Richard and Pema have something amazing in common. They are both fathers to great families. Richard and Gaye have five boys, the oldest 14. Pema has two boys and two daughters, the oldest about 20. Pema’s daughters are of course out of the house and off to college, while his boys are also out of the house. They spend most of the year in a boarding school in Kathmandu. Rich’s two oldest boys and Pema’s boys are getting special time off from school to come along on our trek and even the full hike up Kalla Pathar. As I’ve mentioned before, we’ll be backing off of even a conservative pace at gaining elevation for our trek. The standard is between 1,000 and 1,500 feet per day of elevation gain, but our plan is to keep that down to 700 feet daily. Now that I think about it, gosh, that’s almost nothing. Of course we won’t just scuffle up a few steps and plant a new camp, but that’s really going to drag on.

Over the summer as the days passed I watched for the first signs of a change in season to fall here in Utah. Just a few weeks ago I noticed the slightest change in the colors at the top of one of the peaks nearby, and now it has cascaded half way down to the valley. The change was gradual, and I start to imagine how different the landscape will look when I get back from Nepal at the very end of October. Typically the mountains all have a light blanket of snow and you have to start dressing pretty warm. (I dread this because I’ve lived around palm trees for the past 14 years.) The 30 days I’ll be gone to Nepal is not a short stretch of time, so I need to mentally and practically prepare for being gone that long.

I have talked with Richard and Gaye about the experience in Nepal with the concern that all of the activity will be really stressful. Traveling so far to get there, dealing with the extreme time zone shift, and getting into the country of Nepal will definitely be a shock to the system, no way to avoid that. It’s going to be a bit of work keeping track of documents, equipment, and people too. We have a pretty good feeling that we’re logistically prepared though (except for the fact that I still have no passport). Gaye assures me that once we get up above Lukla and the jitters wear off we’ll set out on a very conservative pace. We’ll have two young teenagers with us, so we plan to hold way back on the daily pace. We’ll get a little routine going, and we’ll soon find that we only have a little light physical exertion, and that mentally we’ll be free to let the stress clear out that we brought with us.

Today was a great day for shopping for a lot of minor yet very significant gear for the trek in Nepal. Of course I’m very fortunate that Richard already has pretty deep pile (literally) of hiking gear, so a lot of the major items are covered: trekking clothes, sleeping bags, day packs, bottles, tents, and so on. Pema was randomly reiterating all the time that I’ll definitely need some thermal underwear, and it sounds like he knows what he’s talking about. I imagine he literally froze his behind off at some point. Fortunately I have had the great experience in the past to gear up for US Army field exercises, and I grew to love some of the cold weather specialties they provided. The keyword for then and for today’s shopping spree was “polypro” or polypropylene. This amazing engineered material has found countless applications, from the Tic Tacs lids to polymer banknotes in Australia. Amazingly it is one of the most common components in cold weather and water wicking gear. Just about everything I bought today had a substantial content of this plastic material.