Everest – Surprised By Joy

Party With Altitude

June 12, 2023June 13, 2023Posted in life lessonsTagged adventure, Everest, Lifestyle39 Comments

“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.

Getting a Boost

July 11, 2021Posted in meditationTagged breath, climbing, Delight, Everest, hardship, inspiration, meditation

“Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.” – C.S. Lewis

When I trekked to Everest Base Camp in 2001, I spent 15 days at or above 10,000 feet. In those days, my body produced more red blood cells to try to make up for the lack of the oxygen in the air. When I returned to sea level everything felt so much easier because of my body’s improved ability to deliver oxygen. Walking was like floating over the ground. Climbing a hill seemed like a mild little bump in my stride. My hardest workout felt like I could do it twice.

Two things happened this weekend that made me think we are going to experience a post-pandemic boost in the same way. First my mom’s retirement community has started allowed children to visit again. They have to be masked and go right up to my mom’s apartment but we can go spend time with her as a family again! The second thing is that our neighborhood community center is hosting food trucks in the parking lots on Friday nights so we have a little bit of community gathering outside again.

After the lockdown for 16 months, these things make life just feel easier. Although the pandemic has affected us all differently, I think it’s fair to say that we’ve all been impacted in one way or another. All the things we’ve done to cope have been challenging – we’ve adopted new technology, grieved the way life used to be, changed our patterns for shopping, eating out, going to school and work, lost jobs or found new ones, meditated, prayed and showed up differently. So I celebrate the moments when we all get that boost where life feels like it’s a piece of cake.

Of course getting to Everest base camp and gaining that acclimatization isn’t easy. On our trip, two women turned back on the second day and on the fifth day, Bill from Michigan got sick and had to stay at a local clinic until we picked him up on our way down. The day before we trekked into base camp, several of us were to feel well enough to climb Kala Patar, an 18,200 feet peak with great views of Mt. Everest but there were a couple of folks with headaches so thunderous they didn’t want to leave their tents. And so it is with the pandemic, I grieve for those that didn’t make it, thank the Universe that we are still here and enjoy the moments where everything feels easy!

Day of Rest

May 16, 2021Posted in meditationTagged climbing, death, Everest, faith, inspiration, rest, restoration

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Twenty years ago at this time of year I trekked to Everest Base Camp with a couple of my friends who were attempting an Everest summit. It’s a thirty mile trek through beautiful country, crossing over raging rivers on precarious bridges, stopping at little Nepalese villages, staying near Buddhists monasteries with everything (trees, people, commerce) getting sparser and sparser the higher you go. Our rhythm would be to trek one day and rest the next because the climbers needed to let their bodies acclimatize to the thin air.

It was interesting to see what everyone chose to do on the rest day – lie in tents and listen to music or read, try to wash clothes or take a shower if you could find facilities, hike around the local area, go into a little village if one was nearby, play cards, or sit around a tea house table telling stories. It was a day that we weren’t on the move so there was no schedule. I usually would chose some alone time and then some time listening to stories. Amongst mountain guides, especially the ones I was with that trip, the ability to tell stories is nearly as good as their ability to climb.

Thinking back on that trek, I think of not only the amazing adventure and incredible views but the practice of the day of rest. Because we all need that day of rest to restore our spirits and bodies before we can climb again. But at home, the choices are too many and the pace too hectic that I often forget to celebrate the day of rest. So I’m inspired by my choices on that trip – spend a little time alone meditating and then swapping stories with others, even if this time it’s on a blog.

One day at about 15,000 feet of elevation we were trekking to our next camp site when we came across this football sized flat space where rock cairns had been created for people who had died on the mountain. I’m at a loss to explain the intensity of how sacred that place felt. It was, to say the least, an impressive reminder that we will all meet our ultimate resting place and until then, we would be well served to celebrate this sacred life with a day of rest from time to time.