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.