I can talk myself out of anything, especially when I think it might be difficult or I might fail. And I might have talked myself out of a recurring dream of trekking to Mount Everest Base Camp if it weren’t for my daughter’s work in Nepal, where Everest is located.
She suggested that we climb over the Cho La Pass to the base camp, and on the way ascend two 18,000-foot mountains: Gokyo Ri and Kala Patthar. Before there was time to ruminate on the stress of hiking for 17 days at high altitude, I agreed to go.
Brett Jones, my daughter, is a foreign service officer posted at the U.S. Embassy in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal. She immediately began searching on her computer for a guide and two porters. She urged me to invite anyone I wanted, but Honolulu triathlete Janice Marsters was the only friend I could persuade to join us.
To get stronger for the trek, Janice and I combined circuit training with running, weightlifting and five-hour hikes. We ascended some of Oahu’s mountains. I also walked around Oahu by myself covering 132 miles in six days. But nothing we did we could prepare us for the difficulties ahead.
Our destination, Mount Everest Base Camp, at 17,290 feet above sea level, is where mountaineers do their final high-altitude training before attempting to climb to the 29,028-foot summit of the tallest mountain in the world.
The scariness of the trek to the base camp began right off the bat when we boarded a twin-engine de Havilland Otter to ferry us from Kathmandu to Lukla, in the Himalayas. You have to fly to that village to reach the trail head. The flight attendant, dressed in a traditional Sherpa costume, handed us balls of cotton to put in our ears and gave us some butterscotch hard candy as the plane readied for takeoff.
We held our breath as the little aircraft zigzagged between mountains that seemed close enough to touch before we swooped down to the ground to land on Lukla’s very short 1,475-foot runway. A woman behind me, who had crouched down with her head between her knees during the flight, jerked up her body in relief when the plane landed safely. The passengers applauded.
Many travelers consider Lukla the most frightening landing in the world. The airport’s upward-sloping runway is to ensure the planes slam to a fast stop before they run into the mountains. But sometimes all the precautions are not enough. In 2008, 18 people died when a Yeti Airlines plane burst into flames after it whacked the side of the runway.
Lukla is 9,383 feet above sea level. Brett, Janice and I felt jaunty, full of enthusiasm as we left its cobbled paths, walking past European bakeries, pubs and little shops. In the bright sun we were comfortable in our T-shirts and lightweight pants. We trudged over suspension bridges, into pine forests and through thickets of pink and purple rhododendrons.
But as we climbed higher up the mountains each day, getting closer to the base camp, vegetation became scarce, the villages farther apart. Cold winds whipped our faces. Sometimes it snowed. We picked our way with our hiking poles over boulder-strewn paths, slowly placing one foot in front of the other, as we gasped for breath in the thin air.
We had opted to bypass most of the crowded main trail to the Everest Base Camp to take the more difficult, less traveled route through the turquoise ice lakes of Gokyo, over the Ngozumpa glacier and up through the Cho La Pass. But when we arrived at the base of Cho La, we changed our plans after we heard ice and possible snow at the top of the pass might make it too dangerous to climb.
On our alternative route, we had to trek cautiously over narrow trails, mere ribbons of dirt pocked by rolling, slippery rocks. It was like walking on tennis balls. One false step and you could fall a thousand feet over rocks into a river valley below. I had not expected to feel so vulnerable. Sometimes I teetered out of balance, clinging for stability to the hand of our 33-year-old guide, Tek Bahadur Sunuwar. It was humbling.
Instead of a daughter, Brett became more like my mother, urging Tek to carry my daypack to improve my balance. Brett was constantly looking over her shoulder to make sure I hadn’t plunged off the cliff. She worried about the increasing cold. When snow came down in flurries or we were pelted by hail, she nagged me to put on another layer of clothes or to zip up my jacket. When the sun beat down on us, she handed me a tube of suntan lotion.
At first the reversal in our roles bothered me, but when hiking in the shadows of the highest mountains on Earth, such pettiness seemed absurd. I surrendered my need to always be in control.
I discovered another way to quiet my thinking. As we trudged higher into the Himalayas, dwarfed by their snowy peaks, I imagined lifting up my concerns and placing them on the shoulders of the great mountains. A big concern, of course, was the fear we wouldn’t make it all the way to the base camp.
Each day, we gazed at helicopters speeding between the mountains, rushing up to rescue hikers we assumed were suffering from altitude sickness or, worse, the potentially fatal high-altitude pulmonary edema or cerebral edema. We passed other stricken-looking travelers, weak from food poisoning or exhausted from too many days of climbing in oxygen-thin air. They walked haltingly or were carried down on the backs of tiny Himalayan horses or yaks.
Yaks on the trail are dangerous themselves. The cowlike creatures covered by long hairy coats usually mean no harm, but they are huge. They are traditionally given the right of way because they can unintentionally push a hiker off the side of the mountain. You learn to always stand on the upper slope of the trail when yaks pass. A friend of ours recently visited a woman in the hospital in Kathmandu who had been shoved off a narrow cliff trail by a yak. She bounced down 30 feet over jagged rocks, breaking her spine in two places.
There are no roads for vehicles; helicopters, mules, yaks and human porters carry the cargo. Some porters carry loads two or three times their own weight.
Our porters, Gyanu and Bikash, hauled our bulging duffel bags stuffed with our sleeping bags and warm clothing and odd items like baby wipes to use on nights we were too cold to bathe, and hand and toe warmers for the freezing weather as we neared Mount Everest. We also carried chocolate-covered almonds, energy bars and minipacks of Kleenex for our noses, which dripped incessantly from the dust and cold.
We spent freezing nights in primitive teahouses and lodges, where we often shared smelly, squat toilets with as many as 20 other trekkers. Brett would stuff tissue in her nose when she went to the bathroom to try to block the stench.
Even though the lodges served unremarkable food, we were so hungry we ate and ate. A favorite dinner was dal bhat, a Nepali classic consisting of lentil soup and a big mound of steamed white rice with fried vegetables. The lodges also served their own version of pizza, a chapati smeared with tomato sauce and yak cheese. Breakfast might be a potato-cheese omelet or fried Tibetan bread with peanut butter. We bought freshly boiled or bottled water.
We snacked all day on treats tucked into our daypacks, including Belgian chocolate bars and trail mix made with yogurt pretzels and dried cherries. But even on this continuous eating binge, each of us lost about 10 pounds.
Our most difficult day was our 11-hour push from Lobuche at 16,210 feet to reach our goal, the Mount Everest Base Camp, at 17,400 feet. On this cold, seemingly endless slog, we stopped to rest at Gorak Shep, a remote, Star Wars-like outpost hovering above a former lake traversed all day by yak caravans. In a room filled with rowdy Russian climbers, many of them drunk on beer, we ordered cups of stomach-warming masala tea slapped down on our table by an ill-tempered Sherpa waiter.
Then it was out in the cold again to continue pushing over more large boulders as we moved across the Khumbu glacier. A Japanese female climber pushed her way forward to trudge along beside me.
She wanted to know my age. When I said 71, she seemed astounded and stopped to take my picture. Then, as she moved on, she shouted my age to everyone within earshot on the glacier. In other circumstances I might have been embarrassed to have my age broadcast to many strangers, but here where there was so little to laugh about, it seemed funny.
I continued to struggle to gain my balance, breathing heavily, as we stumbled from one shifting rock to the next. Brett started to wonder if we were in over our heads.
We were encased in multiple layers of down, fleece and Gortex. My head was covered with three different wool hats, yet it still ached from the cold.
Exhausted yet overjoyed with relief, we finally reached the small hill overlooking the hundreds of yellow, blue and red tents of the Mount Everest Base Camp. We followed tradition by stopping to pose for photos by a rock covered with Tibetan prayer flags with the base camp in the background. After a brief rest on the hill, most trekkers headed back to Gorak Shep for the night.
But we were luckier. Two Everest summit climbers, Canadian businessman Steve Whittington and Daniel Branham, a surgeon from Melbourne Beach, Fla., were waiting to escort us to their expedition tent in the base camp. We had met them earlier at a lodge where they had come down to enjoy a brief rest from their training.
This was a rare opportunity. Trekkers are discouraged from entering base camp unless they have an invitation to visit from climbers. We had to hike an extra mile to reach Steve and Daniel’s heated dining tent where their cook served us cups of hot Tang and a platter of Pringles. The table in the center was covered with cookies, crackers and candy. To keep up their energy, summit climbers have to consume more than 8,000 calories a day.
Even though we were so tired we could barely talk, it was exciting to be in this community of mountaineers who had traveled from every corner of the globe to climb Everest. You could feel Steve and Daniel’s enthusiasm mixed with their anxiety. We momentarily felt like we were a small part of the challenge. We stayed for only 30 minutes before it was time to leave to reach Gorak Shep before nightfall and an expected snowfall.
The next morning we completed our final challenge, the slow, difficult climb to the top of Kala Patthar, an 18,192-foot pinnacle that offers a 360-degree panoramic view of Everest and its companion mountains. Brett and I climbed hand over hand as we neared the summit, both of us stopping often, our lungs aching from lack of oxygen. When we reached the top, we were surprised to see a Spanish climber already there, huddled beside a string of Buddhist prayer flags and smoking a cigarette!
On the main trail back down from Everest, we spent the night in Periche, a wind-whipped outpost on a glacial river where we celebrated Brett’s 40th birthday. We were the only guests in the White Yak Mountain Hut. In the dining room we huddled close to a stove fueled by mounds of dried yak dung. Brett’s birthday cake consisted of a Snickers bar melted between two chapatis, a confection our innkeeper grandly called a "Snickers Pie."
This innkeeper, a tall Sherpa man named Pemba Chhri, gave Brett a white Tibetan scarf. Our trekking guide Tek miraculously produced a bottle of Australian wine. Tek and the porters gathered close as we sang "Happy Birthday." It was as warm and happy as we had been in a long time.
There was nothing left to fear. We basked in our success. Yet looking back today, the most vivid moments on our Everest trek were when I felt most afraid — the times I had to let go of my pride to watch Brett kick into action to protect me.
In the unpredictability of the Himalaya Mountains, there was an unmistakable certainty, the beauty of sharing the trail with a daughter who had grown up to become a generous, compassionate adult.
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Denby Fawcett is a Hawaii writer and former print and television reporter.
