Park, which contains Mount Everest. At 8900 meters, it sit well above
most of the mountains in the area, with exception to its direct
neighbor, Lohtse. The plan go on a route which crosses three large
mountain passes, everest base camp beig merely an off shoot. Although
we are fast hikers, partly due to our training on Annapurna but also
just because we tend to push it as hard as we can inspite of
ourselves, it turned out to much to do within our time constraint. We
elected to walk into Lukla, rather than fly in. Only 5% of trekkers do
this, because it is normally a 8-10 day hike full of massive ups and
downs, the biggest going over the top of a 3500 meter pass. It took us
5 days. Worn out and sore all over we took a rest day in Lukla, and
re-evaluated our plans. The problem was, due to cloud cover, getting a
flight back to kathmandu from Lukla was a sketchy proposition, people
can wait anywhere up to 2 weeks for a flight this time of year. With
impending visa due dates, and future plans, we wouldn't have much time
to wait around or a plane to take off, because if we were to wait to
long, our window for walking out (5 days) would close fast. Our plans
settled down to Everest base camp, Cho la pass (5300 meters of a
glacier), and Gokyo ri (a panorama view of all the mountains in the
region). It took us about 8 days to make all this happen, because of
our pace and acclimitization. Unfortunately a lot of the time was
spent with cloud cover, but that made the few clear days all the more
special. Everest base camp was more of a milestone, as you cant see
everest from that point. Cho la pass was likely one of the more
dangerous things I have ever done. The glacier was in full melt mode,
it was raining/snowing, falling rocks and ice, boulders that move
around while you walk over them, on top of the fact we were close to
18000 feet and 4 hours away from the last shack, in weather that no
helicopter would dare. By the time we made to the actual pass,
exhausted, wet and oxygen deprived, we found that the glacier had
melted away from the rock leaving a pool of ice water, a death pit if
you will. Surrounded by a thick cloud, we made the somewhat stupid
decision to make a dangerous route up the side of the glacier and over
a steep section where a fall meant a slide into the pool of death.
Ryan slipped on this section and had to lung toward the exposed rock
we were crawling over, luckily he was able to grab it with one hand.
This path lead to a cliff like rock face, with a small section that
could we just barely climb/jump down in sections. It wasn't until
after that we realized how crazy we were. We made it down to the next
guest house after a 14 hour day.
The next day we walked two hours in the wrong direction, and ended up
in an abandoned village, except for one woman to cooked us rice and
the. led us in the correct direction. Up until this point we had not
seen a glimpse of everest, the sole purpose of the entire trip, and it
was weighing on us heavily. Finally, with some incredible luck, we
made it up to the top of Gokyo ri around sunrise, just in time for a
perfect clearing in the weather, and we got an incredible view of
everest and full 360 view of the mountain range.
After all that we got a flight out from Lukla the day after we arrived, perfect.
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