“Passion is what makes life interesting, what ignites our soul, drives our curiosity, fuels our love and carries our friendship, stimulates our intellect, and pushes our limit…A passion for life is contagious and uplifting. Passion cuts both ways… Those that make you feel on top of the world are equally able to turn it upside down.” – Jon Krakauer
The most surreal party I ever went to: Drank too much, spent all my money, and then ended up sleeping in a field. No, this isn’t some weird WordPress prompt – just a memory that popped up from telling climbing stories.
After we left my friends, Phil and Sue, and the other climbers in their group, at Everest Base Camp in March 2001, those of us who had trekked in with them headed back down the 30 mile route to hike out. I believe what took us 12 days to ascend while taking the time to acclimatize to the altitude, took us only 4 days to walk back.
Of course, we felt better and better as we descended. At our highest point, climbing a mountain called Kala Patar along the way with an altitude of 18,200 feet, the air contains about 45% of the oxygen that you would find at sea level but as we descended it increased by about 3% for every 1,000 feet of elevation. Our bodies had responded to the thin air by producing more red blood cells, and though they go back to normal after about a week at home, in the meantime, they combined with the denser air to make us feel GREAT.
On the way back down, we spent one night at a tea house at about 15,000 feet. After setting up our tents in the field, my fellow trekkers and I went into the main room for dinner and discovered that if you knocked on the shuttered door to the kitchen, you could order beer.
This was not the first time that the Sherpa at the hut had seen trekkers euphoric with a little more oxygen so they broke out the boom box with the Phil Collins tape. As we danced to Sussudio, practiced the white man’s overbite (imagine tall men jutting their jaws out to be funky), and generally cut loose, we kept on knocking on the shuttered door to order more beer.
Of course beer was relatively expensive. Everything had to be carried in on the backs of men or beasts so the higher up the hut, the more costly items were. I remember exhausting my cash on hand with the first round but fortunately my trekking friends, Dave and John, funded the next couple.
I’m not sure of the physiology of the next part, but alcohol packs a wallop at altitude, at least for me. I think it only took two or three cans of beers and a few flips of the Phil Collins tape and I was dancing on thin air. Shortly thereafter, I crawled into my tent and slept in a field. And the next morning woke up with a mountain of a headache.
Drank too much, spent all my money, and slept in a field. A party with altitude.
For another story about recovering from something else silly I did at high-altitude, please check out my Heart of the Matter Post: Yay, Yeah, Whatever.
Surprised By Joy 