The Biggest Mountains

We arrived back in Namche yesterday afternoon. A lot has happened since I was able to post last, I'll try to back up and at least get all the highlights in.

We left Namche a couple weeks ago and headed up valley toward Tengboche and Island Peak. We stayed the first night in Pangboche and then moved on to Dingboche the next day. The mountain views just got better each day, as we left Namche we had great views of Everest, Lhotse and Ama Dablam. Eventually we passed right below Ama Dablam and up the valley on the north side of the mountain. Island Peak is bordered on the north side by the Lhotse Face, one of the tallest mountain faces in the world and to the south is Ama Dablam. We reached Base Camp in just a few days and took one rest day before attempting the peak. Our acclimatization was good and we didn't have any problems with altitude sickness on the route. It was strange camping on dirt at 17,000 ft. Things are definitely a little different here. The climb was pretty straight forward with minimal technical difficulties. We left camp around 3AM and got to the top about 10AM. I was feeling pretty sick, but it wasn't the altitude. I came down with a pretty bad chest cold that knocked me out for a couple of days. The altitude and cold dry air just seemed to make it even worse. At least I was still able to climb Island Peak. The view from the top was incredible, huge mountains as far as I could see in every direction. I'll post some pictures when I get back to the states.

After Island Peak we descended to Dingboche where I spent a couple of days recovering from my cold. We left Island Peak just in time as large guided groups arrived and quickly over ran the small base camp. I've got a great picture of a dozen yellow tents surrounding my small green tent. They set up so closely that the porter pounding in stakes for one of the tents poked a hole in my tent. I was less than pleased but laughed it off since there wasn't much I could do and we were leaving later that day anyways. After a couple days in Dingboche I was feeling better so we moved up to Lobuche East Basecamp. This camp was much more to our liking since we were the only ones there. We had dragged a bunch of ice climbing gear up the mountain with us but we talked to a couple of guys coming down from the top who told us the summit ridge was extremely loose, unconsolidated snow. So we left the useless ice gear we had lugged halfway around the world in camp. The climbing was more technical than on Island Peak, but not too hard. It started with some fun rock scrambling up through a series of rock bands then onto steeper snow and finally a steep and exposed snow arete. The arete topped out on the summit ridge. The true summit is along the ridge a little ways, across a deep notch and a corniced subsidiary summit. We passed on both of these because of the poor snow conditions and sat on the first summit for over an hour taking in the views. Across the valley loomed Everest, Nuptse, and the Lhotse Face. Up valley was Pumori and further away Cho Oyu. Such incredible mountains, the weather was crystal clear and dead calm so we just sat up there for awhile and tried to soak it all in. Finally we started the descent. Just above the rock bands I saw a couple of other folks down below us, as I got closer I realized it was our porters. Our porters were supposed to be in Dughla, a small village at the foot of the peak. They weren't supposed to come up to our camp until the following day, and they certainly weren't supposed to be at 18,500 ft on the mountain. Apparently they had gotten bored in Dughla and decided to come pay us a visit, finding our camp empty they had headed up the mountain to see how high they could go. No ropes, crampons, ice axes, plastic boots or any other climbing gear, they had my two ski poles between the three of them, thats it. Brian and I gave them our ice axes to help with the descent and by some miracle we made it back to the dirt without any of them taking a major spill. I still get a good laugh thinking about how ridiculous it was, I got some great pictures of that.

We descended to Dughla that night and then got to Namche yesterday. This morning we said goodbye to our porters and sent them on their way. Brian and I are planning to leave on a 10 or 12 day trek tomorrow morning up the Thame valley across Renjo Pass, down to Gokyo and then across Cho La and back into the Khumbu Valley before returning to Namche. It will be nice to hike without all of our climbing gear and without trying to explain to our porters that we don't really have a plan, we're just taking it one day at a time.

I hope everyone is doing well. I'm having an incredible time in Nepal. Hard to believe that my trip is more than half over. Its so great to wake up each morning and know that all I have to do is go hiking or climbing all day. The good life.