in the lap of the mountains (Nepal travel journal, March 2018)

MARCH 31, 2018

Today we hiked from M.B.C. to the final stop. Well, not the final one. Maybe better to say the ultimate stop—the reason we came here. Annapurna Base Camp. 

in the morning

Today was just as, if not more difficult than yesterday, even though it was a fraction of the distance. Again, I had to make many many stops to get here. It wasn’t necessarily the pack weight, although I did feel it in my legs a few times. Mostly it was just an ever-present fatigue as I tried to trudge up any kind of incline. 

wee people trudging up the trail

Focusing on my breathing ruled me. Resting pose consisted of this: using my hiking sticks as props for my body, wedged right there under my clavicle. Bent over myself looking at the snow, white, while I was breathing, breathing and breathing. Meanwhile, surrounding us, the mountains, and the clouds dancing  around them. Snow fields following the contours of the land, and ragged dark rocks rising up out of the white, the sun soaked blinding white. 

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Everywhere—all around are the mountains. We are in the lap of the mother and she sings to us. She sways us. She conquers us in ways we can feel, and ways we can’t even as we (the entire human mass on the mountain) rage against the slopes, shouting in voices full of bravado, screaming out that we exist because it’s the only way we feel we can be see. And the only way we can be known, as something significant.

There are as many ways to be here in Her presence as there are people in the world.

Climbing to the craggy top of the moraine. Listening to the glacier creak and crack. The sudden breaking down of the structure. The sudden breaking down. Vertical flutes of snow, variegated, full of lines and texture. Animal tracks in the snow. The black dog of the mountain, a mouse in his mouth, more interested in playing than eating it. But it was too late to play, sun leaking out of the sky.

Later, I roused myself to join A— in the common room. We chatted about travel and the trail with the South Africans, with whom we had been hopscotching since Himalaya, and talking with Jackie, the adventurous teacher from Hong Kong who lives to travel.

And here, where you can almost touch the stars, we listened to cellphones ring and bling and chirp and talk to their people. It sounds like a casino in the lodge. People stare blankly at their screens. Even here. They all blind their seeing eyes.

Rock and snow (Nepal travel journal, March 2018)

MARCH 30, 2018

Rather than being in the present, I seem to be in the habit of writing about the previous day by the time I get to the page. Here we are, then. At yesterday. 

the way to Himalaya

It was another short day, but A— was having an out of body experience and when doing something like this it’s best to be in your body. I think his exact words were, “It’s like I’m hovering above myself,” and later, something along the lines of, “I can’t feel my own body.”

The bridge of no bodies

We trekked to Himalaya, which was very loud, and had a lot of traffic going through, but the next lodgings would have taken another couple of hours to reach in our current state. The inn keeper at Himalaya (the lower one) was rather irked to give 2 people traveling without porters a room, but we still ended up in a cozy affair with terrifying bed covers.

While A— rested, I found a little hillside on which to hang out. Again, near a helipad. I read, watched the porters breeze through with their loads, watched the stream far below, working the stones and boulders smooth. The sound of water is ever present. It is the Modi Khola. It is tributaries. It is the rainstorms rolling through each afternoon, and the hail they become. 

My grandmother was heavy on my mind. One of the treats I have tucked away in my pack like some precious treasure, even more so than dry socks, is a cadbury cream egg. There are better things in the world to eat, but there are few foods that remind me so vividly of my grandmother, who passed away years ago. I’m not sure when the right moment to eat the egg will be.

After sleeping for a few hours, A— felt better. The rooms are really only for sleeping. There’s no heat, just stone walls, a wooden door and a window. The roof is functional, but not insulated. Which all makes sense. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to carry crap up here. 

how to build things

Once the evening comes on, the only real place to gather is the communal space where food is served. We collected our entertainment, and drifted into the most warm and cozy room in the place. We traded stories with Maeve and Elsa, two Canadians also traveling without porter. It took a while to learn that one of them had sprained her ankle. We later gave her one of our Ace bandages to try to help while trying to figure out how the hell she was going to hike back down.

As we talked and read and made art, thunder and lightening came, and the sky let loose. Hail the size of pencil erasers, the size of pebbles littered the walkways and tables. Later, in the room, we listened to the sound of it pounding on the corrugated metal rooftop. Unrelenting. Waking in the middle of the night, you can’t tell if it’s the river or if it’s the rain making all that steady, incessant noise.

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the last blue

We made another early start of the trek this morning. Today our goal was M.B.C. (Machapuchare Base Camp). The weather pattern up to now has been this: clear morning, clouds by noon, and rain by 2 p.m. Today did not follow that pattern. It started with snow and hail before 9 a.m. 

As we ate breakfast, a dark grey smear in the sky traveled up the valley. When it released, I called it snow, but really it was small hail. 

The trail had more stairs.  It had relentless climb up and up and up the river valley with mountains towering about us.

This part of the trek was a struggle for me. I had to stop more often, and more and more often. Every time I came over a rise, I thought M.B.C. would surely be perched there, awaiting our arrival. But it took a long time for the place to finally appear. Return of the canyon mile. 

Aside from trash and fellow trekkers, the distance between Deurali and M.B.C. felt wild and remote. The spirits of the mountains lived here, vibrant in every rush of rock, in each bit of ice.

Our host at Himalaya House called ahead for us and reserved a room. #5. It’s a good thing he did, otherwise we would have had to continue trekking to one of the lodges further on. I’m not sure I would have reacted well to that.

Towards the end of the day, snow fell onto the path, making it icy, and uncertain. Visibility narrowed to about 40-feet in front of us. It crept up on me since I was so focused on my foot placement. I had to remind myself to look up from time to time.

To say it’s a relief to be here, in dry clothes with a guaranteed bed to sleep in, drinking cup after cup of hot lemon ginger tea, is the absolute truth.

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  Inside

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  Outside

Landruk to Sinuwa (Nepal travel journal, March 2018)

MARCH 27, 2018

Clear skies greet us this morning, and the distant mountains blaze in the sunlight. Snow glitters, all sharp and wild, serene and sage. We’re going there. We are going to stand in the shadows of these giants.

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Hours later, we’re finally still after being in motion for so long. There’s loads more to say and nothing more to say in the same moment. It was a hard day.

We started trekking at 7:45a and we ended at 4:30p. My body is feeling the 8 hours on the trail, which involved lots and lots of stairs. It became a game of not looking at where we needed to traverse and just focusing on each step. I anticipate I’ll be sore and stiff tomorrow, perhaps even dominated by muscle soreness. 

We encountered so many beautiful things today, and dangerous things, and natural things. My eyes and heart and memory card brim with scenes from today. I’m full of awe, and fatigue.

Here are some of the moments lingering:

• Crossing ravines on rickety bridges

• Winding down a slope through the rain forest with ferns along the trailside.

• Rice paddies and ponies with bells and red and white and green ribbons tied around their necks .
• Walls with flagstone steps built into them
• Down in the Modi Khola the water is glacier blue.

• The tiger-striped boulder peering out from the river, polished smooth by the wash from the glaciers

• Hopscotching with the same hikers and porters on the trail, leading and lagging in turns
• As we neared Chhomrong, we noticed more baskets  being used to transport goods, and more of them carry the things of everyday life. Plates, gas canisters, toilet paper, which is really just for the western tourists.

• Puppies laying in the sunshine.

• Steep steps and shallow steps made of metamorphic rock, and clinging to the hillside. Placed there by human hands. Hillsides reshaped for agriculture as well. Paddies and paddocks.

• People shuffling their feet. People hacking and spitting.
• All the creative ways people upcycle waste, like beer bottles and soda bottles and trash cans

• The porter taking a bath in the public spigot.
• The woman washing her hair with a bar of soap after wrapping a broad swath of clothe around her torso and removing her top. Bent over, head towards the ground in a simple act of cleansing. There were echoes of this in the city. The public spigots for bathing and armfuls of laundry.

I’m exhausted by the time we reach Sinuwa. There is nothing in my gas tank and I’m to the point in the hunger trap where I’m nauseous. I need food, but the thought of it is unappetizing. I turn away from it.

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Despite how my body feels, I am inspired by today, by what we accomplished on our own, without support. I’m inspired by the mountains, and by the people who live and breathe and walk this every day.

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575: standing among giants (Nepal, March 2018)

Machapuchare, Nepal
March 2018

Mountains pierce the sky.
Clouds clot over fallen snow,
as white as penance.

We went to Nepal almost two years ago now. This photo was taken during our descent from Annapurna Base Camp, looking across to the distinct silhouette of Machapuchare, which stands at 22,943 feet. It is said to be the home of Lord Shiva (Hindu), and due to its holiness is off limits to climbing, though we talked with locals who claimed to have climbed it and have flown drones over it.

I’d like to think there are some things that are out of our reach, and sacred, but know this is a naive sentiment. Maybe we can still experience awe at the grandness in nature, in the face of the things that are bigger than we are.

575: the setting in

Setting Sun, Rising Mountain

Darkness sits like veils
drawn across the body. Bare.
Waiting. But the light–

looking back (the last Mount Whitney travelogue, August 2019)

In order to know where you are, it’s important to know where you’ve been. And to celebrate it. 

My friend, R— and I hiked a loop in the Julian Alps in July. I’m really bad at doing this, but we had a moment of standing at the shore of Lake Bohinj and looking at the mass of mountains in front of us and tracing our route. From that vantage, we could see where we started, in that little village over there. We climbed that steep slope and traversed that terrain over there. And we descended way over there.

It was inspiring to take in what we had done under the power of our own bodies. So after A— and I had a celebratory second breakfast of burgers (veg for me) and beers at the little café at Whitney portal, on our drive out we stopped where we started.

Here is the view up to Mount Whitney from Lone Pine Campground.

Take a look behind you now and then.
You might surprise yourself with how far you’ve come.

That green shoot to the right of center was part of the approach, which traverses all the way to the left before gaining the rigid line to cut back over on the back side of these stark mountain faces to reach the summit.

It wasn’t pretty (on my part), and I didn’t crush it like a champ… but I did it. With my love, A–, in the beautiful place full of the spirits of the ancestors of the mountain.

We don’t want a life full of things. We want a life full of these moments, these memories. I want time with the people I love, in beautiful places that remind me that the world is bigger than I am, than my life is and all the headaches and heartaches and stresses in it. This is what I’m working towards, a little bit every day.

cheers to that

travelogue: Mount Whitney, Into the Wilderness (August 2019)

About that good idea. It wasn’t. A– started off the day maybe vomiting and definitely not feeling well. I didn’t feel too bad, but honestly, drinking alcohol before a physical endeavor where you care about your performance is just not a smart idea. It elevates your heart rate, acts as a diuretic, diminishes your ability to produce glucose, which your body needs to crush an activity, etc. I listen to a lot of podcasts, and my body only reinforced the message I heard through those other venues. 

It was a stunner of a sunrise, though. Not looking to the east, but in the other direction, where the granite burned with light.

Mountain sunrise

After packing our packs, and staging the car for operation Zero Food Smell & Other Temptations,  we headed up toward Whitney Portal. It was later then we wanted to get started, but early enough that the air was still cool.  The drive up hugged the slope. Owens Valley fell away at the same time as the mountains lift up, carrying us with them. We swooshed against the asphalt and rise and rise.

At Whitney portal, there are campsites, a store, and parking, but not a lot of empty spaces. After following the signs for overnight parking, we chose a spot in the lower lot and backed it in right next to the bear boxes.  

The park has tons of them, and the idea is to pretty much empty your car of anything that could possibly be construed as being edible and place it in something that is a wee more difficult to access. Lipstick, lozenges, wipes, etc. The bear boxes are open to everyone; you don’t get your own, and you can’t restrict other hominids from accessing your stuff, so there’s an element of trust here.

Once we sorted things out and felt confident about the state of the car, we headed to the trailhead.

The most encouraging message I saw posted by the rangers is paraphrased as follows: It takes a lot of courage to turn back. 

They had to do four rescues within one week in July. Each rescue must put wilderness first responders at risk, too. And the suffering of the person. And the expense. I admit it, I get locked into the destination. I focus on the accomplishment, and lose sight of what might be more important. My safety, and my life. We’re not super hard core or extreme, but even so, this is the kind of activity where you can put yourself in harm’s way if you don’t think ahead and plan right.

Anyways, I appreciated the reminder, and it relieved some of my anxiety.

Our objective for the day: set up camp at Outpost Camp and hike up to Consultation Lake, then return and turn in for the evening.

This was one of those places. It had an energy to it. The landscape was lush. The air, arid. There were alpine flowers and bumble bees. Honest to goodness fuzzy-bottomed bumble bees with their legs fat with pollen. 

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Towering above us, jagged granite peaks, like teeth or talons or spires. It is all around us and under our feet. We breathed it in, and took little pieces of it away with us.

This place.

Magic.

The hike to Outpost was full of magic, and water crossings, and dipping in and out of vegetation. And it was a 2,000 foot climb in 3.8 miles. Not the worst, but not an amble through a nice flat meadow, either. But the meadow…

Just before Outpost, the first meadow started. It was stunning, and against the harshness of the rocks, the life that’s there was so much more vibrant. Water saturated the basin, and grasses and trees and shrubs and bugs and animals all soak it in. Just beyond, in a stand of pines on hard rocky ground was the camp.

Thus began our ritual.

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travelogue: Mount Whitney, The Lone Pine Campground Chapter (August 2019)

Planning ahead. Sometimes we rock at it. Other times, like this one, not so much. By the time we got around to sorting out the rest of the details for our Mount Whitney backpack, the campground at Whitney portal was sold out.  With every down, comes an up. 

We ended up at Lone Pine Campground. Even though it looked to be nearly completely booked online, it ended up being our last moment of solitude and total quiet of the trip. 

This is the high desert. Even though Lone Pine Campground sits at 5,900 feet of elevation, the desert summer heat still laced the air, and amplified that dry sage and mesquite smell of the local ecology. It was heaven.

Not sage or mesquite

I live in the desert, and a lot of my early backpack experience was with the Sierra Club out in the Anza Borrego desert. As much as I hate schlupping water, and the way the fine grit of sand gets stuck in the nooks and crannies of your feet, it’s still my home experience. And there is something undeniably unique about the landscape. 

Lone Pine is a bit more vegetated than Anza Borrego, and we drove to the site, but it still conjured those first experiences of sleeping under the stars, and eating food I packed in on my own.

Luckily, we could grab burritos, and cider and beer (again, it seemed like a good idea at the time and we were just so danged excited) from town without having to worry about pack weight. At least, not yet.

Burritos from a food truck the night before a hike.
What could possibly go wrong?

And nearby was our very own sound machine, provided by the Sierra Nevadas. 

A stream.

The stream was frigid. Every bit as cold as the fresh snow melt at Summit Camp in San Gorgonio. A– stripped down to his skivvies and got in with a beer. It was for a minute or two, and that was enough. 

I took cold water baths when my SI complex injury reactivated, and still give myself a cold water blast before finishing my shower. While I’ve come to appreciate how alive all that cold water makes you feel, as in energy vibrating in your muscles and tingling all over your skin, I haven’t quite come to terms with embracing cold in the wild. One day, though. One day I’ll get in, too. More than just my feet.

From our campsite, if you looked to the west, you could see a wall of rock, revealed by a passage carved from ice. In the middle, way way in the distance, stands the jagged molar of Whitney.

O. M. G.

The zoom lens on my Canon 77D wasn’t enough to gather the details, and from this angle, it was hard to understand the approach for the standard route. It was hard to wrap our minds and hearts around the notion that, in 48 hours, we would be standing on that distant summit.

We spent the evening wandering around the old approach route to Whitney portal. The trail wanders up from the campground and slowly gains another 2,700 feet of elevation and adding on another 4 miles of travel to the out and back everyone vies for.

Whitney Portal Approach Trailhead.

We felt the evening cool, and humidity as some of it returned to the air. We watched spears of light shine through the jagged peaks.

A– lit a fire. The bugs turned up their music and, together with the stream, lulled us. We laid out on A’s new lost and found item, a super durable picnic blanket, and looked up at the stars in the shadow of the mountain.

These moments are why I love camping and backpacking. No screens. Just nature and sound of your own blood pumping in your ears. It’s not that it’s primitive. Actually, it feels quite evolved.

travelogue: Mount Whitney, the Agency Chapter (August 2019)

Mount Whitney. It was finally here. 

Neither A or I had summited this mountain before, and we were lucky enough to win permits on our first try.

After investing significantly more prep time than our San Gorgonio backpack in June, we drove up on Monday morning in August, leaving in the dark hours of the morning with coffee and breakfast burritos in hand.

Travel essential

It was partly to get ahead of impending rush hour, but also out of excitement. In just a couple of days, if all of our training and gear added up and we won the altitude roulette, we would be standing on top of the highest mountain in the contiguous United States.   

Once we got into Lone Pine, we had to stop at the Interagency Visitors Center to pick up our permits.

A, taking in the objective from afar

That was a cluster of an experience. We arrived at 10:00 AM, which meant the customer service reps were still going through the list of hopefuls for a walk in permit. There was a line in addition to people sitting on the floor against the back wall, and a general milling of hopeful and / or confused folks lingering near the counter for one kind of Whitney business or another.

We were trying to decipher if the line was where we should be or if maybe we should just barrel up to the permit counter like the entitled people we imagined ourselves to be in that moment. One of the 20%. One of the fortunate. When the woman behind the counter started barking orders at us and giving directions that lacked a few salient details, we didn’t feel quite so special. The list. The list. Everything was centered around the walk-ins for the day. People wanted to know where they were on the list, and how many names were yet to be read. 

We tried to find where our place was in all her rambles, but when she got to the end, and we couldn’t figure it out we had to pipe up. “Excuse me?,” we asked. “Where do we go if we already have permits?”

“You’ll just have to wait in line.” Maybe it came off a little more gruff than she meant, because in the same breath, she said, “Let me take a look at the list. I might be able to take you next after this guy.”

Thus, so it was. We finally found our place. In the line. 

Honestly, it must be a huge task to organize all of the people that come in every single day, hoping for a permit. And considering the amount of human waste, both contained in wag bags thrown off ledges where they are dangerous to recover, and exposed right there on the side of the trail with a little ribbon of stained toilet paper, maybe their tolerance level for humans is somewhat diminished. Mine would be. Add in the significant number of people who ask questions of the ill-informed, are clear ill-equipped, or already behave like they’re going to crap on the side of the trail—well, it’s a recipe for misanthropy.

After we accepted the fact we might be there for a while, the woman waved us up to her register, and thus began the process of checking in. 

She gave us the rundown of leave no trace principles, but mainly it was about the wag bags and bear canisters. A series of pictures trapped under the glass in front of us displayed mangled cars. When she saw us looking at them, she started rattling off the stories behind each one. Bears. This one just had the smell of food, nothing was actually in the car. That one had an empty cooler. 

“Their sense of smell is 2000 times more acute than ours. Did you bring your bear canister?” We finished checking in while worrying about bears. We strolled through the gift shop afterwards, looking for mementos. Like usual, nothing was worth the extra clutter in the house and the expense. Except the topo map bandanas, maybe. Those could be pretty useful.

After soothing our paranoia and acquiring a second bear canister, we left the interagency center, permits in hand and ready.

Ready for Jake’s Saloon, that is.

travelogue: a prequel to Mount Whitney

The city is howling. Dogs, the chirps of sirens, the low wail of a fire truck, the jangle of keys and the steady hum of Mexican music. This is the backdrop at the moment. In a few days, hopefully all our ears will detect is birds and our own breath.

Today is our last day to get things together before heading up to Lone Pine for our Mount Whitney excursion. We decided to do it as a multi-day. For us, the summit is only part of the equation. I want to be in the place instead of rampaging through it. I want to watch the moonrise and have some stillness in a place I might not ever be in again. I want to feel it in my bones, even if just for a little bit. Distill some of that peace and take it with me.

Most people are on the world, not in it. 

John Muir

There is also the simple fact that a 22-mile round trip hike with 6,000 feet of elevation gain necessitating a 3 AM or earlier departure doesn’t sound appealing.

The plan is to camp out, acclimate to the altitude, especially since we live at sea level, and reach the summit as a day hike, then chill out for a bit before heading back into the wilds of civilization. That doesn’t mean summit day isn’t going to hurt. It will. Big time. 

Why Mount Whitney?

There are a few reasons. As John Muir said, it is time to wash my spirit clean. To shed the city for a little while. Less laudable, it’s one of those buck list, you live only once kind of things. Mount Whitney is part of the Sierra Nevada mountain range (so it’s close) and is the highest point in the lower 48-states of the US. Of course, lots of folks want that accolade.

Aside from the glory, we like the challenge of the hike, but mostly, we like being in the mountains. We like silence and distilling life into its most basic elements.  We like watching ants, and stars, and being fully immersed in the moment.

Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where. Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality.

John Muir