[From Val] Setting up home on a glacier

One layer after the next Down in Lukla, around 9,000 ft, your body is comfortable with shorts and a short sleeve shirt. By the time you reach ~16,300 ft, just above Lobuche, you are comfortable climbing into your sleeping bag with tech pants, fleece pants, a long john top, wind shirt, tech top, ear warmer, wool hat, buff, and fleece socks. Really it is quite comfortable to crawl into your tent, protected from the winds, and feel so good and strong at 16,000 ft, higher than the top of any mountain back home. The outer tent fly reads 19F, the inner tent 22F, our fingers read ~70F, and our cheeks clock in around 85F. The next layer is added in the middle of the night, as ~2 inches of new snow fall.

The small headaches come and then go with a little extra rest, hydration, and some caffeine from the kala chia (black tea). We drink around 4 liters a day, as our kidneys adjust to new pH levels and our bodies make more red blood cells to adjust to the low oxygen levels.

Setting up home on a glacier
When you first head to Base Camp (BC), you’re walking into a cirque surrounded by wall of mountains: Pumori, Lingtren, Khumbutse, Nuptse. You can’t even see the summit of Everest. You wonder first how you are going to get up the mountain, but then switch thoughts to where and how you are going to live for the next two months. Then you see the first tents, all set up. The ‘ground’ is not dirt, but a moving, soon-to-be melting glacier that has a layer of rocks of all sizes on it. Small, medium, large, some bigger than a car. As you make your way into camp, you see parts of your temporary home: dining tents, cook tent, yoga (or card) tent, movie (okay storage) tent. All set up with a lot of good hard labor: moving rocks by hand, swinging ice picks. Then your personal Sherpa shows you to your very own tent, in my case complete with a sit-down entry, rock chair outside for gazing at the icefall, the tent platform leveled with many small rocks to ensure that later in the season no puddles would form underneath the tent.

Once inside your tent, setting up home really begins. The big things come first: setting out the sleeping pads and bag, unrolling the rugs you bought in Namche Bazaar, locating the duffels and the packs. Then you decide where the library goes, set up the clothes drying lines, put out the crazy creek. There are the smaller decisions to be made: what will go in this pocket, or that one? Sunglasses and headlamp here, journal and mirror there, radio and pulse ox there, tissues there, batteries there, nano and glasses there… repeat 20 times. Finally there are the best things from home: putting up the framed picture, or hanging the customized prayer flags.

When returning from a rotation on the mountain, base camp especially feels like home. Where you get to take a hot shower after five days up high. Where you can sleep in until the sun hits your tent and the inside temperature jumps from 20F to 70 in 20 minutes. Where you get to use a toilet tent that isn’t perched above a crevasse. Where the dining tents have actual chairs. Where your appetite is strong. Where you don’t have to always breath through a buff. Where you get to change into clean clothes. It all feels great.

Other blogs
If you’re interested in blogs from others on our IMG team, you can check out onorbit.com/everest and ciscoeducationclimb.webone.com (login as guest with password martin).

Namaste for now… and much more when we return from our next rotation!
Val