I did a 16-day hike through the Everest region of the Himalayas. There were six hikers in our group, plus three guides and three porters. Because of the thin air, the bright glare of the light and the sheer magnitude of the scenery it's hard for a point-and-click photographer like myself to take decent photos. I took nearly 1,000, and they're going to require a lot of Photoshop magic. But you get the idea.
There was just too much to see and talk about in a blog post!
We flew from Kathmandu into Lukla, the airport where the fatal crash was a few days ago, then hiked on from there. I already posted a pic from the second day of the trip, when I got my first view of Everest from the ground. We spent the next two nights after that in Namche Bazar, one of the bigger towns in the region despite the fact it looks like it was nailed to the side of a hill.
This is the view from my window at the Moonlight Lodge.
And this is a picture looking down on the town during a day hike we did to acclimatize. Because it's at the confluence of two rivers, the Bhote Kosi and Dudh Kosi, this was considered a good place to build a city.
Namche is listed at 3,440 meters, although there's a quite a bit of altitude difference between the and bottom! (I'm trying to learn to think in meters since everyone else in the world does. I'm too lazy to do the conversions so multiply all the numbers by 3.3 to get the number of feet.) The town ends abruptly at a cliff that drops down to the Bhote Kosi river, with Kwangde (6,187 meters) looming on the other side.
We did see some rain but on the days we really wanted good weather we got it, like the day we did the hike from Namche. Just at the top of the hill we got a glorious view of three of the world's most famous mountains. On the right is Ama Dablam, then Lhotse in the center then the big guy himself.
To get an idea of how the skewed the sense of space and dimension is, consider that Ama Dablam is a mighty 6,856 meters. But it's nearly 2,000 meters shorter than Everest (8,850). They look like they're sitting nearly side-by-side but Everest is a 1.25 miles higher than Ama Dablam.
Everest is a big, hulking brute of a mountain. It's famous blunt summit looks like a boxer's nose. Although it's much shorter, Ama Dablam is a much more beautiful mountain. It almost looks sculpted.
The Everest region basically looks like the letter Y. From the Namche area (behind me in this photo) you make a hard left to get to Gokyo Ri. The valley on the right side leads to Kala Patthar and Everest itself.
The town in the center of the picture is Phortse Tenga, which is on the other side of the river, and which we would hike through several days later. The plan was to climb Gokyo Ri, then cross a pass called Cho La to get to the other side, and then climb Kala Patthar and visit Everest Base Camp (EBC).
Cho La is scary and dangerous under the best of conditions -- a hiker died there three days before we were scheduled to climb it -- so we decided to skip it and instead walk all the way back down and up.
My Lonely Planet travel book has a section in the front where the authors talk about their favorite trip within the country. One author wrote his "second favourite was watching people see Cho La for the first time -- everyone without exception responding with a squint and an appalled look on their faces. 'Up there?! You've got to be ****ing kidding me!!'" (His italics, not mine.) So I wasn't sorry to skip it.
I did the hike specifically for the view from Kala Patthar, but I decided to do this particular hike because it also went to Gokyo Ri. The scenery there was supposed to be fantastic.
I simply can't imagine a more spectacular place.
In this photo are two of the five bright turquoise glacial lakes (they really are that color), the tiny of town of Gokyo and the Ngozumpa Glacier, Nepal's biggest. The tip of Ama Dablam is visible in the far distance, about a third of the way from the left side of the photo. And in the center a U-shaped dip in the clouds -- Cho La.
Oh, but the really good stuff is in the other direction. Not only can you see Everest, but you can also see the fourth-, fifth- and sixth-highest mountains in the world: Lhotse, Makalu and Cho Oyu. (I believe Makalu is the peak just to the left of Ama Dablam in the above photo.) There are only fourteen 8,000-meter peaks in the world and here you can see four of them!
In this picture you can't see any of them, but you can see Gyachung Kang, which is the world's 16th-highest mountain but just misses the prestigious 8,000-meter cut (7,897). Beneath me is the glacier and, yeah, it's a pretty scary drop.
The hike to the 5,357-meter summit was a killer, partly because the mountain looks so plain. It looks like a big, round hill. But it's quite steep, and there are no real landmarks, so it's just and endless series of switchbacks over monotonous terrain. Doesn't look like much, does it.
In the foreground you can see someone drying yak dung into patties. Because most of the region is a national park, cutting of trees is forbidden. In many places there are no trees, anyway. Dung is a common and surprisingly efficient source of fuel. In a harsh environment, you use what you have. People would go down the trails and collect dung left behind by yak herds. We'd see them walking with their big baskets strapped to their backs, full of poop.
The Himalayas are a relatively new geological phenomenon, and the growing pains are evident everywhere. You can't really see it, but scientists say Everest is moving about 6 cm northeast every year. The evening before I climbed Gokyo Ri (the mountain) I climbed the ridge separating Gokyo (the town) from the glacier. In the distance I could hear avalanches or landslides.
I walked along the ridge towards Cho Oyu as the sun was setting. The top of the glacier, at the foot of the mountain, had been melting in the sunlight all day. The cracks and booms of the splitting ice sounded like a battle in the distance.
On the right is the glacier, which does a hard right turn around the gray, rocky hill on the right. The ridge is on the left side of the photo. In the center is Cho Oyu, considered to be the easiest 8,000-meter peak to climb, which is like saying it's the easiest alligator to wrestle. And on the other side is Tibet.
So we zipped down one side of the Y and back up the other to the village of Gorak Shep, the jumping-off point for Kala Patthar and EBC. By this time two people in our group had split off because they were doing a shorter version of the hike. I ended up climbing Kala Patthar by myself.
This is the sun rising behind Nuptse.
This is why you climb Kala Patthar: An unobstructed view of the world's highest mountain.
And this is looking down on Everest Base Camp. In the center, just to the left of the glacier, colored tents are barely visible.
To put the extreme terrain in perspective, consider that EBC is at roughly 5,360 meters, or 17,688 feet. The highest point in the Rocky Mountains is 14,440 feet, more than half a mile lower than the bottom of Everest.
Put it another way. One of the goals of serious mountaineers is to climb the Seven Summits, the highest mountain on each continent. The second-highest of the Seven Summits is Aconcagua, in Argentina. There are 23 mountains in Nepal higher than Aconcagua.
And this is Kala Patthar.
No, not the majestic, snow-capped peak. That's Pumori (7,145). Kala Patthar is the lump in the foreground. Like Gokyo Ri, it's not much to look at, and probably wouldn't even be mentioned on a map if the views from the top weren't so fantastic.
The Tibetan name for the mountain is usually transliterated as Chomolungma, the name of the goddess who lives on the mountain. Oddly, there was no name in Nepali for the mountain, so in 1956 it was christened Sagarmatha, "head of the sky". Well, it sounds nice in Nepali...
The English name was given by British Colonel Andrew Waugh, the surveyor general of India, in honor of his predecessor, Sir George Everest. I haven't been able to find out for sure one way or another, but it doesn't appear Sir George every actually saw the mountain! It's not as bad as naming two continents after an obscure Italian explorer, but it's pretty high up there on the list of cool things named after people who really didn't deserve it.
However, the name does fit. "Ever" implies timelessness, and "est" is a suffix used to express a superlative. I guess we should be thankful Sir George's last name wasn't Klunk or Flatt.
Oddly enough, there is no agreement on how high Everest is. Nepal officially considers it to be 8,848 meters but most of the world agrees it's 8,500.
I didn't actually make it to EBC. I made it down to the Khumbu Glacier, but then a snowstorm blew in. I wasn't prepared. And EBC really isn't much to see. It's just a bunch of tents. And due to q quirk in the geography, you can't see the summit from EBC because what's called the West Shoulder blocks the view. It was a disappointment, but Kala Patthar was the real reason I did the hike.
The hike back took us through Tengboche, famous for its monastery, and its views. In the bottom right-hand corner is an internet cafe. On the top left is the trail we took to get to Kala Patthar, and on the bottom left is the trail we took on the way back. It was really cloudy, so we only had glimpses of Ama Dablam through the clouds on the right. But the center of the view magically opened up long enough for me to take a photo of Everest and Lhotse.
I could go on and on. So I'll add one more pic and end the post. In a village called Pangboche we at the Everest View Lodge. This was the view from my window.
(Seriously, though, in the morning we could see it, and Ama Dablam was right there.) Ok, then, one more.
Posts
