2011 Great Himalaya Trail

Pep­per and I set off to hike from the east­ern­most 8000 meter peak, Kanchen­jun­ga, to the west­ern­most 8000 meter peak, Nan­ga Par­bat. We hiked through Nepal and then Pep­per had to leave to go back to work and I con­tin­ued on through India. This was an amaz­ing trip and prob­a­bly the most chal­leng­ing trip yet.

Here’s the link to an arti­cle I wrote about the trip:

http://www.atlasomega.com/2011/10/crossing-the-himalayas/


View Himalaya Trip in a larg­er map

Some jour­nal and blog posts from the trip:

6/25/11: I fin­ished hik­ing through India, to the Pak­istan bor­der a few days ago. I got to the town of Kargil, right near the India/Pakistan bor­der. The bor­der is also known as the Line of Con­trol since it is an always chang­ing point of con­tention. The areas near the bor­der are heav­i­ly mil­i­ta­rized with the Indi­an army and just a cou­ple ridges away from K2 and Nan­ga Par­bat (the west­ern­most 8000 meter peak) and the Siachen Glac­i­er com­ing off of K2 is the high­est bat­tle­ground in the world, at over 6000 meters. In fact, many more sol­diers have died from alti­tude and expo­sure than from the fighting.

After 2 days of bone jar­ring bus rides to get to an air­port, a plane ride back to Del­hi, a taxi ride to the Taj Mahal and back to Del­hi to catch my flight at mid­night, 23 hours of plane trav­el, 1 hour of train trav­el, and an hour and a half bus ride; I am writ­ing this from the com­forts and lux­u­ries of a house with a refrig­er­a­tor, tv, com­put­er, sink, show­er, and toast­er oven. It is amaz­ing and I am ready to join the ranks of the com­pet­i­tive eat­ing circuit.

Here’s a few stats on the trip:
Nepal- Dis­tance- over 1700km, Days- 47 hik­ing days (plus about 10 logistics/resupply days because of con­stant work and gov­ern­ment strikes and deal­ing with get­ting per­mits), # of Per­mits- 13 or so, Cost — over $1500
India- Dis­tance- about 800+km, Days- 19 hik­ing days, Per­mits- 0, Cost- $0…I tried to get per­mits to a cou­ple of areas but I wasn’t even allowed to get them. I guess they didn’t want my money.
It is going to take me a while to process this trip. The last few weeks in India and the trip as a whole have been reward­ing. I am not sure yet what I have gained from the expe­ri­ences but I am def­i­nite­ly leav­ing with a sense of accom­plish­ment and fleas. This was the hard­est hike phys­i­cal­ly and men­tal­ly that I have done yet. Aver­ag­ing about 25 miles per day and rou­tine­ly doing 6000–7000+ feet of ele­va­tion gain were hard, but your body gets used to that. The hard­est thing was “get­ting no sat­is­fac­tion”. For 3 months I have been dream­ing about cer­tain foods only to nev­er get them and not get any­thing sat­is­fac­to­ry in town. When hik­ing in the U.S. or a lot of oth­er coun­tries every 4 or 5 days you get to a town and can sat­is­fy that crav­ing. I did have one of the bet­ter meals of the entire trip the last week or so of hik­ing. No it wasn’t the gum­my piz­zas that I found in one of the stores. I was walk­ing by a shepherd’s stone hut a lit­tle after dark and he invit­ed me to be his guest. He went and milked the goats and his broth­er cooked up a mean cur­ry and fresh rotis (an Indi­an bread sort of like naan or pita) on the fire. In case you are inter­est­ed fresh goat milk is lumpy and sour and more like a unho­mog­e­nized plain yogurt. In the morn­ing I milked some goats myself and had some clas­sic Indi­an salt tea (black tea, fresh milk, and salt). As always I pre­fer sweet over salty, but no com­plaints it is always good to try some­thing new. And it was def­i­nite­ly bet­ter than the food selec­tion that I saw a teenag­er eat­ing in Nepal. I saw him chow down on a nice, dry cow pie he had picked up off the trail.
The last cou­ple of weeks through India have been scenic and inter­est­ing. The flow­ers have been out in full force with fields of red, pur­ple, yel­low, and blue fill­ing the mead­ows. The peaks and pass­es have been shroud­ed in snow and clouds as the win­ter snows have yet to melt and the pre-mon­soon­al mois­ture has moved in. The clouds, wind, impend­ing doom, and some sort of weath­er came in every day. Every high pass I went over was a bit of an adven­ture, with the last 4 high pass­es of around 5000 meters and above turn­ing into a soupy mix of white with no vis­i­bil­i­ty and hor­ri­ble maps. I am glad to fin­ish before the full on mon­soons hit which are fore­cast­ed for some time in the next week and the leach­es come out to play.
The leach­es would have sucked me dry since I have lost enough weight to throw me back to a weight I haven’t seen since mid­dle school. I think I hit about 147 pounds. Def­i­nite­ly not ide­al for a 6 foot tall per­son. I start­ed look­ing a bit like ET with the sunken chest and you prob­a­bly could have seen my heart glow­ing through my skin. I am excit­ed to be home and move on to fin­ish­ing my next projects, a book that I hope will be out some­time this sum­mer, and a nice big sal­ad topped off with some Phish Food.
Final­ly to all the doubters and times we heard “it’s not pos­si­ble” from peo­ple in Nepal and India, “Yes it is! We just did it!”

6/13/11: Besides for that I had a slight change of plans on my last paved road­walk and real­ized India is a dif­fer­ent ani­mal than Nepal. Roads are fair­ly com­mon­place com­pared to Nepal and some of them are sealed and have bus­es run­ning on them. Need­less to say after get­ting near­ly killed for the umpteenth time (driver’s are absolute­ly crazy here) I have decid­ed the purism is for the trails in the coun­try and to uti­lize the bus ser­vice when the paved road is on my route. The paved road walk­ing was the most dan­ger­ous thing I have done on the whole hike. The roads are windi­er and nar­row­er than in Nor­way and the driver’s are more agro than NYC cab dri­vers. Enough of that. Spend my time on the trails and in the back­coun­try. The moun­tains have been awe­some the last few days with a bunch of high pass­es, crap­py weath­er, nice peo­ple, and beau­ti­ful coun­try. No com­plaints at all. More to come and some good sto­ries when I fin­ish and get back to town in 6 or 7 days. Just to whet your appetite.……I am now a mas­ter goat milk­er and I have fleas worse than Yoni has ever had!

6/10/11: Dream­ing of a bic lighter. One bro­ken Nepali lighter and one Indi­an lighter that’s not work­ing. Looks like uncooked noo­dles twice a day for the next three days.

Sent via Irid­i­um Satel­lite phone

5/31/11: I am in Del­hi get­ting orga­nized and cre­at­ing my home base for the India sec­tion. It is pret­ty crazy here. Street ven­dors galore, autorick­shaws, a cacapho­ny of car horns, and def­i­nite­ly a step up of mad­ness from Kath­man­du. Need­less to say it is a lit­tle over­whelm­ing, espe­cial­ly right now after com­ing from our most remote sec­tion on the entire hike. How­ev­er, there is at least some resem­blance of traf­fic laws that peo­ple actu­al­ly follow!

Yes­ter­day I tracked down the India map sales office on the road map (since they only sell maps in a nation­al office) and walked there, only to find out that it moved 20 years ago. Clas­sic. I did pass 3 McDonald’s, a Piz­za Hut, KFC, Domino’s Piz­za, and a bunch of ice cream places on the way. So the walk wasn’t too bad, besides for being over 100 degrees. I was full the entire time. I was a bit dis­ap­point­ed with my McDonald’s meal though. I had been crav­ing a ham­burg­er or at least the 2 pick­les they put on the ham­burg­er. And I fig­ured at least I would know the min­i­mal qual­i­ty I would be receiv­ing and get a decent bun (since that was impos­si­ble to get in Nepal). The entire McDonald’s menu was chick­en. No beef in Indi­an McDonald’s. The foun­tain drink looked so good too, but I wasn’t will­ing to risk the con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed water going into it and no McFlurry’s, just reg­u­lar soft serve ice cream. So all in all quite a dis­ap­point­ing stop. The Domino’s stop was a lit­tle bet­ter with a paneer cheese pizza 🙂
Any­way, off to find the real map office and hope­ful­ly find a fuel can­nis­ter some­where in this city of bil­lions of peo­ple so I can get back to hik­ing either lat­er today or tomorrow.

5/28/11: Here goes.….. It is always a whirl­wind when we get back to town on this trip and this seems even more so. We fin­ished the Nepal sec­tion of the hike! We have hiked about 1300–1500 miles now. We got to a bor­der town, called Simikot, which we had been told by many that it had the bor­der check post for peo­ple enter­ing Tibet and Chi­na and that we wouldn’t be able to go any clos­er to the bor­der. There also hap­pened to be a small air­port there, “when the planes actu­al­ly fly out of there”. Any­way we fin­ished up and got lucky that a plane actu­al­ly came the next day and we were able to return to Kath­man­du. So here we are again in the hus­tle and bus­tle of a big city., try­ing to get some food and re-up the calo­rie intake. I am def­i­nite­ly the lean and lanky look right now. I post­ed some pic­tures last night and have already received some com­ments on that so I must be pret­ty skinny.

The last 14 days unbe­liev­able and also amaz­ing­ly dif­fi­cult. Prob­a­bly one of the most dif­fi­cult sec­tions of hik­ing I have ever done. We left town with 10 days of food and heavy packs since we were head­ed into a real­ly remote region. We went over 10 pass­es over 5000 meters in those 10 days. Need­less to say, lots of gain and loss again. The moun­tains are awe­some though and views and remote vil­lages have been incred­i­ble. We hit a bunch more snow than expect­ed and in a cou­ple of places when the snow was rot­ten it took us hours to trav­el a few hun­dred yards. Pret­ty frus­trat­ing when you have climbed 4000 ver­ti­cal feet and are almost with­in a hands reach of the pass but you just can’t phys­i­cal­ly move any faster to get there. The tem­per­a­tures stayed cool and we even got some snow a bunch of days.
Things quick­ly changed after we went over the last 5000 meter pass and dropped to 1700 meters ele­va­tion. My watch read 95 degrees and it was boil­ing with humid­i­ty. Pret­ty hard to adapt to in a day, but we pushed through it with the end in sight. We resup­plied at a small town and loaded up with 3 days of Cheese Balls and bis­cuits. Pret­ty slim pick­ings to say the least. Def­i­nite­ly major­ly calo­rie defi­cient. We were dream­ing about dif­fer­ent foods, Ben and Jerry’s, piz­za, and all you can eat sushi con­stant­ly the last 5 days.
We are glad to be back in Kath­man­du eat­ing. We are head­ed to a break­fast buf­fet as soon as I am done with this e‑mail 🙂 Yes­ter­day We went to eat piz­za and I got ice cream after the meal and ate that on the walk back to the inter­net place and we passed anoth­er ice cream shop as I was fin­ish­ing up so I fig­ured I should just get anoth­er one since I was out. I was hop­ing it would be free refills 🙂 Any­way, all is good. I am head­ed to India in a few hours to con­tin­ue the hike and Pep­per has to return home to start work with Out­ward Bound for the sum­mer. I’ll keep you all post­ed on how India goes. 2/3 of the way through the tra­verse now!
Hope every­body is doing well!

Sto­ry from the field- I did have a lit­tle “There’s Some­thing About Mary” mishap 2 days before we fin­ished. I was walk­ing across a rick­ety old sus­pen­sion bridge with wood planks and right behind this lady from town cross­ing the bridge. I looked up real­ly fast to see what was ahead and the wood plank broke. I fell through the bridge with one leg and the plank came up from the oth­er side and slammed me in the face. I guess it was a good thing I was wear­ing tac­ti­cal sun­glass­es and the lens­es were bal­lis­tic, but some­how the skin under my eye­brow and over my eye­lid got wedged in between the lens and the frame and I couldn’t get it out. “How did the beans get over the frank?” sort of thing. I put my hands up to try to get my sun­glass­es off and blood was pour­ing out. A cou­ple of towns peo­ple came over and helped me to a bench and got me some cot­ton and I sig­naled to find me a mir­ror. With the help of the mir­ror I man­aged to get my skin free and then clean up the blood. A nice lit­tle gash, prob­a­bly would have had stitch­es at home, but here I just got the bleed­ing under con­trol threw some duct tape on the cot­ton and got back in the ring. I felt like it was straight out of Rocky and def­i­nite­ly look like I got punched in the face. Pret­ty fun­ny actu­al­ly. All of the locals in dif­fer­ent places kept look­ing and try­ing to ask me what hap­pened too. Walk­ing makes every­thing bet­ter so I just kept on hik­ing. That’s all for now!

5/13/11: Well here goes, it has been a while so there is a lot to write about but I’ll try to keep it short.

We have been hik­ing hard the past 12 days since our last major resup­ply. We have done about 1000 miles in Nepal and are now at our last resup­ply in Nepal, with about 14 days of hik­ing left here. A few stats/thoughts for the last 12 days:
1) We have been doing about 30–45 map kilo­me­ters dai­ly, which at our map’s scale is actu­al­ly 20–30% more dis­tance on the ground. So we have been hit­ting our stride and doing around 30 miles dai­ly with about 1500 meters of ele­va­tion gain on aver­age. In the past 12 days we have gained over 70,000 feet of ele­va­tion. It sort of feels like we are hik­ing into space, minus the huge descents we are doing too. How high is space any­way? Some days we just go up all day. It is like being on the Stair­mas­ter for 10 hours or more. 2) We have been pass­ing a lot of tea hous­es on some of the more pop­u­lar treks and have been using those to boost our calo­rie intake. One day I ate 8 eggs, fried rice, and rice pud­ding at tea hous­es, and always add huge lump­ing spoon fulls of sug­ar to the tea. They can’t believe how much we can eat because before we order they say “are you sure? that is a lot of food.” Oth­er times we will order and only get ran­dom things from what we have ordered, half of what we have ordered, or just what they want to make show up. It gets pret­ty frus­trat­ing when you have the hik­er hunger and things get lost in trans­la­tion and you end up with a real­ly unsat­is­fy­ing meal. We have tak­en one from the pages of In-N-Out Burg­er and dream about our Dou­ble Dou­bles. On the menu they call an omelette a dou­ble omelette if it has two eggs. So our typ­i­cal sta­ple is the dou­ble dou­ble with cheese (which hap­pens to be yak cheese-if you close your eyes and try real­ly hard you can make it taste like Swiss Cheese) and fried pota­toes. Not quite the In-N-Out Dou­ble Dou­ble with cheese and fries but it’ll keep us dreaming.
3) Even if a Nepali doesn’t know any Eng­lish they seem to always know the words “not pos­si­ble”. I don’t know how many times we have heard those words. From the police at the per­mit check­points say­ing that it is not pos­si­ble that we walked from such and such a vil­lage that day to the cooks say­ing it is not pos­si­ble that we eat all of that food. Seems like we could be good moti­va­tion­al speak­ers in Nepal, if only we could actu­al­ly talk Nepali or com­mu­ni­cate with most people.
4) We walked passed a town which was about to have a 3 day fes­ti­val start­ing the next day. I asked what hap­pens at the fes­ti­val. They said tug of war and horse races. I don’t think they got the joke but, I asked is it a 3 day ses­sion of tug of war. That would be pret­ty tir­ing, espe­cial­ly for me since I have lost all upper body mus­cles and have resumed the t‑rex hik­er look.
5) A quick lit­tle sto­ry. One day we were hik­ing down low and had just hit the riv­er val­ley and start­ed our 2000 meter climb. About 600 meters into the climb we went through a vil­lage. Pep­per kept walk­ing and I stopped at a faucet to wet my head and get some water. It was about 95 degrees and humid. A girl around 18 came over to me and invit­ed me to the shade at her house. I declined say­ing that I had to keep up with my friend. She insist­ed so I didn’t want to be rude and turn her down. I walked past one house and to her house. She poured me some milk from her water buf­fa­lo that was sit­ting in the shade under her house. The milk had been sit­ting out in a con­tain­er in 95 degree tem­per­a­tures but didn’t taste rot­ten, but it def­i­nite­ly had a lot of float­ies and tast­ed smoky. The last thing I want­ed in 95 degree heat was milk, but I couldn’t turn it down. I drank it up and thanked her and that I had to go. Before I turned the cor­ner out of view I looked back and waved and she was blow­ing me kiss­es. Hmmm, strange.
6) Final­ly, with the events of recent, which appar­ent­ly are big enough that even locals in remote moun­tain vil­lages have told us about when we tell them we are Amer­i­can, we have changed plans and won’t be going to Pak­istan. I don’t need to be a rock­et sci­en­tist to fig­ure out it prob­a­bly isn’t safe there right now for a gringo. Although if I picked up a lit­tle head­wrap I might be able to fit in, but Pepper’s only hope would be the beard and a burkah, but that would be a weird com­bi­na­tion for a woman.
I think that is all for now. Just enjoy­ing my time now try­ing to fat­ten up in town and use the inter­net before a real­ly remote 14 day stretch. Got­ta run and go find piz­za and ice cream. It has been way to long. Def­i­nite­ly am miss­ing the Ben and Jerry’s 🙂

4/25/11: Things are going well here. We are back in Kath­man­du again, our logis­tics head­quar­ters. We are sort­ing out our per­mits to leave here and hike the rest of the coun­try with­out return­ing back here. Yeah, it has been good to get a lit­tle low­er in ele­va­tion. I was feel­ing a bit under the weath­er through the Ever­est area since we ascend­ed pret­ty quick­ly to 5300 meters. On return­ing to Kath­man­du my pulse was again at 46. I am hop­ing to see how low I can get it!

Not too much news this time since I feel like I just wrote a bunch. The last sec­tion was real­ly pret­ty. We stayed over 4500 meters for a while and went over a bunch of pass­es over 5400 meters and went to Ever­est base camp. Off hand I think that is around 18,000 feet.
The weath­er is improv­ing a bit since it hasn’t snowed more than a dust­ing this last stretch and some days the clouds actu­al­ly wait until 1PM to move in. So that is nice. We got views of Ever­est, Nuptse, Lhotse, and a lot of clas­sic peaks from some of the pass­es. The view of Ever­est from Ren­jo La was stunning.
I think that is all for now. I will try to get some pic­tures from the last stretch up for you all to see.
Hope every­body is doing well.
A few fun­ny things from the last stretch:
1) I saw a Bud­dhist monk with an iPad
2) Pep­per thought he was hear­ing pikas, but it was just his pack squeaking
3) We are now stay­ing right next to Baskin Rob­bins but have unbe­liev­ably man­aged not to go there yet. Some­how we have hit up 3 oth­er places for ice cream in the mean time. I think I am going to have to head there right now on my way back to the hotel though.….….….

4/14/11: Every­thing is going well over here. The moun­tains are big and ele­va­tion changes are dras­tic. I think at least 10,000 feet of ele­va­tion gain or loss has been nor­mal every day. The scenery is amaz­ing. The moun­tains are huge and riv­er val­leys are steep and rugged. These are the biggest moun­tains in the world!

We have hiked about 200 miles or so and are aver­ag­ing 15–20 miles per day, so def­i­nite­ly off of our pace, but we are start­ing to feel good. We descend­ed to a low­er ele­va­tion the oth­er day and my pulse was 46. So we are def­i­nite­ly get­ting used to the high altitudes.
It has been real­ly inter­est­ing because we have been with­in 1 days walk of the Tibet bor­der. So many of those small com­mu­ni­ties get there sup­plies from Tibet and are basi­cal­ly Tibetan vil­lages. See­ing the cul­tur­al changes between the low­er com­mu­ni­ties on up has been very inter­est­ing also.
We hired a guide for the first stretch to make sure that we knew what we were get­ting into. Every­body says the weath­er is real­ly abnor­mal. The weath­er is sup­posed to be real­ly good this time of year, but it def­i­nite­ly hasn’t been. By 11am every­day it is either rain­ing or snow­ing depend­ing on what ele­va­tion we are at. At high ele­va­tions the clouds start bil­low­ing in around 9:30 and build from there. Two sep­a­rate nights we had about a foot of snow­fall. And we have had white­out con­di­tions on two high pass­es that we went over. Not too bad, but one of the pass­es was a dou­ble pass (which was real­ly over 3 sad­dles, so it was a triple pass but the map details lacke­done of the ridges) so we dropped a lit­tle ear­ly. We post­holed down for about 20 min­utes before we both looked at each oth­er because it wasn’t feel­ing right. We went back up and got back on track. We have been posthol­ing waist deep at all pass­es over 14,000 feet so we have decid­ed to alter the route for this stretch a lit­tle to bypass a few real­ly high pass­es and hope­ful­ly min­i­mize our posthol­ing. At times our progress has been try­ing and incred­i­bly slow break­ing trail through rot­ten snow. We should be in the Ever­est region in a cou­ple of days!
The guide has been slow­ing us down also so we are drop­ping him now since we feel com­fort­able out there alone. The guide was tag­ging along and didn’t know the way any way. He was just fol­low­ing us and couldn’t read a topo map. He was scared of camp­ing since we were in remote regions and tried to get us to stay in tea­hous­es more often. One night we set up camp and at 3 in the morn­ing we heard a yell from his tent. We both rolled over and didn’t know what was going on. I went­back to sleep and things qui­et­ed down. In the morn­ing we asked him what was going on. He said in bro­ken Eng­lish that a yeti had attacked him. One had unzipped his tet and came in and was chok­ing him and the oth­er was stand­ing out­side the tent. He said they were lit­tle black yetis about a foot tall. I asked if they were dogs. He said def­i­nite­ly not dogs. We couldn’t stop laugh­ing. He said every 5 min­utes they kept com­ing back and try­ing to unzip his tent door. He was real­ly ani­mat­ed when describ­ing the events. It almost made me believe it 🙂 Sure.……whatever you say. Just like you had said that you had done this hike before and have had no clue where to go the entire time 🙂
One last thing, it is pret­ty inter­est­ing for us to be going ultra­light and as light as we can here. Just like in Europe and oth­er places we are get­ting looks on our pack size. Many of these expe­di­tions to climb peaks or go to base­camp have as many as 30 porters car­ry­ing the groups gear. Here we are, self sup­port­ed with ultra­light equip­ment at over 19,000 feet and no issues.

3/28/11: We are still in Kath­man­du but we are head­ed out to east­ern Nepal tomor­row morn­ing. We will first catch a domes­tic plane, should be a sketchy lit­tle plane that will prob­a­bly bring back mem­o­ries of fly­ing in Ethiopia, and then a local bus. Then we will start walk­ing up to Kanchen­jun­ga base camp.
It has been a bit crazy here get­ting things orga­nized, get­ting per­mits, and get­ting as much local infor­ma­tion as pos­si­ble about our route, places and sup­plies avail­able. In addi­tion Pep­per has had a tough few days. First he missed his flight because he thought it was at 1PM but it was actu­al­ly at 1AM and then one day the Nepali food got the best of him. He was look­ing grim one day, but now he is ful­ly recov­ered now and we are ready to roll. Nepal 1, Pep­per 0.
We also did get invit­ed into some­ones home for din­ner one night which was real­ly cool. We had some fresh home cooked Dal Bhat!
I am excit­ed to get out there walk­ing final­ly and out of the hus­tle and bus­tle of the city and the smog. We’ll keep you all posted!