oke up after a decent 6.5 or so hours of sleep. I was surprised that I got a decent night’s rest; I didn’t sleep s wink before Lukla.

I didn’t have much time to wander around camp because I had to get all my gear together and ready for the trip to EBC. We heard a helicopter come in fairly early; it was evacuating someone from another team that had severe altitude sickness. I had seen this person the previous day being cleaned up after he vomited all over himself. One of our teammates had a room next to his and heard the same going on all night. He should have been moved to a lower altitude the previous day; I hope he is ok. Little did I know it was foreshadowing for our day.

We started out of Lobuche, it was not a hard climb up, but decently rocky terrain. We had been on the trail maybe an hour, and stopped for a breather. I didn’t realize immediately that one of our teammates was in trouble. They were having issues breathing, and got to where they couldn’t walk. That pretty much locked in a medical evacuation via helicopter. The Adventure Consultants team did a great job of dealing with the crisis and organizing the response. One of our sherpas (Kami) ran up the trail to catch up with our porters to get the oxygen bottle and the Gamow bag (a Gamow bag is a big bag you put someone in and pump up pressure in order to simulate  lower altitude). Amazing how fast he could run when I can’t even walk fast at this altitude. Our teammate is now back in Kathmandu and doing fine. A quick response was crucial. What really captures my attention is how quickly it set on; we had only climed 200 ft or so of altitude when this happened, and they had seemed fine before.

Ultimately, we we told to go on ahead while our guide and other staff stayed behind to see to the evacuation. We ultimately got to Gorak Shep. The terrain has gotten a lot more difficult in terms of rockiness and narrow ledges. There were a few climbs, but no climbs as steep as what we had done previously. About 2 hours later, we arrived at Gorak Shep and had lunch. As we get further up the valley, the quality of the food continues to decline, but edible. As we were eating lunch it began to snow.

After lunch, we set out for base camp in the snow. This was the roughest terrain yet; like someone took a barrel of rocks and just dumped them out in some places. The snow meant you just had to take that much more caution on the path. After a little more than an hour, we got our first view of base camp, that energized the team a bit. I think we rolled into base camp about 4:00 PM. Some of the Adventure Consultants staff greeted us at an iconic entrance rock.

Getting to the AC base camp, we were happy for the hot drinks and snacks waiting for us. The facilities were excellent; we had a nice comfortable common area for us to come to and relax. We had an excellent supper, the chefs at camp were quite good. We had large tents with little padded mattresses, with two separate sleeping rooms. We fit 4 people in one tent, and 5 in the other, so it was a little more crowded than normal, but very doable.

I went to sleep hoping the trend of clear weather for mornings would continue; we really didn’t get to see much on the way in due to the snow.