The first few days were in Kathmandu to get organized. We had a couple down days to visit Pokhara.
Phewa Lake in Pokhara
Farmside near Pokhara
Paddle boats on Lake Phewa. We returned one of these late at night.
Sunrise over Pokhara.
Nighttime in Pokhara
We flew into Lukla to begin a 20 day trek and mountaineering adventure. We started on the path to everest base camp, then took some detours across some of the high passes. These are select pictures I took 10 years ago that I've revisited with fresh eyes.
First steps into Lukla after getting off the plane.
Valley views on the way to Namche Bazaar
Namche Bazaar
Up past Phortse
Trekking towards Gokyo
Nick dead. Cholatse in the back.
Once we were about a week into hiking between guest houses and small villages, we started getting higher into the alpine. We had short days of hiking since we were about 13,000 ft above sea level at this point. Most days were 5-7 miles, with poor nutrition and a trail of food poisoning. The food was good though. WE regularly ate Dal Bhat (curry lentils) with rice, nepalese pizza, stale pastries, snickers bars, coke, and pringles.
Views of Machhermo Peak from Gokyo Ri.
Valley View - Mt Everest on left side.
Top of Cho La Pass, 16,800 ft elev
View of Cholatse from the east side near Dzongla
Ama Dablam at sunset
Ama Dablam and the valley
Livestock corrals?
Yak hybrids
Classic interior of the guest houses
I stayed out in the cold to get night photos. To the naked eye, you could see all the stars in these photos, but the scene was generally less bright. These were taken at about 15,000 ft so night photos are not filtered through as much atmosphere and have much brighter stars. Also helps to have little to no light pollution.
Ama Dablam at night
After three weeks of bobbling around the alpine country side, Nick and I were scheduled to climb Island Peak (Imja Tse). It's a glaciated easy mountain, but I still thought it was similar to the technical difficulty of Mt Rainier because of some large crevasse crossings and steep snow at the top. It was really hard to stay warm at night because of high altitude. Can't go fast enough to generate body heat. I was a lot less experienced in 2015 than now for training, nutrition, altitude, and pacing.
Tent photo before summit push of Island Peak
View south from the ascent up Island Peak
Summit of Island Peak (Imja Tse)
Summit selfie
Island Peak (Imja Tse)
After Island Peak, we trekked downwards towards Lukla. we were well acclimatized and could haul ass up any hills on our way out.
One of the common views of Ama Dablam
Po-ta-toes, boil em mash em stick em in a lentil stew
Finally, on our last four days before flying home to Oregon, we were caught in the 2015 Nepal earthquake. It felt like being in a ship at sea being tossed around in the waves up in our fifth floor hotel. We both thought about jumping out the window if we thought the building was going to start collapsing. 8000 people died, not necessarily in Kathmandu, but up in smaller towns and the mountains where buildings were made of bricks uncemented together.
Strong car
Birds would fly in a craze 30 seconds before an aftershock would hit.
Building near our hotel that collapsed.
