base camp to Namche to Lukla to Kathmandu

 Walked from base camp to Namche trying to see the landscape with new eyes.  I saw some children flying paper airplanes off the trail and glimmers of light on the distant Tenbouche monastery.  I saw monks and porters carrying their own kinds of burdens  and saw many people from all over the world, pilgrims, maybe, walking the long road. I saw young boys carrying immense loads of plywood. I stopped at the river lunch place and went inside where the guides eat, where the monks go, and talked with a mother carrying a child in her arms and to her mother, the grandmother who sold me a bracelet. I wanted to work in the kitchen for awhile.

 I had not had a shower in 8 days, so I went to the barber in Namche to get my hair washed and cut. I could not face an actual shower on the cold concrete floor of the tiny bathroom in the Llasa Guest House. The young barber really liked his own hair and was not shy about showing it off.

 The best part of our wild race from Namche to Lukla, a 9 hour walk that we did in 5, racing past hundreds of trekkers, lines of cattle, donkeys...was stopping to see my friend Jetta at the bakery in Phakding and eating Yak cheese and freshly baked  bread, a bit of a tradition for me.  Tanner thought Yak cheese was pretty good, in spite of stories to the contrary.

In Lukla you never know if you are going to take off in two hours or two days.  Below, right, is the church in Kathmandu, which we visited after landing, amazingly getting to Kathmandu in time.  They sang "high on a mountain top"

 When I arrived in Lukla, I was tired of walking, so I sat in a chair on the side of the road and  watched as a girl, maybe 11 and her younger sister, maybe 8, were carrying big baskets of soda up the little road. They were bantering with each other as if it were a game.  But when I saw them still carrying the supplies from the airplane up over the hill into town, I thought, they should be home playing and maybe reading a book.

Amazingly, Kathmandu has posted no honking signs!  The streets are unusually quiet, quiet for Kathmandu, that is.  And there is electricity all day and all night! There are still prayer flags in Thamel from the Diwali festival, and we ate at my favorite green mountain organic restaurant. 

Down Going Down

November 1,

After somehow organizing the chaos of that tent, and finding our other equipment, and hardly eating anything, I could barely function. Carrying huge packs we made it down to camp 1.  I told Tanner and Urken to go ahead, I was going to go slow, I knew the way.  Below the tents, heading toward the fixed rappel lines, I stumbled, off balance with the huge pack, fell over and almost started to roll down the slabs.  I really don’t know how I stopped myself.   I like being alone in this part of the Himalaya, taking pictures, thinking about making paintings. I took my time walking along the floor of the Cambrian ocean,  finally getting to base camp around 5. How good was it to get in my fleece liner, inside my sleeping bag, on top of a pad at base camp after spending two difficult nights at camp 2.

Amazingly, in the early morning hours, I was thinking about the climb, amazing that I could even think about climbing that mountain, but I was thinking, why didn’t we climb slower (actually, we were climbing pretty slow), and enjoy the process more, and take a longer look at the views?  I thought, what we should have done is skipped camp 2 altogether and stayed at camp 3, dividing the climb over two days.  

In some ways the climb was  troubling. I did not anticipate  how commercial the enterprise had become, and so far removed from the joys of climbing, it has become a process of setting up fixed lines and getting clients as far up as possible.  In the spring there are maybe 6 or 8 people trying to climb the mountain, but in the fall, there must be hundreds, many of whom do not really belong on such a big mountain, and who lack climbing experience, but have brand new clothes and boots.  From now on I want to climb more lonely mountains.

If you make it to the summit, there might be a cake waiting for you at base camp. 

 Unfortunately, we found out later that one of the Koreans we passed on the way down had died at camp 3. When I arrived in Namche, on November 2, I thought I was coming upon a funeral process, but it was a group of people carrying a young man who was moaning in agony up the steps, being trailed by a girl carrying an oxygen tank.  The helicopter pilot I talked with at Tengbouche said he is very busy rescuing people, mostly trekkers, who do not recognize the dangers of altitude sickness until it is too late.

The Turning Point 22,488

October 31, the turning point.  We have slept for four nights above 19,000 feet, but are still pushing the envelope of being acclimatized. 

We woke up at 2:00 AM  and I took an amazingly long time to get ready, especially considering that I slept in my clothes, including my down puffy pants. We could have left earlier, since Tanner was not sleeping anyway, but who wants to climb the mountain in the dark? It was dark, of course, and seemed cold, but once we started the climb, which was very steep, I shed the expedition down coat and climbed the rest of the way in a down sweater and hard shell, with my down puffy pants, because it was so much work.  On the gray tower above camp 2, which I had climbed in  approach shoes in the spring a few years ago, I got to a point where I did not know if I could catch my breath. It was painfully difficult to move or even to breath.  But finally, I got breathing under control and we climbed up and up, the very steep ice and rock through the tangle of fixed lines and crazy anchors, set up like a boy scout learning to tie knots…if you are not sure, just keep tying and tying, around old rusty pins or worse, into an invisible morass of rope and rock.  What a mess. Fortunately there was no wind, which explained why I could be shedding layers.

After a long time we made it to camp 3 at 21,123, a large and  lovely flat place covered in snow.  Many people avoid camp 3 because it is directly under the huge serac, the suspended glacier looks like a jewel box hanging on the neck of the Mountain, hence the name Ama Dablam, literally meaning 'the mother's jewel box.' A piece of it came down about 8 years ago and wiped out everyone at camp 3, so their fears are not completely unfounded. 

As the sun came over the mountain, it struck the side of the serac I had looked at for so many years, wondering what it would be like on the smooth field of ice and snow above. The last 1,000 feet of altitude gain would be an easy ice climb in the Wasatch except that for every two steps I have to stop and take four or five breaths, it is excruciatingly difficult to move up.  My calves were burning from kicking steps into the ice and snow and arms were ready to fall off. Getting to the top, the last 50 meters was the most difficult physically challenging experience I have ever had, ever.   We could still see the mountains in the distance,  including Mount Everest peaking above the clouds. although more clouds were forming around us. I know there were people who were praying for me to finally get to the top of that mountain.

We made it to the summit at about 1:00 PM, which was soft and rounded and covered in deep snow. Good place to set up a tent. But, then had to turn around and go down, which was arduous and difficult, because we were so tired. It was an endless series of difficult rappels on ropes that were stiff or frozen.  Somehow my helmet came off and rolled off the precipice.  My down pants had taken a couple of hits from crampons, so all the way down I was shedding feathers. We made it to camp 2 around 8:30 PM,  17 hours on the mountain without a pause. On the way down, around 8:00,  we passed some Korean climbers going up, having a very difficult time of it. When we arrived at camp 2, exhausted, dehydrated, and ready to just lay down, we found that there was a large Sherpa guy sleeping in our tent! With a huge pile of stuff. Tanner slept next to him, my pad was gone, so I slept by the door on top of my coat and lots of rocks. In the morning, after not really sleeping all that much, I noticed that a Romanian had replaced the Sherpa man.   He was not all that friendly, but how did he get in there without me knowing it?

We had our Sherpa guide Urken with us, who was the one who managed the alternating tent situation, like musical  tents, hoping that you will not be left without a tent.  He was not all that sympathetic to  our climbing interests, which included actually climbing the mountain.  He had the unshakable belief that by clipping a carabiner attached to sling, attached to your climbing harness, to a vertical rope, that it acted as a “safety.”  This would be a safe back up on an horizontal traverse, but on a vertical line, it would just keep your mangled body from going over the cliff.  

But, in spite of it all, I made it to  the turning point. The summit of Ama Dablam, a mountain that had inhabited my dreams for years, in a multitude of magical forms and endless journeys. It was the fourth attempt, and the turning point meaning I was heading back home.

Sunrise at 21,000 feet.  Note the huge hanging glacier serac that gives Ama Dablam its name.

 Coming up to the serac as the sun catches it, an immense piece of snow and ice.

 That is the summit of Ama Dablam, after the long climb up the snow and ice west facing face of the mountain.

The summit, with the tip of the last snow picket, poking up out of the snow. 

The view down and the view to the east toward Mount Everest, and the view of camp 3 as we descended. 

Camp 2, 19, 614

October 30

Went to bed around 6:15, read a few pages of Mosiah I had torn out of the book, to save weight.  Then had to stay in the tent in bed until around 7:00 when the sun finally hits.  It is very cold. Put the climbing harness on and filled up the pack with a huge load for camp 2. We are not coming back this time. We climbed the difficult chimney again and the rest of the route to camp 2. We often had to wait while parties ahead of us tried to ascend and manage their jumar technique. Then we arrived again at the disaster known as camp 2, a tiny collection of rock ledges perched above the precipice. It is cold and smells bd, like a New York City subway station in the old times. 

And since when did Nepalese Sherpa guides take up smoking?  Maybe it is to calm their nerves from ferrying people up the mountain on fixed lines. Soon I would realize that this is how it is done here for almost everyone.  The Sherpa guides put up fixed lines and everyone else pulls themselves up. Most of the people, were not even climbers at all. I am super excited to get home, Tanner is very excited to get on the mountain, but I am worried about the cold, I want to keep all my fingers and toes. And it is very cold in our tent and even colder outside. This will be our fourth night above 19,000 feet. Yikes! A rat just walked into the tent vestibule. Rats and fat ravens and endless fixed lines going around the camp. 

Camp 1 to Camp 2

October 29

At camp 1, there is not much choice but to go to bed before 7:00 and stay there until the sun hits the tent around 7:00 the next day.  That is a lot of time in a tent.  Around 1:00AM I woke up and started to think of all the things I am thankful for like  so many, people willing to help me get ready for this project, not just once but three or four times. The people who would teach me Spanish while we hiked in Ecuador, or Emma’s mother following us into the mountains of India, by GPS and praying that we didn’t get hypothermia in the hailstorm. The  long conversations while hiking up mountains, the EPA, for the porters, and for so many things, especially Catherine. It was a long list.  It also snowed a few inches,  and so I stalled as long as possible before taking a load up to camp 2 so the rock would dry, which took a while because it was very cold. I wore approach shoes and climbed all the way, with a pack.  But this was apparently not at the way to climb, to my surprise everyone else on the mountain was using a jumar or ascender to get up the rock using the fixed lines. 

A typical rat nest of rope and tat and twine that makes up a Himalayan anchor, like a boy scout learning to tie a knot, if you are not sure, just add more turns. The camp situation at camp 2, 19, 614. We returned to camp 1 to sleep.