With only 19 days and a wake-up before we depart for Nepal we felt a subtle impression that we might want to go over our packing list to make sure we have enough Snickers bars and pee bottles. That long list of essential trekking equipment is intimidating enough on paper, but piling it up in person you start to feel like the little storage space at your feet on the plane will implode into a black hole singularity. (On international flights the airlines tend to install video control boxes under many of the seats too.) We pulled out all of our gear and marked the checklist and stuffed each item into our large duffle bags. We sorted through what we had, and found that our checklist still had a long way to go.

There are a lot of details to the essential gear list to cover all conceivable contingencies. You have to imagine yourself in the environment and think of everything you might need. Sure, you can eventually adapt to using pine needles instead of toilet paper if you forget to bring it, but forgetting to bring sun block lip balm for yourself will lead to chapped lips or lots of cooties. You also need to efficiently pack your gear to actually fit into your bags and for access at a moment’s notice. Fortunately our group has a little time left to complete the checklist and to anticipate our individual needs.

Our needs will be a little more complicated though because we’re planning on a couple of moderate elevations summits: Kala Pathar and Island Peak. We’ll require some extra safety and cold weather gear that we plan to rent once we get to the Namche bazaar. These items are already on our packing list, like crampons and a harness, but a lower elevation trekking group won’t need them. We will want to limit the heavy items in our bags on the flights into the Khumbu region as much as possible because of the weight restrictions. The greatest concern is going to be the flight from Kathmandu to Lukla, because the baggage weight limit is very restrictive at 45 kg per person, with steep overweight penalties.