline but the views were quite nice and it afforded us the oppurtunity to take some great photos my mom is just going to hate. In the photo here we have Ali taking in the view from a perch that looks a little more precarious than it is.

I believe this photo was taken shortly after leaving Dughla and heading up towards Base Camp. The elevation is a bit higher and the views getting more dramatic. This is the area where we had started to reach the terminal morraines of glaciers; the area where glaciers had retreated leaving behind massive piles of stones scraped from the mountains above. I think this was also just below or just above an area of numerous head high square stone memorials built for climbers who have died on the mountains above. They are a sobering reminder of what may come if you are heading up for a summit attempt and are unprepared or just unlucky in many cases.

This next photo is from the area of Everest Base Camp itself. Coming down from high above between Mount Everest and an adjacent mountain called Nuptse is the massive Khumbu glacier. The most common route up Everest first climbs up through the slowly moving iceflow from basecamp to camp one. It's the very beginning but also the most dangerous part of the climb. Being up close you can really appreciate why. I'm on the glacier in the flat section. To my left behind me (outside of the photo) the ice climbs steeply up and much more ragged than where I am standing.

From Everest Base Camp the views are amazing, surrounded on all sides by some of the tallest mountains in the world, but you do not get a view of the summit of Everest. To do that you have to backtrack a little ways to the village of Gorak Shep. We spent the night there at 5,185 meters (17,011 feet) and the next morning climbed up a small mountain called Kala Patthar. From here you get the best view of Everest you can possibly get without doing some technical climbing up one of the nearby peaks or Everest itself. Everest is still just a big piece of stone rising up from between some other peaks. It's impressive but some of the mountains you are standing closer too seem to dominate the skyline due to the perspective. Off camera to the right would be Nuptse and slightly to the right of me in the background you can see the Khumbu Glacier (or Khumbu Icefall) coming down from between the mountains.

Just below the summit of Kala Patthar there is a spire of stone that demanded I scrambled up to the top to pose for some photos. It was quite windy and getting windier by the minute so my Karate Kid pose never worked out but I did get a few good shots. I wish I knew the names off all the mountains in the background but we didn't hang around up there long enough to find out. I do know that at the base of the valley below me you can see the morraine fields of a few glaciers including one or two beautiful ones creeping their way down from Pumori which is off camera to the right and directly behind and above me in the following photo.

Ahhh the summit of Kala Patthar. It was a festive but brutally cold place. When Ali and I got there it was crawling with other trekkers and the wind was howling at a good 40 mph or more the entire time. It had to be below freezing out. As you can tell I am cold. Ali had less clothing on than I had and I think about five seconds after snapping this photo he literally ran down the mountain. When he realized he couldn't feel his hand or his face he decided it was time to go. I found him at the base of the mountain lying in the sand in a warm sunny spot basking like a lizard.