20,305 Feet and Negative 20 Degrees

We just returned from an amazing mountaineering expedition in the Everest region. Neither of us had climbed with crampons and ice axes before, so everything about it was new for both of us. We climbed a peak known by the locals as Imja Tse and by tourists as Island Peak. We're not sure why it has two names, but it's not uncommon in this region. Mt. Everest is known by Nepalese as Sagarmatha, "Goddess, Mother of the Sky" and by Tibetans as Chomolungma, "Goddess, Mother of the Earth."

We started the adventure by flying from Kathmandu to Lukla. Wow! That was as nerving and exciting as surviving our jeep ride on the cliff edge earlier this month as we finished the Annapurna Circuit trek. Feeling nervous about the flight landing was valid since within a few weeks before our flight there was a plane crash landing in Lukla that killed all passengers aboard. After flying across the edge of mountain peaks with the Himalayas jetting up in the background, we took a nose dive down toward a short landing strip approximately 1730 feet long. One guy we met on the Annapurna Circuit said he'd hiked to Everest Base Camp and that he'd rather land on an air craft carrier than at the Lukla Airport. That seemed like a good claim as we landed, but after getting out of the plane and looking the airport over, we decided the Lukla landing strip is probably at least 2-3 times the landing distance of an aircraft carrier. (After looking up some facts online, it looks like an aircraft carrier landing is approximately 5 1/2 times shorter than the Lukla Airport landing strip). The landing strip in Lukla is so short because right before the landing is a cliff dropping below and right after is a cliff overhead, so there's no room for margin of error. The landing strip is at a slight slope of 12%, so when you take back off it feels kind of like a ski jump - minus the snow. So that was our exciting beginning of our second two week trek. We got some good video footage at the airport, but for some reason, our only photo isn't that great. It still gives and idea of the airport, so we felt like posting it. We're standing part way up the hill that begins immediately at the top end of the landing strip.

We seemed to be used to the altitude since we'd already spent some time in Tibet at Everest Base Camp and spent the beginning of October trekking the Annapurna Circuit that went up to 17,760 feet, so we ascended up the path faster than we expected. Also, after we returned from Annapurna, Rusty had the ureter stint removed from his kidney which had agitated him throughout the two week Annapurna trek, so he was doing much better. We both felt in good health and unaffected by altitude all the way until the night before our climb when Rusty finally caught someone's sore throat, cough and upset stomach. That was kind of disappointing as we had survived the miserable cess pool tea houses of the Everest region all the way up until the most important night; however, after a bathroom break, Rusty braved it and performed better on our climb than Kelsi. Rusty managed to pass his sore throat on to Kelsi, but we're not sure if Kelsi's cough came from Rusty or from heaving in so much cold air at 20,000 feet trying to climb a vertical wall of ice. We got better video of the vertical section than photos, but below are a couple photos during our climb. This photo shows where we're hooked up to the fixed ropes ascending with jumars which only move up the rope, but will not allow you to slide down.

The following photo was somewhere below the fixed ropes as we never were unclipped from the ropes near the top of Island Peak since there were steep icy drop offs on both sides from the moment we clipped in all the way to the top. Since we started the climb at 2 AM, we had to stop to put sunblock on right after the sunrise on a ledge where we were clipped in. Rusty managed to loose one glove shell and a water bottle over the icy edge which we weren't able to retrieve. Luckily he had a fleece glove lining and we had superbly warm and unwindy weather, so he managed without freezing his fingers.

Kelsi was shocked that the climb was way harder than anticipated since we were told that it was just a "beginner's peak" and we had just finished the 12 day trek up to 17,760 feet a couple weeks ago so we were feeling fairly strong. However, Kelsi was heaving like a 90 year old and took three hours to climb the final strenuous ascent of nearly 330 feet to the summit ridge. Our guide estimated it would take us five hours to summit, but it ended up taking six and a half hours due to Kelsi bonking the final stretch. After everything, we learned from several experienced mountaineers that Island Peak isn't really a beginning peak after all, and actually has some pretty technical aspects, in addition to the extreme elevation. Here's our certificates for successful ascent:

Below is a photo of Island Peak from the base. We climbed 3615 feet starting at 16,690 feet from base camp. The summit is 20,305 feet high, just 15 feet lower than North America's highest peak, Mt. McKinley (20,320) in Alaska. The peak is actually an extension of the ridge coming down off the south end of Lhotse, which is connected to Everest via the South Col. In the photo below, the ridge to the left links straight up to Lhotse. We liked to think of Island Peak as Everest's baby since it's kind of an offshoot down just two ridges and 8724 feet lower. If you've ever hiked Mt. Olympus in SLC, UT, you may have an idea of how steep the easiest part of this climb is. The first half of the climb was very steep hiking with a lot of scrambling over rocks until we came to the snow line where we put on our crampons and roped to our guide until we reached the fixed line leading up a vertical ice wall to the summit. We had a short break in steepness as we crossed a beautiful glacier just before the fixed ropes.

We had to spend a couple nights along the trail acclimatizing, so we read quite a bit. We were lucky this lodge had a small library since only Rusty brought one small book as we didn't have a porter this time. We felt Rusty was doing well enough in his recovery to carry his own bag this time.

Carrying all your own stuff trekking around for two weeks was quite a work out! The exercise combined with terrible food made us loose a few pounds. Rusty claims to have lost 10 pounds. Kelsi claims to have made up for lost pounds by gaining muscle and is ripped!!! :) We spent a few nights reminiscing about our mom's great food back home naming specific dishes while eating the nastiest food ever since Mongolia. Tea houses in the Everest region are miserable cess pools of sick people and sick food. We went to bed hungry a couple of nights after we couldn't eat more than 2 bites of the stuff they served us. And they charged ridiculous prices for the inedible stuff. We understand we should pay for how hard it is to get food up there as there are no vehicles and only small planes with limited space and weight arriving in Lukla, but it would have been nice if it was at least palatable. We were even willing to pay $2 for a Snickers when the $5 meal of a mixture of everyone else's leftover soup thrown into our bowl made us gag. One night our soup seriously tasted like leftover garlic soup mixed with someone else's left over noodle soup turned to mush mixed with potato soup, kerosene, teflon, salt, more salt, yak dung and bacteria. We tried to not complain too much since it's part of the experience of traveling, but the food on this trek was unbelievably disgusting and expensive! We started getting wise and ordering plain boiled noodles and boiled eggs hoping they couldn't get that too nasty nor masked from being off someone else's uneaten plate. Kelsi's family may not believe this, but she's starting to eat eggs regularly and even liking them! Who knows what part of this is growing up and what part is being so deprived that eggs have started tasting heavenly.

The suffering was still worth the climb and the experience in the Everest region. We didn't take the 5 extra days to hike up to Everest base camp from the Nepal side since we'd already been there in Tibet and we're ready to move on to warmer weather! (Since the torturous Utah winter last year, we only had about one month of summer in July before taking off to Mongolia where we had snow August 18th! Then we've been chasing cold weather in the Himalaya's since. Rusty's finally as tired of being cold as Kelsi).

Here's another cool photo from the trek up to Island Peak. This is in Tengboche, which has the most famous monastery of the Everest region. The highest looking peak on the right side of the photo is Ama Dablam, our favorite peak aesthetically. You can see Everest peeking up just to the left of the farthest left monk. There's a ridge just below Everest's peak that follows along up to the right of the same monk to Lhotse. You can't see Island Peak in this photo, but it's located just below Lhotse around behind Ama Dablam.

The photo below was from a really fun festival that began in Kathmandu the evening before we took off to Lukla. It was called the "Light Festival." It was kind of a combo of our Halloween, Christmas and New Year's. It was like Halloween in that all the children were going around singing and dancing for money - kind of like trick-or-treating except they didn't wear costumes. It was like Christmas because everyone decorated everything with lights, flowers and other things to make everything festive and decorative. It was like New Year's in that it was one of the local religion's New Year. Different cultures sometimes go off different calendars than ours.