Everest 3

That's me up there working my way up to Everest Base camp. The glacier to the right in the flats is the Khumbu Glacier. Basecamp would be in the flat rocky area just next to the glacier at the base of the mountain in the center of the photo. The tricky thing is that since it's all just a pile of rocks it's hard to get any real perspective. From where I am to the base camp area is about an hour walk at a rather brisk pace. The larger rocks you see in the "flat" area are the size of 2 story houses. There is a large crashed helicopter at the edge of the glacier that is in the photo but too small to be seen since it's so far away. Those close mountains stand around 1500 meters (almot 5,000 feet) above the base camp area.

Here is that helicopter that crashed at everest base camp. I believe this big russian MI-17 helo crashed here in 2005. It's been beat up worse since it's been lying there and Ali and I spent some rest time throwing rocks at the empty shell. The glacial ground and backdrop still don't give you a good sense of scale here. The MI-17 helo can have seats for up to 24 passengers in the back and the length of the fuselage from tail to front windows is just over 60 feet.

Some of the yaks up in the Himalayas were pretty cool looking creatures. Many had been trimmed of some of their wool to make blankets, scarves etc but many more were in their full glory such as this majestic guy up at Gorak Shep posing with Nuptse and Everest mountains in the background. The yaks were far less excited about me than I was about the yaks.



For example, here I am on a small frozen lake sliding around like a jackass taunting a yak for no good reaason. The yak just looked at me strangely and walked away disgusted.
One time I tried to get Ali to jump on the back of a sleeping yak and see if he could ride it. My argument was that he may never come here again and be in the vicinity of an unsuspecting sleeping yak. It was an oppurtunity he may only get once in his lifetime. He should grab the bull by the horns as they say and climb right on that guy! His argument was that he'd prefer not to get gored by a yak deep in the Himalayas at such a young age. We called it a stalemate and kept hiking.





This is one of the looms they used up there to make the handknit scarves and shawls from yak wool. Similar looms are used for making some basic carpets as well as other things I am sure. In some areas you would pass a little old lady working on a scarf with a rack of finished products for sale nearby. It's all quite old school. It was actually quite funny sometimes to see the items for sale on the side of the trail. The last thing I need to buy when I am a seven days walk from the nearest road is a six in tall bronze statue of Buddha. Perhaps I am wrong but it's just one mans opinion.







Below is a typical small teahouse with yet another yak wandering about. These are the types of places we would stop to get lunch now and then on the treks. Perhaps just some hot tea. One place like this we had somosas for only 5 rupees each which is equivalent to about 3 or 4 cents a piece!

More Everest Photos

Here's another series of photos from the Everest Trek. These are still all courtesy of Ali. I won't have mine till I get back to the states and save up enough money to develop around 14 rolls of film totalling around 450 prints.

The photo to the right is of the illustrious Ali himself. This was the day we got snowed on coming back down from Everest towards Jiri. We had gone over the 3500 meter Lamjura Pass less than an hour before this photo was taken. The smaller building in the background is where we stopped for lunch and to dry off a little.

This little dude was in the building that I just mentioned above. We first saw this guy on the way up to Everest and he was incredible. He was hanging around outside in the cold for a couple of hours totally by himself just having a great time while his mom made us lunch. He's maybe bang a rock on the ground for 45 minutes or make funny noises for example. Lunch is cooked on that wood fired stove the little dude is sitting next too. Most of our dinners on the treks were cooked on stoves just like that one in kitchens just like that one.

These two girls came out to look at the wierd tourists that walk in the mountains for no good reason at all so Casey gave them each a candy and as you can see they were terribly excited. Well, it's a little hard to discern from their faces but generally speaking the kids are excited about free candies even if their expressions are still sometimes that of horror or confusion.











In the area between Namche Bazaar and Gorak Shep we passed many amazing homes. It's well above treeline so they are nearly entirely built of stone. Stone walls, stone roofs, stone everything except for doors and windows. The firewood is carried up from as much as a few days walk away. One day on the hike down we passed at least thirty to forty people with huge bundles of firewood being hauled up the mountain on their backs.


Here's one of the many bridges we crossed on the Everest Trek as well as the Annapurna Trek. The old valleys have been dug deep and tight by the fast flowing rivers fed by snow and galciers melting high above. The bridges save a lot of time and effort but at times can be a bit sketchy. Most of them are newer steel bridges but some are still wooden planks for the base as you see in this one. The horizontal sections of wood are usually patches...

X-Mas in Kathmandu

Still just hanging out in Kathmandu and even here where only some of the tourists are of the christian or related faiths it's hard to escape the pull of Christmas. I'm staying at a Buddhist Meditation Center and even here the monks gave us all free chocolate cake on Christmas eve and there were candy bars stuck to our doors with a note saying "Happy Christmas". It's quite funny at times.
I spent christmas eve dealing with a bit of a gastrointestinal disorder that had me on the toilet far more often than I cared for and I even broke my 13 year long run of not vomiting. The last time I threw up was I think 1993. Fastforward to Nepal, 2006 and halfway through watching a bootleg DVD copy of the movie "The Departed" in the buddhist meditation room here at our hotel I got up to use the bathroom and while I was there I had this growing suspicion, "I think I might actually throw up" which shortly after changed to "I totally am going to throw up" and throw up I did. It was not as bad as I remembered but I would be more than happy to go another 13 years without another episode like that.
Today, being Christmas, has been a bit better. No vomiting and things are feeling a bit more settled internally. I might even have an actual meal for dinner tonight instead of the few pringles and coconut biscuits I've eaten since lunch yesterday. In the christmas spirit I did get out to do a little gift shopping for the friends and family back home but mostly just hung around the hotel area reading.

Two days ago on the 23rd Casey and I went to a punk rock show here in Kathmandu. We missed the first band to play but we caught the entire set of the second band Rai Ko Ris. They were pretty good politically influenced hardcore punk stuff along the lines of a Crass of Ebullition Records type band. There was even a female playing guitar which I thought was great considering the culture here. There is a long ways to go still in terms of womens rights and gender equality. The third band was pretty more gimmicky drunk punk style stuff with 2 or 3 westerners and wigs and a santa clause costume etc. We hung around for a few songs of their set and halfway through a Dead Kennedies cover but we were less into that style and decided to take off. It was a cool thing to see a young punk scene in a place like Kathmandu. It's something I was not expecting to find. There is supposedly an "Infoshop" here in Kathmandu that I will have to go check out soon. Here's the website for the band Rai Ko Ris.

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.