Are you spontaneous like me when it comes to adjusting your day’s plans, or your lifetime destiny for that matter? Let me clarify a little; I’m a Space Cadet when it comes to making a plan and I’ve just adapted to being very flexible and minimally invested in setting my itinerary. One December I arranged for some extended time off from work to allow for a far away visit home. I thought I had prepared just sufficiently for my travels by clicking enough buttons on an airline reservation website, and I had shuffled a few official memos around my office to arrange for my absence. Literally the day I was planning to fly out I realized I didn’t actually have an airline reservation at all. I thought it was a little mysterious that my credit card was never charged and I never received any kind of confirmation. To some this might have been a devastating realization and a startling rebuke to take more personal responsibility.

With the superlative and singular terrain of Nepal it seems that casually trekking amid the jagged mountains is pretty pedestrian. There are certainly enough thrill seekers fueled on high horsepower trucks and death-defying adrenaline rushes that can make good use of Nepal’s extreme geography. Apart from the degree of personal risk involved in an expedition to the summit of Mt. Everest, there are countless combinations of normal recreational activities mutated into something insanely suicidal, but a good laugh if you survive. You could say that mountaineering to the top of Mt. Everest is the most extreme activity on the planet, but then consider that it takes months to get up there, and most of the action moves extremely slowly and you undergo prolonged trauma from the cold and shortage of oxygen. Let’s classify this less of an extreme sport and more like being a subject in a torturous medical experiment.

This past summer I had a bit of a brush with ‘celebrity’ when Pema introduced me to his good friend Dale Covington. When I first heard that name I dreaded for a moment that I was going get stuck in a conversation about some form of Seven Habits, but I was far off the mark. Stephen COVEY is another inspiring local luminary, but Mr. Covington is more famous for excelling at jumping off of perfectly good cliffs or Himalayan mountains and paragliding for a graceful and thrilling ride down to safety. The day I met Dale he was taking Pema out for a few free rides under his veteran guidance from the location of his paragliding school at the edge of a mountain slope south of Salt Lake City. My fear of heights prevails over my sense of adventure, so I passed up an offer to join them. I admit I really enjoyed watching the Over Khumbu video of Dale’s expedition to Nepal for high elevation paragliding, but that clearly exceeds my personal limit of about six feet that I can comfortably fall to the ground.

Back in the early days of this blog I mentioned how important it was to break in and test your boots before setting out on an extended hike. Rich Christiansen, our CEO (Chief Enthusiast of the Outdoors) passed on an old pair of boots to me that carried me through the whole of our trek in Nepal last fall. They were very comfortable, durable and lightweight, but over the course of unknown hundreds of miles of rugged mountain terrain the stitching on the uppers was coming undone and the traction on the soles was worn away. For the majority of miles on our hike over the uneven flagstones of the Khumbu that condition actually seemed to be an asset. The worn soles had more the effect of being like specialized rock climbing footwear that could get good traction on the varied surfaces.