I don’t know which piece of good news to share with your first. I guess I’ll postpone some of my self-promotion and give you an update on our good friend Pema. He keeps himself busy from fall to spring hiking the steep Khumbu trails of his home neighborhood in Nepal and tends to maintaining his prosperous lodges. You can be sure that he gets quite enthused when summer comes along and the heavy monsoon rain make his trekking business impractical. He absolutely loves getting out and traveling the world in the summers, as he has been doing for many years. He has made so many friends across the far corners of the globe that it takes him all summer to dash around and drop in for quick visits. For now he’s in the eastern United States, and by the end of the summer he’ll whip through here on his way to California. I suggested that either he has too many friends to visit or he should find more excuses to get away from Nepal.

The other good news is that I’ve finally updated the menus on SherpaTrek.com with links to the rest of the articles I wrote about Nepal. If you have a look now you’ll see that overall there are about 120 articles, and that’s not including the blog entries. As you can see, the list is way too long for a neatly organize menu now. The articles cover just about everything I could think of and many of the quirks I experienced in visiting Nepal and in trekking through the Khumbu region. Of course there’s a lot more to the history and culture of Nepal, but you have to admit it’s a pretty extensive collection of notes and anecdotes about the experience. I hope you will take a look through the articles and find out just how fascinating Nepal is. I enjoyed researching and writing about all of it and at the least it will be a good record of some great memories.

Utah is definitely going through its awkward phase in the change from winter to spring. The metaphor for the development phases in a person’s life is pretty obvious since the teenage years act out a brief tantrum of horrifying thunder and rebellious destruction. Once it passes the weather is sunny and mild, just like how a lot of us in America soon start wearing Dockers and we get a mortgage. The transition from fall into winter, and correspondingly our personal transition into old age, is usually very mellow. Shovan, or own Subject Matter Expert on Nepal, is excited to see the raging wind gusts, and I’m pacing around reminding everyone to save their work on their computers in case the power goes out. Shovan describes the weather patterns as being much, much different from this.

Nepal is situated at a latitude similar to the very warm Gulf of Mexico, but other factors make the weather patterns entirely different from the likes of Florida. Nepal is deeply land-locked between China and the sub-continent of India, and the crumpled terrain of the colliding tectonic plates vaults Kathmandu and the Himalayas thousand of feet higher in elevation. Nepal does not have a blustery and rainy transition into spring, rather a gradual warming with clear skies.

Ironically, the turbulent weather picks up later, as the monsoon season builds to a fury in July and continues through the whole summer. Maybe that like me since I turned rebellious and destructive later in life. It’s common sense to not set out into the wilderness during the torrential monsoon storms, just as it could be a catastrophic round of golf today on the golf course near our offices, like the unfortunate fellow we saw dashing for cover, if only he could figure out which way was up.

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.

Certainly I was concerned that I was just going to be stuck alone and far from home for my vacation. Sticking to my original plan was a bit of a stretch at that point since airline seats are scarce during peak travel seasons and last minute tickets are heinously overpriced. I wasn’t really that phased though since I’m sure I must have dropped bigger plans than that before, like becoming a doctor or a rock star. I stopped by a “brick, mortar and human being” travel agency that morning to try my luck at getting another flight out. If not home, I was open to a flight to a bombed out atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean or a bus ride across the county to a new McDonald’s I had heard about. To enable and even condone my negligence in taking positive control of my destiny there just happened to be a ticket available for the exact flight and the exact fare I had “planned” on.

Suppose you have a manic moment, restlessly shifting in the covers late one sleepless night, and you resolve that you’ve got to live life and get out to see the world you only know from snarky NPR programs and this blog. Forget about the sterile and detachted planning involved in booking an itinerary for one year from now, you want to be on a plane for old Soviet Anthrax Island or for the Terai land-roaming leeches Blood Sport next week. Your first consideration will be to disregard all of my posts from last fall about getting your vaccinations and your passport in order, as well as booking far in advance with a discount travel agency for international travel. Follow my example and obliviously check in at the last minute with some flip flops and a couple of shirts crammed into your day pack with the travel agency. You’ll have little more to worry about than aisle or window seat, and if you want to Super-Size your fries at that new McDonald’s.

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.

A quick ride (vertical drop) down Mt. Everest on a snowboard or out of a helicopter is exhilirating, and why hasn’t avalancheboarding caught on, which isn’t any more crazy than ironingboarding? If you just want to jump off of things there’s BASE or bungy jumping (reserve chute optional) and paragliding. The massive glaciers and the heavy monsoon rains create heavy runoffs and violently rushing waters, which makes for great whitewater rafting. When the snow melts and the soil dries out you can “ride” a bike or a mountainboard (a skateboard with big, knobby wheels) down the slopes. There’s the jungle safari in the lowlands, as well as being hunted for sport by the leeches. You’ll laugh, but I’m serious. Crossing the street in Kathmandu is extreme enough for me.

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.

I understand that paragliding originated from alpine skiers and rescue crews who needed a quick descent down high elevation mountains. At least that’s the rationalization they gave when they were ‘hot-dogging’ on the job. Dale now runs a top notch paragliding school here in northern Utah and he enjoys consistently favorable gliding conditions from his favorite “Point of the Mountain” staging base. He holds classes there and performs tandem flights. Each time I drive north of here to visit Salt Lake City I watch out for that certain spot and I am always amazed to see people softly gliding down or even slowly vaulting up higher as they catch onto rising thermals (no, not Long Johns). I’ve heard that the more skillful and experienced paragliders can make an extended cross-country flight up there, dangling from a big bed sheet flapping in the wind. Dale himself has managed some pretty long flights, and I’m sure he agrees it beats trying to find parking at the airport.

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.

However, my sure footing turned to a maddening debacle trying to even stay on my feet climbing the snowy and slippery base of Ama Dablam. That day was so rough that I scuffed up and unwound some sturdy stiches on the uppers. Once we got back home and we recovered and battle-damage assessed our equipment I saw that my boots were kind of ripped up and worn away, leaving them unserviceable without an overhaul. I did a little hiking about when I was in the Army before, and that’s when I learned to value my boots and to obsessively polish and maintain them. After so many road marches carrying a rucksack weighted down with batteries and training manuals the soles would scrape down to a little nub, but the Army was prepared for that.

On every base next to the dry cleaners (where you could get your BDU’s starched like industrial cardboard) you could count on finding the boot repair shop. Within a year the soles would wear away and you’d have to get a resole job, but most troops looked forward or even cheated and got it done early. The new soles, in various grades of cushion or durability, made the boots much more comfortable and durable than with the OEM materials. With this in mind I thought it would be great to get a new set of soles on the my beat up hiking boots that Richard gave me. This is where the plan unravels though, because the boots are so hi-tech that the soles a kind or morphed all the way up the sides and the meld in with the design of the uppers. The effect is that, although the boots originally cost hundreds of dollars US and the uppers could weather many season of grueling hikes, the soles are worn out and it seems there’s no way to restore them. I though about getting retreads on the old soles, but I can just imagine having a blow out the next time I get caught in the wrong conditions.

Let’s say the symptoms of spring fever suddenly flare up on you when you’ve got a free day. You dig into the back corner of your closet where you last remember seeing your boots and hiking gear, and lace up and cram in a few things into your daypack. At least here the snow has just cleared and the air and soil share a similar soggy quality. It’s not a terrible idea to get an early start conditioning to up for hiking, but then the weather conditions are still going to take some serious consideration for safety. The thing about those of us living inland and up in the mountains is that we base clothing levels on a skewed relative perspective on the outside temperature. I was reminded this winter that it get’s really cold here with a relentless chill to the point that it eventually seems normal.

Typically in very early spring, even in February some years, there is a brief interlude of warmer weather, thawing the ice and draining away the blackened slush from the streets. We go delirious and euphoric from the break in the deep freeze and we feel like dancing and frolicking outside, in our t-shirts and shorts of course. Within days reality sets back in and we strap into 6-inch thick pressurized environmental suits again for another month or two. Having lived in warmer climates like Hawaii and California I’ve seen this effect play out for gleeful vacationers. From the perspective of a local I would put on a sweater if it got into the 60s, and I’d be properly bundled up if it got any lower (fortunately a very rare situation).

So, to my amazement, there would be those visitors to the region who were perfectly thrilled to be wearing the tank tops, shorts, flip flops and sunglasses on those days I thought I should take special care not to get the sniffles. I made that long tangent just so I wouldn’t have to lecture about how you should still dress dry and warm for hiking in the early spring. I could come up with some quirk of life that I could tie in to watching out for seasonal landslides and cold weather injuries, but I don’t think telling you about having a Matsumoto’s shave ice after a hot day surfing on the north shore of Oahu will help keep focus here.

We were so amazed and thrilled with the sights and unexpected experiences every day along our trek, and we wanted to be ready with our cameras and laptops to record all the details. Rich and Cody slung out their digital cameras with every adorable Sherpa child and lumbering yak we passed, and I filmed every colorful wildflower fluttering in the breeze. Of course at the end of the day I just had to deploy the notebook computer out of my day pack and type up blog entries about adorable yaks and lumbering children. Of course if I let it go more than a day at a time I might mix up the details. It didn’t take long on our hike for us to become very mindful of the power meters on our electronic devices. We had to carefully monitor our usage and to try to power off as quickly as possible after all interesting sights and experiences had moved along. I brought a huge pack of AA sized batteries with me to make sure I had a guaranteed power source for my operation critical electronics (the GameBoy). However, keeping the computer and the video camera charged up was a technical challenge.

Nearing the end of the route on the return we met a fellow who had an ingeneous device strapped over his backpack, a flexible solar panel. He explained that he was using it just to charge up his iPod, and we lamented that we had spent so many Rupees on the hourly charges for electricity at the lodges. Considering that we were outdoors in the sun every day, it would have been such a convenience and a relief on the weight we were carrying if we each had one of those panels draped from our packs. Each of those panels could capably charge a camera or an iPod and we wouldn’t have to plot schemes and alliances to wrest control of the single power outlets in each lodge. Of course they’re probably not powerful enough to run any device directly, but they can charge up batteries over a few hours. A few of these flexible solar panels I came up with are Brunton SolarRolls, foldable Solar Panels from RadioLabs, the GSE SUNLINQ, and the Unisolar Flexible Panel. These are all fairly expensive, costing hundreds of times more than a regular alkaline battery, but then that’s the point. Who wants to carry hundreds of alkaline batteries on a long hike.

Our Sherpa guide and dear friend Pema Dorje Sherpa sends his cheery regards from Nepal and he’s very excited for the new trekking season that is building up now. Pema is a vastly experience expedition and trekking Sirdar from countless adventures through the high mountains of his home country and he loves sharing his stories common sense. He led us on a hike through the Khumbu last October and we had a very enjoyable and safe journey with his wise guidance. Of course he’s pretty well balanced with a great sense of humor and a funny laugh. Of course we won’t be able to set out for another trek soon, but Pema loves meeting and taking care of other outgoing trekking groups. For the rest of us stuck only reading about Nepal on websites, Pema is there for us and ready to send responses to questions. We’ve added a little banner button on the right panel with “Ask Pema!” Click on the banner and open up a mail client to send him a question at pema@sherpatrek.com and he’ll certainly have something to say.

There I was, flapping in the frigid wind and clutching to a chunky boulder, my jaw gaping in amazement at my personal view of Mt. Everest. That’s one (melodramatic) way to describe the pinnacle of our journey trekking through the Himalayas last fall. To be honest, I didn’t get a very clear view of anything because my legs were locking up from the chill in the gusting wind and the steep drop seemingly on all sides. I was so cold and worn from climbing the last hundred meters or so that I only sought out shelter between the rocks for relief from the elements. I had my video camera with me, and I did my best to reach up out of the rocky crevasse to record a panoramic view or the mountains and to assess just how steep the drop was just down-wind from me. Watching the footage now it’s a bewildering sweep across indistinguishable rocky terrain and a crackling audio track of the wind and the violently snapping prayer flags overloading the tiny microphone.

Of course I couldn’t stay there wedged between the rocks for long. I had to get back up, turning my face into the scorching wind, and smile for a few photos. I even had to unbutton, unzip, unstrap, and pull away the layers of protective environmental gear I was wearing over my head so you could tell it was me in the pictures. For the few moments I was standing there, setting good lighting and composition with Mt. Everest in the background of my pose, I was bare to the elements and I felt a lot like I had plunged into freezing salt water. This helped me to understand why no one ever spends very long celebrating at the top of Mt. Everest and there are never more than a few photos to record their triumph. In our group we got good souvenir photos and immediately set our minds to getting back down. We had put so much time and effort into reaching this one distinct geographic location and we were anxious to turn back and get to our slightly less freezing camp in Lobuche. Considering some other intangible achievements though, reaching the top of Kala Patthar was a formality.