As usual I found myself somewhat separated from the group as I was hiking onward to Gorak Shep. I set my pace ahead of the others, and I found myself in a bit of solitude in the grey, barren glacier valley. The trail was leading into frost and snow, and across the side streams from the river there were sheets of ice. This was clearly in an area that didn’t often thaw out and there seemed to be layers of snow and ice that had been building and slightly receding over the years. I could see a very thick buildup of icy snow wedged between some massive rocks and the hillside, and an odd little cave was left over by some process of years of melting and freezing. I wasn’t feeling such a chill anymore in my toes since I had a good hiking pace and the warm sun had tipped over the mountains and washed the grey snow in light. Since we had gotten such an early start to the day, buy mid-morning I already had the sack lunch on my mind. We had by then become familiar with the chapati bread with jam, the boiled egg, and the hearty wedge of nak cheese. After that back had been crammed and mangled inside of the pack is comes out pretty messy, but no less satisfying on the trail.

Looking back now on Lobuche we were thrilled and relieved to finally arrive, but once we saw it we were ready to quickly move on. It was a destination that we envisioned as an amazing goal, and it’s the sort of challenge you place before yourself that you don’t know how you’ll ever reach it. There were so many thousands of feet of elevation and miles of winding trails to traverse before we could get up there. As with many monumental tasks you can’t wrap your brain around all the details and all the hard work that it will take to reach it, so you just let it go and you throw yourself forward. We also had built up a lot of anticipation by hearing of the experiences of other hikers who were returning and euphoric from the joys of the relatively lower elevation. With all of this in mind we really were thrilled to realize we had passed through all the anxious anticipation, like kids making a trip to a great amusement park.