Trekking in the High Himalaya
Dateline: April 2nd, 2010
I took my second dose of Diamox last night – about an hour-and-a-half before going to bed – and was rewarded with the best night of sleep I've had since my first night in Phakding (now one-thousand-seven-hundred-and-thirty vertical metres below.) I still awoke every few hours but my sleep felt deeper and I got out of bed at 0645, feeling more refreshed than I have in days. I could have slept in longer, but other people in the lodge – and the campers in the back field outside my window – started moving around at 0530 or so.
Despite feeling so good this morning, I had my concerns about the day ahead. In particular, I was nervous about how my body would handle the six-hundred-vertical-metre gain in altitude today – a feeling not helped by the fact that members of Team Britain were heard throwing up in the back field whilst I got dressed. But I pushed these thoughts out of my head as I ate breakfast. My head was pain-free and clear. I was hungry as balls. I felt normal.
After breakfast, I downed another 125mg of Diamox and got back out on the trail. My strategy with the drugs is simple: I'm going to follow the same dosage I was on in Peru – 125mg every twelve hours – until I start descending. Based on that, I should only be on Diamox for another two days – four pills total out of the ten I purchased back in Namche Bazaar.
At 0800 we were on our way up to Lobuche, headed for our last night before our final push to Everest Base Camp, a night we would be spending just a hair short of 5,000m in altitude. To start off the day, we trekked up to the ridge overlooking Dingboche, along the same path we'd covered during our previous day's acclimatisation hike. Like yesterday, it was a slow and steady ascent, made just a little more difficult this time around as I had on my full twenty-pound backpack.
Once we were over the ridge, the trail looked like it snaked its way across flat tundra – a barren landscape punctuated by the occasional boulder and ground-hugging rhododendron bush. Looks can be somewhat deceiving. After an hour's worth of hiking across that flat wasteland, I turned around to see that we were a good fifty to seventy-five metres above the ridge. Still, as gentle as that slope was, "slow and steady" ruled the day. Given the ever-increasing altitude, it was taking me longer to recover a reasonable heart and breathing rate after sharp climbs, and I wasn't moving nearly as fast on flat sections as I was when we were just five-hundred vertical metres lower. But as slow as I felt my pace was, we were still making good time in relation to other trekkers on the trail.
After a further three hours of trekking, we forded a small glacial river – formed by ice-melt off the Khumbu Glacier – and made the short climb into the village of Dughla. We were at the halfway point between Dingboche and Lobuche, both by distance and by altitude.
Calling Dughla a "village" highly implies that there are more than two or three buildings. This is not the case. To be fair, the discrepancy between Dughla's designation and the relation is due less to a misnomer on the part of Nepali surveyors, and more to the fact that a flash flood washed away most of the village as recently as 2007.
Speaking of floods, I had a paranoid fear that I was going to be washed away by a wall of water whilst lying in bed this morning. While perusing my Trekking in the Nepal Himalaya guide yesterday afternoon, I read a blurb about the dangers of global warming and the shrinking glaciers in the high Himalaya. As the glaciers melt and recede, the run off ends up in glacial lakes, held back by natural dams formed from the terminal moraine of the glaciers.
The danger is that these dams cannot continue to hold as the volume of water in the glacial lakes increases. Of particular concern is the Imja Tsho, at the foot of the Imja Glacier. Imja Tsho is the fastest growing lake in the Himalaya. When (not if) the terminal moraine dam blows, the subsequent flood will tear through the Chhuking Valley, with communities like Dingboche, Pheriche and many points south on the Everest trekking route right in the path of the vertical tsunami.
Around 0600, I was awoken by a wall of sound – something that sounded disturbingly in my mind like a gigantic wave washing down the valley. I started to sweat but stayed put in bed. If the sound really was that of a glacial lake outburst flood, there was nothing I could do. There was no higher ground I could run to fast enough. I just laid there in bed, wondering what the news coverage would look like in the papers and on TV, and what type of disaster relief effort would be mounted. Since I'm sitting here writing this, obviously the dam didn't blow. I never did, however, figure out what that noise was.
Memorials
At Dughla we stopped off for a rest and refuelling stop. Santosh and I had some tea, while Arun sat down and hovered down two bowls of soup noodles. After the forty-minute rest stop, we continued to climb up the moraine towards Lobuche. Slow and steady became slower and somewhat less steady. Even though the ground distance between Dughla and Lobuche is only two kilometres, we had to ascend three-hundred vertical metres in that span. Trudging up that 15 grade slope was slow work, punctuated with plenty of rest stops. It took us about an hour and fifteen minutes to get to the top of the moraine, where numerous memorial chortens were scattered all over the plain, memorialising climbers who had lost their lives on Mount Everest. The memorials included one dedicated to Scott Fischer, leader of the Mountain Madness expedition during the 1996 Everest Disaster. The place was sobering.
In Memory of Scott Fischer
We spent fifteen minutes paying our respects at the memorials, before continuing on towards Lobuche by following the moraine alongside the Khumbu Glacier. After a thirty-minute ascent, we arrived at the Kala Patthar Lodge. We finished the journey today in about four-and-a-half hours, getting into Lobuche at 1230, or just in time for lunch. Excellent timing since I'd had nothing during the trek except for a mini Crunch bar and a taste of Arun's soup noodles at Dughla. I was starving. I decided to break up the monotony by ordering a huge plate of mashed potatoes, served with two fried eggs on top. With a good dollop of ketchup on top of all, that plate was a slice of heaven to my carbohydrate-starved and oh-my-God-I'm-so-sick-of-daal-bhat-ridden body.
While it's not surprising to me that the temperature is dropping as we climb higher into the Himalaya, I have to say that I'm finding Lobuche to be particularly cold. The common area of the lodge is prone to drafts, and the heaters weren't lit until 1800, or just before sundown. I spent most of the evening huddled around the warmth.
As the villages get smaller and smaller, the teahouses get busier and busier. In addition to the groups in from Dingboche, numbers were swelled by those that had stayed in Pheriche the previous evening. The common room is a cacophony of different languages, a melange of different nationalities. We had Russians, Germans, French, English, Nepalese, Dutch, Norwegians, Austrians, Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders and Israelis. And those were just all the people I met. The Russian couple carried their Yorkshire terrier all the way up. Guess he/she/it makes for a good, living, hot-water bottle during the nights.
The Kala Patthar Lodge, Lobuche
While we aren't camping or roughing it, this label of "teahouse trekking" makes it sound more comfortable that it is. The beds are wooden boards with thin foam mattresses. Electricity is scarce, and the heating is basic. You have to get used to the smells: the squat toilets, the dozens of unwashed trekkers, the yak dung used for fuel inthe heaters, and all the kerosene fire starter. This trek is not for those used to five-star comforts. Hell, maybe even just the one-star comforts. Stains on clothing mean nothing. Most people haven't showered since Namche Bazaar. We all bloody stink.
Holland struck me as incredibly peculiar while I was chatting with him this afternoon; either he can't grow a lick of facial hair, or he's the only man I've seen on the Everest trek who has remotely bothered to shave.
Altitude Stats:
- Starting Altitude: 4,335m
- Ending Altitude: 4,925m
- Maximum Altitude: 4,895m
- Minimum Altitude: 4,335m
- Total Ascent: 675m
- Total Descent: 80m
Related Entries:
1. Trekking in the Solukhumbu - Day 6: Giving In to the Drugs
2. Trekking in the Solukhumbu - Day 5: Above the Tree Line
3. Trekking in the Solukhumbu - Day 4: Hot and Cold; Up and Down
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