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.

Although I’ve spent a number of years of my life in Utah I’ve never actually gone to any of the fine ski resorts to go skiing. That is until this past weekend, when our chief web designer invited me to go snowboarding at Snowbird. I remember in high school noticing that a lot of the other kids disappeared several days out of the week each winter to go skiing, and then some of them would turn up hobbling back to school in a cast. Not only was it an expensive sport to get into, it seemed to me like you’d probably break something along the way. I got enough encouragement to try it out this time, and I’m glad I did. The equipment rental turned out to be a lot more expensive than if I had just gone to a movie for the afternoon, or about five all day actually. I had a great time showing off my crashing skills, but after the first couple of runs I got the hang of it. I probably won’t get out of the Chikadee run for a while, but then I’m not in a hurry to leap off of any black diamond trails.

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.

Enough about extracting surveillance photos from outlandish regions of the planet, let’s get back on the trail out of Khumjung. Most hikers will take the low road out of Namche and pass up the encounter with the Everest View Hotel and the village of Khumjung. I couldn’t say which is more challenging between the very steep route straight up, or the seemingly endless though more level trail out to the east and then north. That’s really a pointless topic to consider because you should just resign yourself to facing and overcoming never ending inclines anyway, especially the types that take you high up into the clouds, to soon slip down for a splash of the rushing river below, then back up. Regardless, once we get past Namche and Khumjung there is a nice rise up to Mong La, a brief break in the trail to sit down and gaze across the valley to Phortse. Mong La is at around 13,000 feet, and the trail down again to the river is 1,500 feet below. 1,500 feet up again on the other side brings you to the lower edge of Phortse village.