Sancho is aparently a local or regional version of mentholatum. Remember images of grandpa putting a towel over his head, over a bowl of steaming water, with a weird medicine smell rising in the air? Well that’s just what they had us do in Phortse to treat our coughing and wheezing (when it wasn’t HAPE or HACE. but that’s another story).

Tara demonstrates:

Another monastery along the way. We ducked in, and then stopped at a tea house nearby for lunch.

After Andy and Abby were airborne, we were on the trail. It was sunny and the air warmed quickly. At almost 14,000′ we were still above the treeline but the low growing plants were back and the landscape felt more alive, unlike the arctic, rocky, glacier we had come from the day before.

We walked near the river for most of the day doing our ‘Nepali flat’ thing…going up and down and winding up at about the same altitude at the end of the day as when we started.

We re-crossed Lobuche pass and stopped on the way down at Lobuche for a quick lunch (with my altitude and sickness-addled brain it took most of lunch to realize we had been there before). We set back out in the snow, and reached Pheriche in the late afternoon. This was to have been one of our shortest days in good weather, but it was a high exertion day. I felt so bad I could think of nothing other than getting this day over with and was the first to arrive. Took a shower, and crawled into the sleeping bag before dinner. Too bad there was a full bar at the tea house that we never touched.

Katie was there, looking and feeling great. Amazing what a couple of thousand feet descent can do for the body. Except that it didn’t do anything for mine that night.

By the next morning the storm had blown through and we were treated to another spectacular mountain view. Right after breakfast, Andy’s helo arrived and soon he and Abby were airborne to Kathmandu and some medical attention.