CHAPTER THREE

It’s The Journey, Not The Summit

“At last the ladder which had been built slowly, slowly, one hope at a time, reached up to the clouds. And the dreamer began to climb.” —Unknown

What a multi-media, cultural, spiritual and sensual overload Kathmandu, Nepal provides; a constant cacophony of competing sounds, sights and smells. My second journey began on March 24, 2008, at Tribuhaven International Airport. After the casual customs rituals and fighting the screaming kids wanting to carry bags for tips, I hoisted my blood-red Mammut trekking pack over my shoulders and commandeered a rickety cart to wheel my three huge duffels to the x-ray area. I pushed and coaxed the gargantuan bags through the machine, an x-ray contraption that doubtless wasn’t turned on and probably hadn’t worked in years.

Dispatch: 28 March 2008 4,500 feet Safely in Nepal, and on time.

All I can say is wow. That was the world’s fastest year. Arriving in Kathmandu early yesterday morning and stepping out of the plane, it was as if I had never left. The scent was the first clue, a mixture of wood smoke from cremations, diesel exhaust and decaying garbage. Don’t get me wrong, I loved it. I roomed at Hotel Tibet with Chip Popovisciu. Great guy. We organized our gear in the wee hours, as we will ship out to Lukla tomorrow at 5 AM. Can’t wait to get a move on this climb, though we haven’t received our climbing permit yet! Gotta love politics. Later — Dr. Tim in Nepal.

Our greeters shooed away the attempted tip grabbers and placed the traditional welcome garland of pungent, fresh marigolds around my neck. On the twenty-minute bus ride to the Hotel Tibet, I chatted with Ciprian “Chip” Popovisciu. Chip, originally from Romania, has a Ph.D. in physics, now lives in North Carolina, and works for Cisco Systems, creating the next generation of the internet. With a long and lean endurance athlete build, Chip looked ready for Everest. He sported an Eastern Bloc inability to pronounce the short vowels, and some old-school muttonchops. He planned to meet up with his climbing buddy Vance Cook, a software engineer and video-game entrepreneur from Salt Lake City. Vance’s business claim to fame was creating the popular video game “Tiger Woods Golf.”

The ornately carved wooden door and pungent potted plants greeted me at the Hotel Tibet entrance like old friends. Once inside, I felt downright homey amid the spotless dentate hardwood moldings, wool tapestries, and Tibetan paintings and sculptures, especially when the staff greeted us as if we were, indeed, long-lost family.

Chip and I were assigned to room together so we pushed, pulled and cajoled our worldly belongings into the rattle-trap elevator, poured ourselves into the room, and collapsed. We realized we were still in the manic phase of our jet lag, so I suggested a beer at the tiny lobby bar. We ordered up two Mt. Everest beers, with labels bearing Tenzing Norgay striking that iconic summit pose from the pages of National Geographic nearly fifty-five years ago. We toasted Sir Edmund Hillary, who sadly passed on in January 2008.

Chip knew this was my second Everest attempt and peppered me with questions, which I happily but carefully answered. I promised myself I would not be one of those self-proclaimed Everest experts, telling Nepal newbies what to do. I would not become boorish and, in fact, would only give suggestions if asked. Every group has a butthead. It wasn’t going to be me.

Finally exhausted, we passed out for awhile, but I found myself awake and wired in the wee hours, tossing and turning. I didn’t want to disturb Chip, but I really wanted to sort my gear. As soon as he made a sound, I asked him if I could turn on the light.

“Sure, can’t sleep anyway.”

My plan was to separate the two bags that would be carried by yaks to Base Camp and make sure there was nothing in them that I would need for the next two weeks on the trek. My third bag would hold the paraphernalia for the trek that we could tap into each morning and night once it was offloaded from the yak.

After sorting bags, we celebrated our first morning in Kathmandu by going to Mike’s, an oasis of American breakfast with a Nepali twist. Mike was an expatriate who arrived in Nepal in the early sixties while in the Peace Corp and never left, over the years becoming a respected member of the capital city. We Americans loved Mike’s for its beautifully landscaped grounds, the best wait staff, the best coffee, exotic fruit juices and tastiest breakfast imaginable—breakfast is my favorite meal—all for 300 rupees (about $4). A Mike’s meal provided significant improvement from the hotel breakfast of toast, barely palatable mini sausages, and rot-gut instant coffee.

Next, we hopped a cab to the Swambanunath Stupa (a.k.a. the Monkey Temple), a mixed place of worship for devotees of Buddhism and Hinduism. The temple sits high on a hill in the center of the teeming city, and bustles at all hours. In 2007, Big Al and I, again jet-lagged, were there by 4 AM to watch the sun rise over the city. We carefully inched by dozens of semi-sleeping monkey families, who violently screeched and bared their teeth when we got too close. We camped out and watched the first monks come out to do their chanting circumnavigations of the centerpiece five-story-high white-domed stupa, while the monkeys acrobatically climbed, hand-over-hand, up the prayer flags catching moths to eat. That morning, Buddhist and Hindu stood shoulder to shoulder, peacefully worshiping.

Chip and I saw it again that morning: two of the world’s major religions coexisting without fringe extremists killing each other in a twisted rationalization of religious doctrine. The rest of the world should take careful note.

On our way back to the hotel, we saw pickup trucks laden with Maoist campaigners handing out leaflets, blaring political slogans over PA systems, and clogging the roads by the busy market areas. It was election time in Nepal. The word was that people were disillusioned with King Gyanendra, head of the monarchy that had run Nepal for over 240 years. Many people were starting to become enamored with the Maoists, a violent communist political group, who seemed to have a shot to win in the April 14th elections. We would be climbing Everest on that date. Presumably, after the summit, we could return to the capital and there could be a new government in Nepal after a quarter of a millennium.

We went back to the hotel for a dead-to-the-world sleep, until a phone call told us we were late for a mandatory 5 PM team meeting. There must have been thirty-five folks present, all staring at us, the last to arrive. I gave Ang Jangbu a fond shake and a man-hug to Mark Tucker. Eric Simonson had started the introductions, so I found a seat and mouthed my silent greetings to Casey Grom, Mike Hamill, and Dave Hahn, all guides, and Joe Yanuzzi, an attorney from Philadelphia, whom I had met climbing in North Conway, NH.

The trekking team of ten was there, two of whom, Jim and Kate Swetnam, were on the Mt. Kilimanjaro climb with Bob Degregorio and myself in 1999. I can remember on summit day of that great African continental high point, Kate saying, “This is the trip of a lifetime.” I responded, “It’s only the trip of a lifetime until the next one.” It was great to see them. On the ensuing trek, we swapped stories of the 19,340-foot climb and the safari afterward.

At the meeting, I found out that the climb team and the trek team would share the trail to Base Camp, where the trek team would stay a day or two and beat a hasty retreat, while we summit hopefuls would toil and fret our way to the summit and back for an additional month to six weeks.

Then we went back to our room and the strategy for final prep: leave one small bag of street clothes and shoes at the hotel for our return; three duffels to fly, two of which I would be reunited with in Base Camp; one for the trek, which I would have access to morning and night each day, to be carried by a porter or yak; and my trusty backpack, which I would of course carry with me on the plane and daily on the trek. I charged up all the batteries I could in the hotel bathroom—satellite phone, hand-held computer, Canon high-definition movie camera, iPod, and both trek and climbing Canon cameras. Before bed, I applied padlocks to my three huge duffels and dropped off easily to sleep.

Going to Lukla the next morning, I sighted a yeti! Actually, we all did, as we boarded our flight on Yeti Air. Everyone wants to see the mythical abominable snowman, but Sherpa lore has it that if you actually catch a glimpse of the famously shy beast, you will die within the following twenty-four hours. Yeti Air was close enough for me.

On the hour-long flight in the dual prop twenty-person plane, we nearly sat in the laps of the two pilots, cradling our packs on our laps, while a solitary, demure flight attendant handed out hard candy and cotton balls for our ears. The engines’ drone made conversation impossible, but I saw looks of excited expectancy and apprehension in my fellow mountaineers. As we flew higher, I remembered when my buddy Rob Scott and I climbed Denali in 2004; as we took off, our glacier pilot Jay Hudson said, “Grab your testicles and your spectacles and hang on!” It was a toss-up as to which of the two flying experiences was the most exciting.

For the first twenty minutes of the flight, we were above the hazy terrain of cultivated, increasingly mountainous foothills which led, in the next twenty minutes, to higher and more remote precipices and impossibly deep chasms before we finally caught sight of the tiny postage stamp of an airfield at Lukla, at 9,000 feet. The short runway ran uphill after landing, to slow the planes as they landed. Just before smashing into the forty-foot-high vertical rock buttress at the end, the pilot took a hard ninety-degree right while reversing engines, pulling to a stop seconds later at the airport’s single building. (During the fall trekking season, a group of twenty German tourists and their pilots died when, in a bit of fog, the fence had been clipped by the plane’s rear wheels upon touchdown.) We screeched to a stop, and chaos erupted as baggage handlers threw our gear out of the plane’s storage and started to reload before we even uncoiled ourselves from our seatbelts.

Walking off the field, I warmly greeted Passang Rinjing, Big Al’s Sherpa from his successful Everest 2007 climb. We were a little team of four within the bigger team of twenty western climbers and twenty Sherpas that year. Passang is not only a summit climber, but would make a few extra double-dipping bucks this year helping our team with cooking and carrying all the way to Base Camp.

Soon we shouldered our packs and took our first steps on the trek through the muddy main street of downtown Lukla. Our elevation was 9,000 feet—already 3,000 feet above the highest point in the northeast United States. After all the hours sitting on planes, it felt great to be physically active. The weight of my backpack, the rhythm of striding along the trail, even the challenge of breathing the thinner air all made the mission real, tangible. After all the preparation, I’d finally begun.

Our destination for the day was Phak-Ding, a small hamlet on the Dudh Khosi, or Milk River, so named because of the grey silt it carries from the grinding glaciers of the high mountains ahead. The terrain reminded me of those National Geographic photos I had studied as a kid. I’d looked at those pictures and wondered who lived in those places, what kind of lives they led. And now there I was, hiking through those very pictures. I could reach out and touch the beautiful colors of the brightly painted teahouses and the picture-perfect manicured farms surrounded by ornately carved Mani stones and prayer wheel buildings, all in the shadow of huge Himalayan peaks. I heard the constant roar of the river below us.

The trek provided ample opportunity to gather good karma by passing the aforementioned Mani stones (huge boulders with carved prayers usually painted in blue or white) on the left, and spinning prayer wheels, with the right hand only, thank you.

At that stage of the trek we were an amorphous, spread-out group of thirty-two. Sherpa helpers, porters and yak drivers came and went throughout the day as our group either plodded the dusty trail or passed out on a rest and acclimatization day. Our team included the eleven self-guided climbers, plus Dean Smith, Jaroslaw Hawrylewicz and Nicole and Greg Messner, whose guides, Justin Merle and Dave Hahn, waited for our permits back in Kathmandu. There was also our trekking team and our IMG management team of Mark Tucker, Ang Jangbu and Lobsang Sherpa, joined by IMG’s owner, Eric Simonson, who hiked with us until Namche Bazaar.

There was constant banter as we all tried to sort out who was climbing and who was trekking. Conversation came to an end, however, when we tackled steep ascents of the many spectacular gorges, the first real test of our unacclimatized lungs. Simply bending over to tie my shoes at high altitude evoked the same heart and respiration rate increases that my Rhode Island workouts had provided. The ascents of steep gorges on the hike to Base Camp elicited pulmonary yammering that was scary-fast. Our lungs were still virgin territory for the low oxygen levels, and it would be weeks before we could hike even a moderate hill without sucking wind like a two-pack-a-day smoker.

I planned to hang in the middle of the pack for the trek and take it easy, because I never acclimatize particularly fast and this was not a race. People drifted up-trail and down; there was always someone interesting to talk to or, if I wanted to be alone, there was plenty of time for that, too. I found myself looking more closely at my surroundings this year than last and was constantly amazed at the beauty of the land, the architecture and the people. I believed it was because I had accepted the climb to come. My goal was clear, so I could enjoy the road and be in the moment.

There were two women on the climbing team and two on the trekking team, about average in climbing expeditions. It must be a drag for the ladies to be surrounded by all these boisterous, often obnoxious alpha-males for eight to ten weeks, but they all seemed to be cheerfully resilient, even Val Hovland, the only woman who came unaccompanied by a husband. Eventually both Val and Nicole summited in 2008, while ten of the twenty-one guys from our group got to the top.

Soon the routine of the trek to Base Camp was set. Each afternoon our Sherpa helpers bolted ahead of the group to set up camp at the next village. They set up our tents, put a sleeping pad in each, and started to prepare dinner in the nearest teahouse. As we unacclimatized hurtin’ hombres trickled into camp at different times, the trick for each of us was to find the yak carrying our own duffel bag, and drag the bugger to the correct tent (the duffel was dragged, not the yak).

The window of time between hiking and dinner offered the opportunity to take a nap or read a bit before gathering in the dining room to attack mugs of Sherpa tea or hot lemon in front of the yak dung stove. Hydrate or die became my mantra throughout each day on the trail, and especially at each meal, as fluids thin the blood and aid acclimatization.

The trail began to demand more of our attention through steep, intense climbs and precipitous downclimbs, all while dodging porters, yak trains and multitudes of yak patties on the heavily trodden four-foot-wide rock and sand track. Centuries of feet and yak hooves have worn the rock walkway, but eroded areas are well-maintained with fresh-hewn rock and mortar; the labor is supplied by masons compensated by donations placed in a brightly painted blue wooden box constructed for that purpose. Such care was critical because maintenance of this centuries-old path is a key to Nepal’s economy. There are no roads to Base Camp or to any of the surrounding mountains. This trail was it, where all those climbers, trekkers and adventure seekers must place their kicks. It’s not Route 66, only a primitive dirt path, albeit one of prime importance for the Khumbu Valley. These trails have never seen a wheeled vehicle, not even a mountain bike, as the terrain is simply too rugged for anything other than foot or hoof. Everything in the Khumbu, from beer to buildings, was brought here either on someone’s back or on someone’s yak.

While I’m on the subject, in Phak-Ding and upward to Pangboche, the yaks are actually crossbreeds of cattle and yaks called zopkios; these are the serious, real-deal yaks. Essentially cows on steroids, yaks are thick, hairy and outrageously strong. They are considered important members of the Sherpa family, and are usually decorated with prayer flags and other articles of Buddhist worship. Yaks are bought and sold and can be used to rent out to treks or expeditions, for food and even for fuel. No wonder they are important to Sherpas.

Yak dung is gathered in baskets, dried, mixed with sawdust and kerosene, and burned for heat and cooking. After a lifetime of breathing the particulate matter resulting from the burning of yak poop, it’s no wonder Sherpas’ life expectancy in the Khumbu is fifty-five or younger, usually due to pulmonary disease.

This path is a cash cow (or cash yak) for the locals as well as the country of Nepal because tourism, and most specifically trekking, brings in much-needed bucks for this poorest of poor economies. Each Everest climber pays a $10,000 fee to the Kingdom of Nepal for the permit just to make the attempt, but that’s not the bulk of the tourism dollar. It is the infrastructure of goods and services surrounding the hiking and climbing visitors that brings relative wealth.

We awoke the next morning in the hamlet of Phak-Ding and prepared to advance up the famously long, steep and painful Namche Hill to the cultural and social hub of the Khumbu Valley: Namche Bazaar (11,000 feet), where we would acclimatize for two additional days. On the way, we passed tiny villages with excellent names: Ghat gives way to Nurning which leads to Dukdingma, followed by Zam-Fute and Monjo, and up the trail is one of my all-time favorites: Thumbug. Making a strong showing for most fun name in the Khumbu Valley is Phunki-Tenga.

“The Hill” was where I plugged the iPod to my brain, clicked into my Namche playlist and trudged upward for two hours on nature’s step-mill, fueled by energy gel and Neil Young. (Energy gel—my brand is called GU—is a small single-serving squeeze pouch of nutrients used commonly by endurance athletes.) I felt physically well, and people commented on how strong and focused I seemed; quite different from 2007, when I never seemed to get my groove on. No matter how studly you feel and appear, there’s no getting around it: these steep uphills really hurt. I just went slowly and steadily and rest-stepped whenever possible.

The rest-step is a climbing technique I learned on Mt. Rainier. The rest-step allows you to climb brutally steep hills relatively comfortably, albeit slowly, even with monumental pack weights. The idea is to quickly snap your rear leg into a locked position, so that your weight is on the bone structure and not on the musculature, for a half-second or so, before throwing the opposite leg forward.

There are various additional tricks to becoming very efficient in rest-stepping, like imposing a slight forward lean to the body’s trunk before becoming upright once the rear leg is locked. On the Namche Hill, as on all hills to come, I practiced my technique so that when I got to the mother of all hills on summit day, I would have it wired into my central nervous system like Tiger hitting a nine-iron.

We all have differing speeds of hiking, and, although I planned to be in the middle, I found myself at or near the front group the entire trek. That fast hiking group included Crazy Joe Yanuzzi (so named by yours truly because he’s quiet and can go for hours without saying a word), Chip, Vance, Scott Parazynski, a NASA astronaut with multiple space shuttle flights and spacewalks to his credit, and Adam Janikowski, an investment professional from Canada who was Scott’s climbing partner. The trekkers, as you might expect, were usually much slower, but seemed to be doing OK. Fast, slow or in between, everyone on the team was eventually visited by a variety of the normal symptoms for third-world high altitude expeditions: fatigue, nausea, colds, diarrhea, loss of appetite and headaches.

Upon reaching Namche, we followed International Mountain Guide’s cultural habit of grabbing the highest camp, or, in this case, teahouse, available. It’s a righteous plan on the mountain, as it means you have fewer hours to go to the next checkpoint, but getting to the teahouse just plain hurts. Plodding to the Sherpa Lodge at the uppermost rim of the Namche amphitheatre, up one cobblestone at a time with heaving lungs, was the first place to bow to the god of suffering on this trip. I knew it wouldn’t nearly be the last.

In addition to the deep, dull musculo-skeletal ache that impacted my every panting step with a rhythmic pain-fest, I had the added embarrassment of being a member of the slowest group there. Local Sherpa shopkeepers and lodge workers, and even the yaks and chickens scurried about at a normal pace. Other trekking groups staying at the lodge at this altitude for at least a day longer than we, moved with a great deal more speed than did our “fast” group. We resigned ourselves to a simple truth: at each new altitude, we were broken men and women until the myriad physiological miracles took place and we acclimatized.

And now for some political news, or at least some political controversies. I’ll take a little time to explain it here, just to show you that no matter how much each of us trained or planned, events that had little to do with our team stood directly in our path to Everest. The head cheese of International Mountain Guides, Eric Simonson, who along with Phil Erschler and Geo Dunn formed the guide business in the 1980s, accompanied us, as he did in 2007, as far as Namche. Eric is an Everest summiter, but was best known for organizing the expeditions that found George Leigh Mallory’s body on Everest’s north side in 1999. Controversy remains over the fact that Mallory and Sandy Ervine could have been Everest’s first summiters in the 1920s. Most experts agree, however, that there was little chance that the duo got to the top before meeting their demise on descent.

Eric and I got off on the wrong foot when he called me four days before I left for Nepal in 2007, requesting that I redo my entire expedition application, which I had sent in eight months before. I refused. I simply had too much to do. Besides, I reasoned, that job should have been completed well before we were about to leave. Maybe as a result of our disagreement, we were a tad aloof with each other when we met in Kathmandu. Then he got peeved at me (and Al) again because in the wee hours, while camped next to Eric, Al and I talked and giggled like schoolgirls and kept him awake.

The more serious issue between us happened while I was in Base Camp and Eric was 7,000 miles away in Seattle. (It seems no distance is great enough, or mountain high enough, to keep me from pissing people off.) The brouhaha began because I had been sending dispatches to a blog on my website that several hundred people and media outlets were following. The “Eric Rule” stated that there would be “no communicating any information about anybody other than yourself.” This rule was instituted as a result of the 2006 IMG expedition, when two team members had blogged about a climbing death on the mountain before the Kingdom of Nepal had announced it, as is customary. As sure as bodies roll downhill, the European family of the deceased began calling Eric for answers he could not give from such distance.

Leave it to little old me to add, the very next year, to this veritable shit-storm of controversy by my dispatches. On April 2, 2007, in front of the entire team at dinner, Eric, through Base Camp consigliore Mark Tucker, threatened to kick me off the team. Here, verbatim, were the offending words from my satellite transmission that day: “The trek in (to Base Camp) was NOT easy. Two people had to quit on the way and virtually one hundred percent had some health issue, from GI issues, to altitude, to infections of all sorts. Luanne Freer, a volunteer MD, even had to do minor surgery on one of us.”

Stupidly, I thought this passage innocuous at the time, but I quickly realized upon inspection that I wasn’t being anonymous at all, but had, like a dope, included everyone on the team. Eric could have been inundated with endless whining relatives hungry for info, since “everyone” was sick. Worse, the staff at Explorers Web, the most influential of Everest websites, ran that snippet in their daily report, sharing it with a wider world — and gave me credit. Great.

I was horrified at what I had done, and terrified that Simo would follow through on his threat to give me the heave-ho from the climbing team. How would I repay my sponsors, two of whom had come up with $20,000 each for my climb? I felt the same shame as when I was caught red-handed by Mrs. Leibert using salty words in the second grade. I apologized to Tuck and the whole team publicly and Luanne privately the next day at the Puja ceremony. Eventually it all blew over. Whew!

Although all was forgiven and in 2008 we got along swimmingly on a personal level, this year’s “Chinese situation” brought Eric to an understandably high level of stress.

Eric painted the picture on IMG’s Everest blog on March 21, 2008. “I have said before that each year is different when it comes to Everest, and 2008 is shaping up to be no exception! Just when we were celebrating the end of civil war in Nepal and the prospects of nationwide elections this spring, it seems that world events conspire to make the Everest season unpredictable. The recent instability in Tibet and the diplomatic pressure that the Chinese have put on Nepal to close the south side of Everest makes us remember that it is not just the weather, avalanches and ice we struggle with, but also government and politics. Knock on wood, it now looks like we will get our Everest permits, with some conditions—we will likely have to come down while the Chinese are summiting with the Olympic torch from the north side. The exact details will be forthcoming and we will keep everyone updated on this.”

So, in addition to the usual logistics of sending three MI-17 helicopter charters to Shyangboche with over 22,000 pounds of food, fuel and supplies to be re-packed onto six hundred and fifty yak loads and sent to Base Camp, and packing and re-packing the oxygen shipment from Kathmandu, it sufficed to say that Eric had a few things on his mind.

Even before we left the United States, rumors abounded online and through emails about just what we climbers would face because of Chinese restrictions. Eric Simonson called on Crazy Joe, a skilled Philadelphia lawyer and strong-as-hell climber, to draft a document for all of us to sign at a team meeting at The Sherpa Lodge. The document said we agreed to toe the line on whatever rule the Chinese came up with. We don’t sign? We go home, simple as that. Simonson’s business was on the line there. If one of us summited and unfurled a “Free Tibet” flag, ruining China’s propaganda party with the Olympic flame, Eric could lose his Nepal guiding privileges—a disaster for him, as Everest is the crown jewel of his company’s focus.

Eric passed out copies of the document and we went through it line by line for two hours, debating, dissecting, even though none of us (including Eric) yet had a clue what specifics the Chinese would be demanding. OK, so they say we can’t climb when the Chinese are on their summit attempt and we can’t have any communication with the outside world, or film anything without “approval,” whatever that means. Obviously, they didn’t want even the possibility of negative news.

Jim Harter, a climber from California who made his fortune in gas, oil and real estate, finally said, “I just don’t think I can sign this.”

Simo retorted, “No problem. You can leave right now.”

The proverbial yak poop hit the fan, with angry outbursts from all sides—except from me. I signed the document without blinking, and Eric Simonson went home to Seattle.

A team acclimatization hike was scheduled for the next day, which I deferred to get to a cyber café (yes, even in the mountains of Nepal). I had Joe Bannister, my web guy in Rhode Island, scrub my dispatches, both past and present, for any stray comment that might inflame the Chinese, cause World War Three, or, worst of all, keep me from climbing Mt. Everest. Just in case, I also contacted Tom Sjogren at Explorers Web, imploring him not to print anything I had written—past or present. I recalled some choice dispatches in 2007 in which I opined politically about the Chinese invasion and subsequent annexation of Tibet in 1950, and the resultant abuses still going on today.

On his website, Tom is very committed to bringing past and present abuses to the public. (For example, he reported that in Cho Oyu Base Camp, Chinese soldiers shot and killed nuns and children who were trying to escape religious and personal persecution by going over the high mountainous pass of Nangpa La to Nepal.) On my climb, however, I would not fight that battle. I was there to climb Everest and return safely. After nearly getting the boot from the 2007 adventure in blogging, I just wanted to get my permit and climb on—without controversy.

Mark Tucker pretty much stayed out of the arguing at the meeting and shrugged apologetically when we made eye contact post-meeting. Smoothly professional, he had a wonderful mix of human understanding, competency in climbing—a seven summiter, including Everest in 1990 on the Peace Climb—and innate management skills. In 2007, I saw him do a masterful job of diffusing two potential dust-ups at Base Camp. One involved two overly testosteroned policemen trekking in with us who nearly came to blows. The other involved a notable climbing guide who came to Tuck to mediate after an altercation in the icefall. Tuck’s sincere “How can I help?” worked perfectly in those situations, and I marveled at its simplicity and power. Every team on Everest came to Tuck for advice, and he truly embodied the moniker of “Mayor of Base Camp.” Other than his penchant for unbridled wagering in non-stop dining tent poker games, he was my kind of climbing CEO.

The days and villages meandered by like silt in the Dudh Khosi river: hike a little, rest a little, rest a little more, get to a higher elevation and let the body acclimatize, drink and pee twenty-four-seven to increase red blood cell production and carry more oxygen to our starved tissue, eat everything in sight, even when not hungry, spin some prayer wheels, see a view that you just can’t believe exists in nature, repeat and repeat again.

“Traveling teaches you as much about the places you leave behind as it does the place you are visiting.” —Paul Watkins

At home, we deal with hygiene and the call of nature as just part of the day. We take the opportunity for a shower or excretion for granted. Just something that has to be done. Not so out here. Every pee or poop was a strategic act; planned, thought out, an unwelcome adventure. And showers? More mythical than real.

By the fifth day out, I felt desperate for a shower. My hair became so greasy and my odor so bad, I really needed to de-louse. But it wasn’t going to happen. Pee and poo? There was no putting those off—at least not for long. But there are certain pieces of equipment that can help. Such a device was my half-gallon collapsible pee bottle, the envy of my team. Light, space-saving, with a huge capacity and a large mouth opening for rolling over and peeing while still in the tent or the teahouse, it was kind of like having a bedpan in the hospital, but in this case, it was a luxury. There was no need to unzip a warm sleeping bag, put on boots or struggle to get out of the tent because you’ve waited until the last possible second to wizz, hoping you don’t freeze your fingers and a certain delicate body part which must be left uncovered to do its work.

More than once, I filled that gargantuan vessel to the brim before dumping it among the rocks next morning. Of course, the pee bottle didn’t help with the pooping. For that we had to exit the tent in parka and headlamp to pick our way carefully around tent stakes and lines to the temporary communal outhouse tent specially constructed by our Sherpa team. Peeing is one thing; you can always find an isolated spot. But an outhouse? We all had to use the same one. Sometimes one after the other. No leisurely reading of the paper here. No flush, either; the accumulation of the previous users was piled beneath us for all to smell.

So it didn’t help that there always seemed to be someone with a gastrointestinal problem who perfumed the little outhouse with a fragrance that even overwhelmed the cold. Above Base Camp, in Camp One and Camp Three, a poop hole was dug and marked well. In Camp Two, otherwise known as Advanced Base Camp, the Sherpa team put a small tent over the rocks, together with a can and plastic bag liner. People take turns on the really gross job of emptying that quite nasty bag into a crevasse. When I see pictures of jubilant climbers summiting Everest, I know they are probably thinking, “In a few more days I’ll be able to take a shower! I’ll be able to take a crap in a toilet!”

On the trek to Base Camp, I tried to remember people’s names, where they were from, who was trekking and who was climbing; this was a tough task, considering we had team members from Jamaica, Poland, Romania, Canada, Taiwan, and, of course, the United States. One guy I got to know, Willi, a radiologist from New York City who was originally from Korea, did not enjoy his first foray into trekking. He paid $6,500 for the trip (the fee for trekkers is lower), picked up all the required gear for at least another $2,000, took three weeks’ leave from his job in a New York City hospital—and landed smack dab in misery.

Willi just wasn’t physically or mentally prepared for the daily grind of hiking up seriously big hills with a thirty-pound pack on his back, then sleeping on the ground with a tent-mate (Gary, our trek M.D.) who snored like a slowly choking goat. Things went from bad to worse for poor Willi when altitude sickness and gastrointestinal disturbances added to his stew of unhappiness. Nobody makes it through weeks in the Himalayas unscathed from various and sundry maladies, but the Everest Base Camp trek was not the place to make your debut into outdoor adventure.

Third-world hygiene and relatively close proximity of team members make it imperative to be constantly vigilant of the state of your stomach. I learned the hard way in 2007 to Purel my hands almost every time I touched anything public, like a doorknob or a Fanta bottle. Willi, or any of us, could become contaminated from people’s hands or a yak’s back or just from whatever blew around in the air.

At other times, we just had to trust the western hygienic food prep training of our group and at the odd teahouse where we stopped for a bite. But even then, we learned to pass plates to each other with our thumbs under the plate, to minimize risk of nastiness transmission. We met the inevitable mini-epidemic at Dingboche at 14,000 feet, but by quarantining myself out of the tent and into a local teahouse, I was able to dodge that bullet. I felt glad to escape from the tent I shared with Chip for a day or two while the poor guy sorted out his malaise. Every time he opened his mouth, his sulfur-laden breath smelled like rapidly decaying eggs.

Of course, we all smelled about the same after six days on the trail; that same telltale scent remained for the entire expedition, even if we had the good fortune to have an occasional solar-powered lukewarm shower. In reality, we all smelled like a can of smashed assholes, it’s just that we were no longer terribly offended by it.

Dispatch 31 March 2008 Blessed for Everest.

Yesterday was a cool day! We left the town of Namche and had some up and down climbing for two hours before an early lunch, then bang…the big, long grind of an uphill to Tengboche and its famous monastery. We lazed a bit, then camped twenty minutes down trail in a yak pasture in Deboche. We were up early today because we had a meeting with the Rinpoche of Tengboche Monastery. We presented him with kata scarves and donations, and we each received a blessing as he placed the scarves one by one around our necks. (Rinpoche means “reincarnated lama.”) Several of us hiked up the hill a second time later in the day for a service (and a slice of cake at a small bakery). We are at about 12,000 feet and going to 14,000 feet tomorrow. Hope all is well at home. —Dr. Tim

Dispatch 1 April 2008 Blessing Bound.

Hello from Deboche (fifteen minutes and a little downhill from Tengboche Monastery). We are camped at about 12,000 feet in a beautiful spot. I saw my first view of Everest today…it’s just as momentous as it was last year. Tomorrow is a rest and acclimatization day, and it looks like we will get a blessing from the Lama at the monastery. I am really excited because he was not in last year. I am feeling quite strong and fit and taking great care of my throat by breathing through a cloth buff and sucking lozenges. It seems I will be able to dispatch a little longer. Over and out. —Tim

Dugla for lunch and Lobuche for dinner was the order of the day. The former is a village consisting of three buildings and an outhouse. Dugla is the terminus of a confluence of trails from Dingboche and Pheriche. Its location is at a very questionable, wobbly yak bridge, across a roaring patch of violently crashing water from glaciers a three-day hike away. Our world had changed from lush farmland to scrub hillsides, to above-timber-line yak grass savannas, and was now giving way to rock broken into all shapes and sizes. The roaring rivers swollen with glacier-melt were our constant companions, and their rocky banks let us know in no uncertain terms that we were nearing the nexus of their creation: the cirque of our world’s greatest mountains, including the one undisputed greatest of them all.

An hour-long gut-busting uphill stretch involving countless rocky switchbacks in increasing wind and cold brought us to the crest of a ridge. In clear weather, it was made visible miles away by thousands of colorful prayer flags and shredded kata scarves whipping about chortens, areas of contemplation and tribute to all the Himalayan climbers who have died in the mountains.

We all stopped and sat in silence, taking in the significance of the multitudes of these stone chortens or shrines, each one erected in honor of a deceased climber.

“A climb is always implicative…it points us out to ourselves.” —Pat Ament

Here is the dispatch I sent when I first came upon this place, a year earlier.

31 March 2007 15,500 feet In Memoriam.

Many people have read Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer and are therefore familiar with the tragedy that unfolded in the Everest climbing season of 1996. There was a somber feeling when we climbed a ridge and found ourselves in the memorial for climbers who had lost their lives in the Himalayas. Chortens are stone memorials standing two to twelve feet high, and there were a hundred or so. Rob Hall, Babu Chirii Sherpa, Yasuko Namba, Scott Fischer and Alex Lowe were some of the notables. The lesson for me is to be reverent and humble and to work with nature and not force anything. The summit and safe return is the objective, but if that seems doubtful l will opt for the safe return. Over and out. —Dr. Tim

I sat listening once again to the wind snap at the prayer flags and looked over those cold stones, the reminders of what happened to healthy, strong young men and women skilled in the ways of the mountains. I realized that none of them expected to die as they trekked up to Base Camp, passing this very spot. But die they did.

How do you wrap yourself around the idea of death in relation to living your dream or following your mission? I must admit that after my previous Everest experience, I was even more attentive to this reality: through 2008, two hundred and ten climbers had died on Mt. Everest. Of these, one hundred and twenty bodies remained uncovered on the upper ramparts. They all had missions on Everest, just like me. Craig John told me that while involved in a rescue high on Everest in 1994, “I gained an understanding of how and why people die up there. When you stop up there, it would be so easy to not get started again. It feels so good to stop—almost euphoric—to not move.”

I could die up there, too. It’s a crap shoot. Yet I remained confident in my ability to make good decisions when the chips were down. My experience in 2007 when I decided to turn my tail around, put it between my legs and go home was a good example. Good decisions reduce a high risk of death on The Big E. The human error or “subjective hazard” factor in climbing defines such scenarios as continuing to climb in bad weather or when sick or exhausted. I was pretty confident in my ability to minimize those risks. The big unknown for me was how my brain and lungs would do in the death zone above 25,000 feet. Will my brain swell with cerebral edema, rendering my decision making, agility, and balance roughly the same as that of a drunk driver flunking a sobriety test? I didn’t know. Nobody does. Even if you have summited an 8,000-meter peak before and performed well, there is no guarantee that you won’t get an altitude-related life-threatening disease on the next climb. There are fourteen 8,000-meter (26,000-foot) mountains in the world, and all are in the Himalayan Range in Nepal, Tibet or Pakistan.

Beyond subjective hazards, there was the more pesky issue of objective hazards: those circumstances over which you have no control—avalanches, rock fall on the Lhotse Face, icefall collapse; these are situations that can kill you, the situations that, when you are in your tent alone, get in your head and stay there all night, especially when sick or exhausted.

In 2007, Al and I stood somberly in the Western Cwm (a cwm is a Scottish term meaning “valley” and here refers to the real estate between Camp One and Camp Two at 21,500 feet) as a dead Sherpa climber’s body was trucked down the snow slope in a makeshift sled from the base of the Lhotse Face. He evidently had been hit by one of the madly careening rocks sailing off the mountain thousands of feet up. He probably never saw it coming, and it crushed his skull, killing him instantly. Days later, two Koreans were killed when their tent was avalanched off the Southwest Face behind our Camp Two. Shortly after that, an entire rope team of four Nepalis (including the first Nepali woman to summit Everest) fell to their deaths on the Lhotse Face, leaving red streaks in the snow and ice for thousands of feet.

These were some of the things on my mind as I sat on the cold stone seats on Chorten Ridge. The increasing wind chilled me into putting on my wind layer. I couldn’t help but wonder if some in our group were marching to their deaths. I wondered if my teammates regarded death as a possibility, however small, or would they do everything in their power to deny death? One by one they crested the hill and nervously milled about. We were all somber and reverent, spoke little, took a few pictures and read the brass plaques. Everest confronted us here in all its cold reality. After twenty minutes or so I shouldered my pack and moved on, alone with my thoughts.

“You cannot run away from a weakness; you must sometimes fight it out or perish; and if that is so, why not now, and where you stand.” —Robert Louis Stevenson

Lobuche is a cute little berg of five or six stone houses nestled under its namesake mountain, with a meandering stream running through it and some ponies and yaks wandering about. I think it got a bum rap in Into Thin Air, as Krakauer described it as a fetid, open sewer. Granted, we didn’t pitch our tents in town, but in the suburbia of the yak pastures that surrounded this tiny village.

We had a rest day in Lobuche so Vance, Chip and I took a little acclimatization hike on the grassy slopes above the village. We picked our way around leisurely, and gazed at the amazing scenes playing out endlessly in all directions: soaring jagged peaks with massive ice-laden shoulders; down valley, great green valleys with centuries-old pastoral farming scenes; up trail to the west of us, the jumbled stone and ice floor of the terminal snout of the Khumbu glacier emitted from Sagermatha herself, and underneath, beginning in trickle and ending in torrent: the Dudh Khosi River.

Despite the beauty around us, I needed some basic comforts by then. One more night to Base Camp, to Wheat Thins, I told myself. At this point I couldn’t wait to delve into my large duffel bags with my own space to put them in. The constant set-up and take-down of gear had gotten seriously old. I smelled like an old yak and I needed to delouse as best I could once we reached what would be our home for the bulk of the next two months: 17,300 foot Base Camp.

The last way station before Base was Gorak Shep (Dead Raven) at 16,800 feet, a cluster of three or four stone teahouses. It sat next to a vast dried lake bed and at the foot of the trekking peak Kala Patthar, at 18,500 feet. (A trekking peak is one that demands little or no technical climbing skill—basically, a hike up a long trail.). Gorak Shep is where some of the most dramatic photos of Mt. Everest have been taken. Take a picture there as the sun sets on its massive bulk, and you would swear that the mountain was molten.

We decided to get rooms at Ang Tsering’s teahouse instead of pitching the tents. I was thrilled until I saw the room: so small that Crazy Joe and I couldn’t stand or turn around at all with our debris on the floor. As soon as the sun went down, it became shockingly cold, as if we were in a meat cooler, only way smaller. To add to the fun and games, turning over in bed was a major production, as the sleeping platforms were maybe six feet in length and two feet wide. Getting out of bed to dump the pee bottle was a near-impossibility, so I held off as long as possible. To top it off, I had an altitude-induced doozy of a headache with severe nausea, and there was nary a chiropractor in sight.

I was upright at 5 AM and still feeling like a train wreck. I packed my duffel and dragged it outside into the frozen air, where I suddenly realized it was much warmer than in our miniscule stone-enclosed bedroom. What is this, a subterfuge of physics? I thought.

Vance, Chip, Crazy Joe, Mingma Sherpa and I got an early jump and headed for Base Camp. The last stretch of trail to Base Camp started at the dry lake bed at the foot of Kala Pattar and skirted the huge lateral moraine over which we had climbed on the previous day’s hike out of Lobuche. The ice floes of the Khumbu glacier have slowly built up huge piles of stone debris over the years, and they hovered over us on both sides of the trail. The stone rip-rap was elevated at least two hundred feet above us in places. We hiked on an increasingly flattened plateau of broken rock mixed with ice, which gave a characteristic turquoise hue to pools of melt water that formed and dissolved daily on the surface of the moving glacier.

The five of us followed the trail on the ridge of the left lateral moraine for the first hour, and then passed what I considered a potentially dangerous area. About fifty yards above us in an eroding cliff loomed huge boulders—half in and half out of the earth. Below us, having fallen and broken into countless pieces, were remnants of splintered rock. This whole area was in constant transition. It was only a matter of time before some of these huge crowning boulders, the size of Chevy Suburbans, gave birth in a hail of sparks and splintered stone, and wiped out whatever yaks or people were below. Needless to say, I kept a constant wary eye on this area, with a plan that if a runaway boulder came at me, I would wait until the last possible second and sprint or dive to either side to dodge the rock-fall. If the falling stones were small and unavoidable, I’d turn and take the hit on my pack rather than my person (a little trick I had learned on Mt. Rainier). Each time I passed through this shooting gallery, I breathed a sigh of relief as we turned onto the glacier proper, and safety.

I realized how much better shape I was in than last year as we blazed into Base Camp in two hours. In ten minutes, we saw the first colorful tents—already festooned with thousands of prayer flags—perched among huge gray stones.

Our Sherpa team had been hard at work for two weeks, leveling tent platforms from the ice and rock and placing small stones so water wouldn’t collect with the inevitable melting that happens as the season goes on. In addition to our individual smaller tent platforms, it took many Sherpas days to hack their way through the ice with steel bars, shovels and old ice axes to level large platforms for the communications tent, the two huge dining tents, the cook tent and the storage (movie night) tent. Despite the solid ice the Sherpas encountered, the ice floe beneath Base Camp was in continuous flux; an actual river ran beneath us. I remembered that last year, I could often hear the water running beneath my sleeping bag at night, as if someone had left a faucet on. That and the constant cracking of ice told us that Base Camp surfaces were always changing, so each team must carve out its own level spaces every year.

We wound our way through the under-construction tent city and around a yak or two, and I showed Joe where Hillary and Tenzing’s Base Camp was placed in the first ascent year of 1953. Then, Mingma proudly led us onto the steps of a mini-amphitheatre of stone steps that the Sherpas had somehow man-handled into place. Before we could extricate ourselves from our pack straps, we were clapped on the back by the rowdy, friendly-faced Sherpas who had poured out to greet us, one of whom pushed a mug of steaming lemon tea into my hands.

Jaroslaw said one day in camp, “Failing? I’m not worried about making the summit. I’m worried about not making the summit. Being here for seventy days, going through all the blood, sweat and tears and not making the summit would be an absolute disaster.” He did make it. But if he hadn’t, I wonder what he’d think of those seventy days. Sounds as if they would have been a waste of his time, a sentence he had to serve so he could get to the top.

“When you are facing in the right direction, keep putting one foot in front of the other.” —Phinjo Sherpa

Jaroslaw was a cool guy and a great teammate (and it was great fun to bust his beans), but I had a different take. I saw the fruits of a seventy-day expedition in the enjoyment of everything you can possibly experience. That’s a lesson I took from both years in Nepal. The lesson started on the long hike to Base Camp, where trekkers and climbers all got to know each other, share the environment and scenery so few others in the world are privileged to be part of, eat hot meals, crawl into sleeping bags comfortably spent, and sleep deeply.

The lesson continued as I became an inquisitive tourist, visiting ancient cities and learning about the culture. On rest days, for example, I’d join a few others interested in Buddhism for a hike up to Tengboche Monastery to take part in the services there. We’d sit in the back of the great hall, with its huge floor-to-ceiling Buddha, and hang with the monks as they sat on their little square wooden seats, wrapped in thick maroon robes against the chill of the unheated room, steam rising from their bodies as they chanted their ancient prayers. I had learned and experienced so much, and we had not even reached Base Camp yet. I was determined to drink in every aspect of those seventy days—good or bad.

“The sigh he makes is deep, a hungry air-take for the strength and perseverance all life….takes.” —Toni Morrison