Kongde, the Overview

The very short runway at Lukla, this is going to a long complicated mountain story, but for now, I will just say that I  rode the little plane for the 9th time, it landed and bounced, then let everyone out. Above the runway, is the one of the peaks that make up Kongde Ri, which is really three peaks, over 6,000 meters.  The south peak looks over Lukla, the northern peaks tower above Namche. Kongde from Lukla and after 12 hours of hiking.

For a brief moment we saw the sky. To get above the clouds,  all we needed to do was get above 5,000 meters, but Sonam, one of the porters had altitude sickness, so we set up a camp in the clouds so that he could be taken down to a lower camp.  This was the second night camping, the third day of hiking. From the base camp, where I spent most of an afternoon in foggy clouds, one of the north peaks appeared around 5:30 PM.





So I had some tent time to do heating experiments inside the tent.  How long do I dare leave the MSR Reactor on inside the tent?  Instead of being at high camp, we were two hours below high camp, which meant we had to make up the difference by getting up at 3:00 AM the next day. Starlight.

 Sunset from inside the tent.  I love my tent.

This is a view of the ridge line, part of the next day's climb, which will be described in more detail later.

 At high camp there are two beautiful lakes below great cliffs with ice waterfalls.  We saw most of the ice fall into the lake later in the day as well as a huge avalanche of snow.

Unfortunately, this is all the snow we could find as we climbed up the ridge, and it soon disappeared.  We had prepared for snow and ice climbing, not scrambling on loose boulders.

This is Dano looking over the clouds below us, he is Nima's uncle, but Nima has many uncles. For Sherpas everyone is a brother or sister, aunt or uncle. Most important he is  the only person we knew who had ever been to this area before. More about Dano later.  That must be me with Pimbaringi Sherpa, Pasang Sherpa, and Sonam Sherpa, who carried a lot of unnecessary baggage up to camp 1. Did we really need a pressure cooker? But more about that later.  

That is Mount Everest, and Laotze, from the pass high above the popular trail to Everest base camp, where happily many foreign trekkers were wandering up and down the well marked road. The pass is 4510 meters or 13, 651 feet, which we reached on day 2. We started the day at around 8,000 feet.  Since we only had to climb to 19, 705 feet, I thought we were doing pretty well.  Little did I know. We saw no one on our narrow steep trail until we reached our second camp, where we passed two Australians on their way down, not feeling at all well.