We spent an extra “rest” day in Pheriche for acclimatization. Everyone else was doing pretty well with the elevation, but I got bad headache and started taking Diamox. I stayed behind at the lodge while everyone else shot straight up the hills to the east for a day hike, sort of in the spirit of scouting out and discovering the new countryside. They had a fair impression of just how high the “hills” reached, but as they reached a new ridge they felt the next ledges up drew them on. They were gone quite a long time, all morning and into the afternoon. Their curiosity and adventure took them over 3,000 feet above Pheriche (though they claim it was more like 4,000 feet up), so they aggressively challenged their physiological dependence on oxygen. I, on the other hand, was starting to feel a little bored and lonely, with only the sound of the breeze brushing the tightly trimmed grass. It was a cloudy day, oh, and I was on some mysterious pharmaceuticals, so the whole world felt kind of sterile and subdued. I know I was wrong about anything within a few hundred miles being sterile.

Pheriche is where we started to get serious about dealing with the effects of the altitude. At 14,000 feet and above the effects were no longer a myth for us. I, for one, had a terrible night with a splitting headache, and after an unbearable wait until morning I raided Gaye’s stash of ibuprofin and diamox pills. There is, of course, the a clinic in Pheriche devoted to treating and educating hikers regarding headaches and acclimatization. I got some very informative background information on high altitude headaches from Dr. Lipmen, who was leading a pharmaceutical trial up there. We also met Christina, who was actually on her way down from Lobuche and Kala Patar, but actually, even further “up the trail.” She’s from Georgia, but she had spent the summer in sourthern China at the Utahloy International School, which is in Zengcheng, near Hong Kong.

Trekking in the Himalayas of Nepal last October each of us in our group had magical, surreal moments when the moonlight shimmered from the snowy peaks reaching above 16,000 feet. Being back in wintry mountains of Utah again I’ve caught a few subtle moments like that, though they were hidden away from sight by the clashing light pollution of the city. Driving late at night on a freeway running parallel to the edge of the mountain range with clear skies and a full moon I noticed the same silvery sheen I remembered from my nights camping in Pheriche in the Khumbu. As we had finished our long hike in the late afternoon to reach the lodge in Pheriche we saw the skies already turning to the warm colors of dusk, but that the air was quickly falling to a brisk chill as the sun was setting behind the stark peaks. We put our minds to setting up our tents and arranging our gear for the night, then we warmed next to the stove in the dining room of the lodge. It was soon dark outside, except for the brilliant, full moon rolling up into the sky.

Next on our itinerary for exploration and discovery is to put Pangboche behind us and to aim for the next camp in Pheriche. Actually, in hindsight we can say that we didn’t really leave everything from Pangboche behind because some of us picked up a little bug in the digestive track and each of us spent a few days of our own high level, internal diplomatic talks with the bacteria negotiating territorial ownership. Richard was hit hardest, and we traced the cause back to the holy water from Mt. Kailash that we all drank. There was a lot more positive than negative that we brought with us, so we were invigorated to progress on our journey. Remember what I said about the landscape at Phortse starting seem a little different. Well, as we hiked along the river valley norteast, parallel to the Imja Khola, we were straddling the tree line, and we were clearly passing into a different ecological system. Apparently we were wandering into fringes of the realm of aged, jagged boulders with colorful colonies of lichen. We were finding the landscape a bit drab as our eyes were adjusting to the new, subdued range of colors, with the rich green of the trees washing away into faded, dry grass.