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.

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.

Today I’ve been scrubbing through our group’s combined collection of photos from our trip through Taipei, Bangkok, Kathmandu, and our trekking to see Mt. Everest. There were 3 or 4 digital cameras between us, I was taping onto digital video, and the Strange’s brought an actual film camera (they must have borrowed from a museum). It’s wonderful looking through all of the old scenes with the perspective of a little distance, and so many of the sights were amazing and unforgettable. Of course we have probably hundreds of landscape photos featuring white-capped mountain peaks. Along our hikes we had to stop around every new turn in the trail because we would get another spectacular view. There were also a lot of memorable people we met and there were a few yaks that left an impression on us. A lot of the pictures were of us relaxing and having fun, so those must have been after we had rested and gotten warm from the day’s hike. There’s just so much to tell in the pictures, and I could go on for quite a while on many of them. Maybe I’ll feature photos here on the blog and give a little back story. In any case, I have prepared and uploaded a selection of the 200 finest photos for you to view in the SherpaTrek Gallery, along with some stunning wallpapers.

This weekend I stopped by to visit some family in the area and I was excited to report on my experiences from Nepal. I brought along a few tapes of digital video I had shot over the month, and I figured the best way to describe the whole adventure was to show them the footage. That’s a treat I’ll have for this website some day soon, but there are a lot of wobbly miscues I need to edit out first. I’d like to convey the true sense of the surroundings to them, with all the sounds and smells, but watching all of the video for the first time it seemed far removed from the muggy heat of Bangkok and the sense of dread of climbing the hill above Namche. Maybe with some editing magic and some extra action scenes I’ll be able to enhance the sense of immersion.