Everest Basecamp 2019

12^th November: Lobuche – Gorak Shep

The official itinerary for the trek was to have a shorter day up to Gorak Shep and then climb Kala Pattar to watch the sun set later in the day.  However, the weather had been following a pattern of being sunny in the morning and then clouding up later in the day.  We all agreed that if we climbed the hill that evening, we would see nothing (that said, there had been a beautiful sunset on Nuptse the evening before).  Instead we swapped the days and would visit Everest Basecamp today and climb Kala Pattar the next day.

Neither Maurizio nor myself heard the alarm at 6:30.  I had to wake him and was running late.  It had been a difficult night, feeling bunged up and developing a sore throat.  At breakfast, most people were coughing now.  As Maurizio was now quite poorly – he couldn’t keep down the small bit of breakfast he tried – Lhakpa, our head Sherpa, agreed with him that they would set off in their own time and at their own pace, and see where it got them, while the rest of us would push off.

Looking back down the moraine

It was, as usual, cold out.  The valley was still in the shade, the insides of the bedroom window had been frozen.  After a short way up the valley, we climbed steeply onto the moraine above the   glacier.  It was hard going over a rough path which rose up and down constantly.  The route was very busy with people coming up and going down, yak trains clanking past, and occasionally people coming down on horseback – probably being evacuated for mountain sickness.  We passed the Australian group we had met in Phakding.  They were a day ahead of us and had been up at 4:30 to see the sun rise over Everest from Kala Pattar.  ‘You’ll love it,’ they called.

Dropping into Gorak Shep

Slowly plodding on, I was expecting Gorak Shep around every corner, but it took an absolute age to appear.  When it did appear, like all the high ‘villages’, it was just a collection of hotchpotch lodges clinging to the rubble of the moraine.  There was a large sandy plain in front of it that used to be a lake.  Lhakpa had caught us up.  ‘I thought you would be there by now,’ he teased.  There was a more serious message.  He was on his own as Maurizio had been unable to continue onto the moraine.  It had been very hard work from that point on, so I could understand that.  Instead he had returned to Lobuche where Lhakpa arranged for him to stay another night while we were at Gorak Shep.  Lhakpa worried that Mau would need a helicopter evacuation, and we worried for our companion too.

Famous sign outside Gorak Shep

After tea, and dropping a small amount of gear off at our lodge, we set off for basecamp.  At the far end of the ex-lake I spotted the famous sign, ‘Way to Everest B.C.’ that Merv and I had discussed earlier in the week, and cut across for a photo op, where everyone joined me.  At the end of the lake, we were back on the moraine.  The mountains huddled around us now, great white jagged peaks looming above us.  The glacier was still mostly dust and rubble, but in the distance we could see the rippling chunks of ice that looked more like a classic glacier; they signalled the bottom of the Khumbu icefall.  It was slow going again, up and down over bumpy paths.  A cold wind stirred the dust up into our faces.  The sun beat down.  People were dropping off the moraine in the direction of the icefall that now came fully into view below the hidden Western Cwm – you would only know the valley was there by flying over it or climbing up this high.  Reluctant to drop down the wrong path, and have to climb agonisingly back up, we paused until Pasang, Lhakpa’s son, arrived.  Having never been there before, he had to ask one of the other passing Sherpas if it was the right way!

Highest Shark in the world

On being told it was, we dropped down and then were on the glacier itself.  Here and there the glacial till was split to reveal the ice just a few centimetres below the stony surface.  And in a short time we finally arrived at ‘basecamp’.  It wasn’t obviously a camp as such.  There was a large, tilted rock upon which was written ‘EVEREST BASE CAMP’ and around which people thronged.  There were prayer flags stretched everywhere, memorials, pebbles with wishes and prayers written upon them, little stacks of rocks.  People queued for photos in front of the sign and we all took our turns too.  This was it, this was what we were here for, what the whole of the trek was aiming at, the bullseye for our arrows.  There we were, quivering in the centre of it.  A giant, surrounding cirque of mountains cupped the ice and the rocks, and us.  There were no tents but plenty of people, beaming and chatting, celebrating.  I took a moment alone to try to take it in.  Mostly I was gasping from the effort and the thinness of the air, but I could feel the sense of achievement starting to grow.  I had done it, after all those years of dreaming, following timorously in the footsteps of the giants that had preceded me, I had done it.

Our group at Basecamp

The lodge at Lobuche had provided us with a rudimentary packed lunch – yak cheese (actually quite nice, and actually nak cheese, yak being a male and therefore quite hard to milk), a boiled egg, chocolate bar, biscuits – so we sat somewhere slightly out of the wind to eat the meagre rations.   It soon felt cold so we set off back down, struggling back over the tumble of the moraine.  We were all suffering from the altitude and the effort.  As we inched back towards Gorak Shep, Merv tried to think of some obscure word that meant ‘endless’ but it was only some days later when I came up with ‘interminable’, which I quite liked.  It described the seemingly endless terminal moraine nicely.

Looking up the moraine

When we arrived back at the lodge I could have done with going for a sleep, but we had tea and dinner to order, and before I had chance, dinner had arrived, though I struggled through my Sherpa stew.  We sat around the main room, the yak dung stove perfuming the air, and chattered through the evening about our day’s adventure.  At 8pm, the lodge owner flicked the lights on and off to signal ‘closing time’ (and to allow the Sherpas to bunk down in that room), and we shuffled off to our cold, prison-cell rooms, feeling tired, under the weather and elated.

On Kala Pattar the next day, Everest a dark pyramid behind me