Sleeping in thermals, jeans, two fleeces, two pairs of socks and a snood, but neither hat nor gloves nor down outer layers, in a -30 rated sleeping bag under two quilts, we’re actually quite toasty at Gorak Shep, despite the cloud that’s come in.

It feels like a permanent change in the weather, as if winter has come. And, over breakfast, we argue about discuss what to do.

“We climb Kala Patthar in the morning?” says Nir, who, in my opinion, could do with more layers, but won’t say he does, and anyway all our clothes stink now, so I can’t offer him anything more than what I’ve already lent him unless he admits to positive desperation.

“No,” I say, pointing at the cloud cover. “We’re not going to see anything. I think we do Everest Base Camp in the morning, then if it clears, we do sunset at Kala Patthar.”

“So,” Nir says mournfully. “Two nights at Gorak Shep?”

“Yeah,” I say. “And if the weather doesn’t clear tonight, maybe we’ve got a chance at sunrise. If we don’t, we head straight down to Pheriche. It’s warmer, right?”

“Yes,” Nir says. “Minus five, maybe.” In the bracing atmosphere of a trekking lodge at Gorak Shep, such a temperature sounds quite indulgently tropical.

“Do we REALLY need to do Everest Base Camp?” asks Zac, who, like me, was so focussed on the Cho-La pass that he’s forgotten the theoretical point of this trip.

“YES,” I say, laying down a three line whip. “There’s nothing there, but it’s the bragging rights, and you’ll kick yourself if you’re an hour and half’s walk away from it, and don’t do it.”

“There ARE no bragging rights in Everest Base Camp when you’re twelve,” he says, not for the first time. “And there’s nothing even there! It’s just a moraine. There won’t be any tents there.”

“There will be when you’re eighteen,” I say. “AND, there’s a sign.”

Much to Zac’s distaste I’m quite tragically obsessed with signage, and the taking of photos in front of said sign (maybe I’m secretly Japanese). I also want to look up the Khumbu icefall.

The path leads past an empty glacier lake through a vast landscape, with dazzling high mountain scenery: it would be hard, I feel, to get tired of this stark world of snow, rock and ice, the jagged slump of bluish icefalls descending Nuptse, the slabs of granite thrust up as plates collide, this almost unimaginably ancient place.

There are more memorials here, to soldiers from many armies who have died on the mountain, to expeditions from all over the world, to young men who have given their life up to conquer this ugly slab of a mountain. I wonder if their mothers ever visit them, like the mother we met in Egypt.

We head over the top of the valley and into moraine, where the path snakes over the top of great mounds of rubble and compacted ice, taking breaks before the dangerous place so we can cover it fast.

Nuptse, we agree, is a beautiful mountain to walk past.

After an hour, we’re in the zone that I’ve come to love, the simple bliss of one foot in front of another, the drumbeat of step-step-stick, thinking about nothing.

I say something to Zac. “Don’t,” he says. “I’m walking. Now you’ve broken my rhythm.”

The cloud muffles all sound, the ice glistens, and up here, I can see what drives people to climb mountains. Not Everest, with its long queues of climbers making its way up the ropes dragged by Sherpas, but the quieter peaks, where you can be alone in the mountains and the silence, snow and cloud enfolding all.

Simultaneously, and schizophrenically, I’m looking forward to the comforts of civilisation, best expressed as a Negroni and a blue steak.

And there it is! The Khumbu icefall, the jumpoff point for Everest.

I stop and snap Zac in front of the spot where more than three thousand souls have started their journey towards the summit, and from which hundreds have never returned.

A couple of rubble heaps more, and there’s the sign! The SIGN!

Everest Base Camp is a movable feast, and as most summit attempts are made in May, there is nothing to mark the spot but this plastic banner and some prayer flags, which I strongly suspect to be a few hundred metres ahead of where most people actually place their camps.

There’s a weird rush of disappointment, followed by elation. We’re nowhere, I think. But we’re HERE!

“Wow!” I say to Zac. “I was expecting this to be a total anti-climax, but it isn’t.”

“No,” he says. “I’m surprised too. It feels good to be here.”

“We did it!” I say, and thank Nir profusely.

There’s a little pink sparrow-type bird on top of the rocks lined with prayer flags. I capture him just before he takes flight, frail, vulnerable, warm, soft and so alive in this hard terrain.

He feels, dimly, like a symbol. And as I look at my little boy I feel the same sense of wonder as I did when we finally found our hunter-gatherer in the jungle of the Spice Islands.

“Mum!” says Zac, inspecting the names marked out in pebbles in the dust, scrawled on rocks in marker pen, decorating the prayer flags. “Do you have a pen?”

Uhoh. I only have a biro. (Doing the Everest Base Camp trek with kids? Bring a marker pen. Moraine is such a mobile landscape that the usual rules about not scrawling your name on natural wonders cease, I feel, to apply.)

“No,” I say. “I’m so sorry! That was so stupid!”

I rummage in my bag. I have a lipstick!

“Use this,” I say, scrawling invisibly on a rock.

“Nah,” Zac says. He has located a computer printout left by some corporate team building expedition, and a piece of cardboard.

Grinning evilly, he squats down and scribbles on his cardboard, then places it over the poor corporate team builders’ expedition memories, weighting it with rocks.

“Oh my god!” I say. “You’ve just turned twelve! And you’ve reached Everest Base Camp on the twelfth of the twelfth, 2012.”

It seems apt, somehow, kind of perfect. It pleases all three of us.

I take some lacklustre photos. By Himalayan standards, the views from Everest Base Camp aren’t all that, but I knew that anyway.

“Time to head back for lunch?” I ask.

The food on the Everest Base Camp trek is by now becoming spectacularly unappealing, but Nir gave us a taste of his “meat” (yak) curry last night, and we’re rather looking forward to having that for lunch.

“Yeah,” says Zac.

My hands are too cold to mess around with the self-timer, so Nir grabs the sign shot.

Wow, I think, as we amble gently back across the moraine.

Just Kala Patthar to go, and then we’ve done the whole shebang. And, it looks like the weather might clear soon, so we could nail it this afternoon. We’re well acclimatised, so I don’t see it being difficult.

And it slowly begins to dawn on me that, of course, we have not done the whole shebang. We need – d’oh! — to get back down.

You can read the last post in this series on our Everest Base Camp trek here, start from the beginning here or read about Kala Patthar.

If you’re thinking of doing the Everest Base Camp trek, I recommend my Everest Base Camp FAQs.

The post We Made It! Everest Base Camp! appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

Everest Base Camp The Lazy Way, Day 12: Gokyo to Dragnag

Dragnag is our jumping off point for the Cho-La, the Himalayan high pass that is beginning to scare the pair of us, and it sits across a hideous slurry of dying glacier from Gokyo.

We have fallen a little in love with ice, up here. Zac’s been skating on frozen lakes, lounging on them, shattering great slabs of fresh water ice on the rocks or yet more ice, jumping on the slabs that have frozen out their water and now sit stranded, balanced on rocks, shattering them with the child’s delight that has yet to give way to adolescence.

The ice roars and creaks and hisses as it expands and contracts in the sun. An animal roar, when there’s a deep crack happening, as if there’s a giant sea snake trapped in the bowels of the ice, something dark and sinister, and, once, I catch a fissure zipping its way across the surface of the ice, just like in a movie.

I’d heard that ice roared. But I never believed it until I heard it.

Watching snowcock pad around the rocks, bright Himalayan ducks skipping deftly from the edge of the roaring ice into the icy water, and the yaks still free in their high pastures, I’m amazed by the life that exists here.

What we’re heading across, though, is not so pretty. It’s marked as glacier on the map, but in fact it’s the ugliest landscape I’ve seen: moraine.

And, if you ever doubted that glaciers were in retreat, here’s the proof right here, a landscape so dazzling in its ugliness, a post-apocalyptic nightmare of mound upon mounds of slag and rubble, sinister pools of grey ice, ice so grey-blue and hard it’s conglomerate rock, holding up the ugly, ugly stuff above.

It looks, to be honest, like the remains of a gigantic, abortive mining project, one conducted by competing individuals rather than a machine.

I would never have thought nature could make such a mess.

But then, of course, with glaciers, it isn’t just nature. It’s us.

A path, continually remade by landslides and marked with totemic cairns, winds up and down and around the rubble, around a wasteland of ice lakes and ice caves, built on hidden arches of rocky ice.

It’s annoying walking, constantly on scree, over the top of one mound after another, sometimes scrambling over big boulders, sometimes slipping as the dust gives way, revealing ice as hard and clear as tinted glass.

“It’s like Norse hell,” I say to Zac, dimly remembering the sagas, the frozen wasteland of Niflheim.

“Yes!” he says. “It is.”

“Go fast here,” says Nir. We’re walking along a path below the spot where the valley descends into moraine, a steep sandy slope decked with rockfalls and adorned with more rocks waiting to fall. “Little bit danger.”

I don’t want to go fast! I got up at 3.30am to see sunrise from Gokyo Ri, I’m carrying our little daypack and, in fact, I don’t really think I can go fast at all.

That said, I’m a mother. So I chivvy Zac to walk fast, which entails walking fast, or faster, myself, one wary eye on the slope above me.

And then there’s a crack, and a shower of dust, and I look to the side and behind me, and, as if in slow motion, a rock comes bounding down the slope.

“RUN!” yells Nir, running.

And we run! Oh Jesus, do we run, pelting down this scree-strewn path that can’t be more than a foot wide, run like I never thought we could.

And, mercifully, the landslide stops, contained behind us. It’s only a few bare handfuls of rocks, some the size of my fist, others the size of my head, and every single one of them big enough to kill my child.

We stop to catch our breath.

“That,” says Zac, looking shaken. “Was the most terrifying experience of my life.” (Which, given the boy had a car crash earlier this year, is saying something.)

“Three or four Nepali people died here,” says Nir.

“In rockfalls?” I ask, redundantly.

“One time I here and a boulder like this,” he taps a chunk of rock the size of an armchair, “Fell here.” He points beside his feet. “Little bit danger,” he concludes.

“And the Cho-La?” I say.

I’m so scared of heights that I haven’t really internalised the other dangers these mountains have to offer. I’m terrified of cliffs, crevasses, long drops to certain death, but otherwise really quite relaxed about safety.

“Danger,” he says.

“Big danger, or little bit danger?” I ask, in Nir-ese.

“Danger,” he says.

For the first time in the mountains (I gave up smoking when I was sick in Pokhara), I could really, really do with a cigarette.

You can read the last post in this series here, start from the beginning here, or join us crossing the Cho-La Pass.

If you’re thinking of doing the Everest Base Camp trek, I recommend my Everest Base Camp FAQs.

The post This Frozen Hell appeared first on EscapeArtistes.