On the edge of recovery, but not there yet. Still at almost 14,000′ I was exhausted, my lungs were making bad noises, and I hadn’t slept more than an hour straight in a week. Still, the days were full of amazing sights and we just ran on adrenaline.

I believe that Phortse is off the beaten path. Most trekkers return to Namche the way they came. Again, Deana knew the woman who ran the place and I’m so glad we stopped there and saw something different. The views from the trail were remarkable (that’s a new word. I’m tired of spectacular).

It was my worst night. I wasn’t sure I was going to wake up so I didn’t want to go to sleep in the last hour. Not that I had slept before that. So of course, I fell asleep and it was the one morning when nobody knocked and woke me up with ‘milk tea pleeze’ so I was a half hour late to breakfast and had to rush to get packed.

But as usual the sun was shining when we woke up, I wasn’t dead, and the only good way to get to Namche was to shoulder the pack and start walking. If I’d been at home I wouldn’t have moved from bed. But I was still in the middle of nowhere in Nepal so it wasn’t worth thinking about.

The world was turning green again.

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.

A little drama crept in here. Katie had been suffering from altitude sickness. She’d received oxygen during the night at Gorak Shep and Deana had decided she needed to go down the day before we went to Base Camp. She walked down with a Sherpa.

Andy had been steadily declining for days but somehow forced himself to get to Base Camp with us. That evening he took a turn for the worse and Deana decided he needed to be sent down on a pony the next morning, before we all left. He was not well enough to walk all the way to Pheriche and apparently a helicopter could not fly safely to Gorak Shep.

We awoke to find ourselves in a snowstorm and high winds. Andy set off first thing on the pony, with Deana, two Sherpas, and Abby in tow. Seemed to me we were running low on Sherpas, because Barbara had her own personal one. No sooner had we left the tea house than Barbara went running past me, headed back inside, agitated because she couldn’t breathe.

We put on our warmest clothes, set out down the mountain, and the rest of us tried to stay more or less together. The trail was really slippery and steep and we soon learned if we didn’t want to slide down the mountain on our backsides we needed to NOT walk on the trail. The yaks and dzokios just added to the mayhem by coming down the trail too, except that they were the most sure footed of us all. And then there was that time that I was waiting for a yak train to pass, and turned to my right to see Hilly and the twins beating with their hiking poles on a yak because they thought it was getting too close. Brain damage.

I felt all day like all we needed was for someone to get hurt (2 more Sherpas to fix this) and/or for the fog to set in and for us to lose visibility and we would be in a real fix. Fortunately we didn’t have to explore this option.

From having my own picture of the iconic sign ‘way to Everest BC’ to walking on the Khumbu glacier to finally standing at base camp (or at least next to a big rock with “EBC” written on it) this was the other signature day. The pictures speak for themselves.

Dawa, our lead Sherpa, at Everest base camp, 20Oct2011.  Very cold on the Kuhmbu glacier. All the best pics are still in my camera.

We climbed Kala Patar (about 18,400′) the day before and got spectacular views of Everest and the surrounding peaks. Arduous climb after so many days at altitude, cold nights, and long daily hikes. Arduous for us rookie trekkers, that is. Gave me a whole new respect for what real mountain climbers bear up to for months on end.

More views for the memory books. I had a *special* bedspread…”the best love”. wtf??

And the short walk to the long drop. This picture is uncharacteristically clean, but treacherously frozen.

The highest tea house (about 17,000 feet), where we spent two freezing, filthy nights before and after reaching Base Camp. Bronchitis, Khumbu cough, no sleep, no oxygen. The worst drop toilets of the trip. Nicknamed “Satan’s rectum’ by Chris. That took top honors for creativity and fidelity. Reminded me of the star wars bar scene, except the star wars bar was clean and most of the aliens were friendly.

More exhibits from high altitude: pink puffs (??), a meal of yak steak, fries, bok choy and pizza. Thanks Tara for remembering to take pictures.