Everest north face

We broke camp at Yuba at eight and got on the road for Everest North Face base camp. It felt great to be back in the jeep and off our feet. It took 2 1/2 hours to get to Tashi Dzom where we had stopped for lunch on the way to Yuba ten days ago. It is an interesting little village. It actually qualifies as a town, what with a police station, electricity, several restaurants, and “Hotels.” A euphemistic term here for anything that has something where you can flop your body. One of the buildings even has a sign in English “Family Hotel.” Hey, if I tried to bring my family there to sleep I’d be disowned for sure, and rightly so. The restaurants, too, stretch the imagination to qualify as what we would think of as eating facilities.
But the town is a hub, a crossroads for traffic, coming from Shegar, where we stayed a couple of weeks ago, Yuba, and Everest base camp. I wished I could have a mini cam on top of one of the buildings for an hour. The place is a wonderful array of Tibetan back-country culture, and all aspects of life pass in front of your eyes. We just sat there and took it all in. There are more horse and buggies than any type of vehicle, many, many more. The horses are all gussied up with ribbons and bells. The buggy tires have been patched so many times that they now use the outer tire for the patch, not worrying about the tube itself. Little kids about four years old drive these buggies at breakneck speed down the streets and on the roads.
Kids play in the street and harass the multitude of puppies which roam aimlessly looking for a scrap of food or affection, whichever comes their way. The people are dressed in the same type of clothing we’ve seen throughout the region: women in long black dresses with a hand-woven apron in front to designate married status. The colors of the apron are muted. The only sign of anything that could qualify as being the slightly flamboyant was the shiny buckles many of them wore. Men wore jackets in a myriad of styles. Most wore hats. Western-style cowboy hats are very popular here providing shade and protection, and simple long pants. The people rarely wore anything that qualified as colorful in contrast to their animals. Horses attached to the carts and yaks in the field always had whatever strand of color that could be found attached to their horns, necks, or mane. Woven ribbons, flags, strips of old clothing, plastic feed bags - anything that smacked of color was attached to them. I don't know the reasoning as to why the animals are so colorful and the people so plain. Must be rooted in Buddhist thought.
But every once in a while some woman/girl will pass looking very washed, both in body and clothes and wearing brightly colored apparel. I think that they must be ethnic Chinese, but sometimes without getting up close and personal, it is hard to tell, depending upon the region of their origin within "China" proper. They are obviously a cut above the economic norm here, and it further indicates that cleanliness is more a matter of condition than personal choice.
We got to checkpoint to enter Everest Nature Reserve, where the sign says “no unauthorized vehicles beyond this point.” From here you are supposed to get the government vehicles to take you the rest of the way to base camp. That’s very difficult for groups like us where we now have a big truck, (bye-bye yaks) to haul all the tents, cooking equipment, food, and the rest of the paraphernalia that a group requires, but rules are rules, unless, somebody knows somebody.
And Jimmy always knows somebody. He has a friend, or a friend of a friend, at the checkpoint and, with a little greasing of the palm we were allowed to pass with our big truck and all our gear.
We arrived at Rhombuk Monastery, where we will camp for the night, at 12:30 p.m. and the other groups which had to follow the rules got here at 4:00. They all want to know how we brought our vehicles in. We’re supposed to play dumb so Jimmy doesn’t get into trouble. But everybody knows the game here, so it’s really a little silly.
After seeing so few other tourists on the trek, again it is very much a different mind-set as North face is a bustling concern. Kangshung was very beautiful but the base camp itself was deserted. Here the area is very desolate, but base camp is alive with tourists, and the area literally abounds with the camps of the climbing expeditions attempting the reach the top.
We saw several expeditions’ headquarters, looking like small cities with computer headquarters, dozens of tents for each expedition, and people scanning the mountain-sides trying to keep track of their group on the mountain side. Each expedition is a small army of equipment and personnel. National flags of the countries (it’s always an Indian expedition, or a British expedition, even though the participants may be multinational).
Just outside the expedition area a small city of canvas tents providing all services for the number of tourists who come to this base camp has developed. It has the feel of some high mountain gold or silver camp. I keep thinking of what Leadville, Colorado or Bodie, California must have looked like a hundred plus years ago during their boomtown days.
A 10x10 tent qualifies as a hotel. I didn’t want to look inside to see sleeping arrangements, and if there’s a propane stove hissing inside another tent, then that must be a restaurant. There’s even a post office where you can mail letters and post cards from Mount Everest. It was Sunday, and so the post office was closed, but. . . . yes, Jimmy knew the man who ran the post office, so he opened it up for us. It’s not like the guy could go anywhere for his day off. He sold us 6-yuan stamps for international mail and a post card which ordinarily would cost maybe one yuan for a total of 20 yuan - a nice little commission for him.
It’s a five mile walk from where we are camped at the Monastery to actual Base Camp. Naturally, Dave walked it. Manoj said it was an hour and a half walk, and since it was getting later in the afternoon by the time we got camp set up, the rest of us decided to take the jeeps up. There are horse-carts which will wiggle and jiggle you all the way to base camp, and it’s a going concern for many Tibetans. At 30 Yuan per person, they can easily make it even if they have just one trip up and back. Judging from the number of carts and drivers in ratio to the number of tourists taking them, somebody’s going to go hungry tonight. Dave, Tony and I all walked back to camp. It was nice to walk because we had the option not to.
It’s quite a shock for us who walked for ten days and only saw the one group from Colorado until the last day. Here there are dozens of tourists camping, all vying for the small amount of semi-flat space where the rocks can be sort of removed from the sleeping areas.
It is so dusty and dirty, that we’re trying, unsuccessfully, to keep the dirt out of the tents. They are our only sanctuary, the place to where we can retreat when we need quiet time and space. With the wind blowing incessantly, the dirt just filters into the tent and gives everything a grimy feel.
The toilet tent already blew over, causing great hilarity about the possibilities that might have entailed. We all agreed that it would have been a great trek memory if somebody had been on the pot when it blew away. We just couldn’t agree who should have been in the tent when it blew over:-)
There’s a beautiful new hotel here, and I joked that I was going to sneak over and book Carol and me into a room since the camp site was so marginal. We were informed that if we did, not to get out of bed to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, because there’d be three bodies in sleeping bags on the floor. We were to learn later that the group with whom we originally traveled in Nepal and the first ten days of the trip before trekking, actually stayed in the hotel, and said that if they’d had the choice they would have slept outdoors. Apparently, there was no heat, no light, and no water. They couldn’t even use the toilets. At least I had my pee bottle.
The mountain itself looks very different from the East (Kangshung) face. There it was a massive line of peaks with a wall of snow running as far as the eye could see. The ridges looked very smooth because of all the snow. Lhotse, Makalu, and other peaks softened the outline of Everest and they added up to the line of Himalayan mountains that was our view for several days. Here, from this side, this huge mountain just seems to sit there by itself. There are hills which block off the rest of the range, and so Everest looks isolated, apart from the rest of the range. And the face of the mountain is very different. Gone is the wall of snow. Here, you see the mountain, not the frosting cover. The black rock is dotted with ice fields, but hey, it’s a big mountain. There’s lots of just plain mountain. It is really more impressive from this side.
Walking in and amongst the expedition tents really made us feel that we were part of something that was larger than just our isolation on the trek. There it was just us, enjoying the beauty and being basically alone with the mountains. Here you just feel the activity. It would be easy to dismiss it as just a tourist spot, but it’s more than that. Here people are putting their lives on the line to climb this thing. For more reasons than I can list here, Summiting Everest is a big money, high stakes game. The corporate names on the tents attests to that. It would be impossible to have an expedition for serious climbers without sponsorship.
There are fat cats who pay up to $100,000 for the chance to climb it, and get very pissed when conditions prevent it. This has caused guides to risk going up when they shouldn’t, and people die because of those decisions.
There is a thing called the Seven Summits, and the bragging rights that go with climbing the highest point on all seven continents. Everest at 29,003 in Asia, Aconcagua, 22,834 in S. America; Denali, 20,320 N America; Kilimanjaro, Africa 19,340; Erbrus, Europe, 18,510; The Vinson Massif, 16,067, Antarctica; and Mt. Kosciusko, Australia, which comes in at an embarrassing 7,316. Sorry Pat. :-)
We’re supposed to camp here for two days, but because we got here so early, we were able to go to actual base camp today that means that we’re a day ahead of schedule. So Manoj suggested that we make a very long day into two shorter days and save our nerves, not to mention our butts.
So, officially, we’ve seen everything we were supposed to see and do, and now we’re taking three days to get back to Katmandu. Thoughts of restaurant food, cold beer, warm showers, beds, clean clothes, and jumping fully clothed into the pool dominate the conversations in groups large and small.
From Everest Base Camp, North face, Tibet,
Carol and Jim