7 April – Pheriche to Lobuche Base Camp

Overnight low in room 40F. Starting altitude 4240 metres (13900 ft), ending altitude 4785 metres (15700 ft). Gain of 545 metres (1800 ft).

Pheriche to Lobuche BC. Decidedly not a rest day. Today’s activities involved going up, up, more up, and then up some more, and then up. Foreshadowing: the rest of this blog post basically consists of repeating the previous sentence in various ways.

Preparing to go up

We would actually not be staying in the town of Lobuche, but rather in Lobuche Base Camp, which is a camp established by Himex for use by their Lobuche mountain summit expeditions. Our route would take us toward the mountain, then would turn right to follow a notch in the mountains. We had roughly 550 metres to gain today.

We would turn right behind the hill in the foreground,
having gained roughly 170 metres

About halfway to the right turn, one of the guides was kind enough to use my camera to take my picture in front of some groovy scenery.

Child’s play! Ha ha ha ha ha!

The trail up the notch got much steeper. One of the guides had advised us that the trail would become a ‘grind’. Since he had described previous serious climbs as ‘a bit of an uphill stint’, I experienced apprehension. In truth, the grade wasn’t so bad. But at this altitude, I really couldn’t be in any way aggressive about making progress. Here is a view up the notch.

There would be about seven false summits before reaching the top

Here is a look back the other way

That plain below is where we started

At this point, I want to take a break from whining/bragging to show you a shot of some true beasts.

These guys are incredible

A couple of points of interest. That green duffel is mine. No big deal, that, just sort of interesting (if you’re me). Of perhaps greater interest to people who are not me are the two leftmost individuals in the above photo. They are both young girls, neither of whom can possibly weigh more than 50 kilos. The duffels they are carrying weigh an average of 20 kilos apiece, and each of them are carrying two. They are wearing sneakers.

I found that I could make pretty good progress, if I kept my pace slow and steady. My paces started out at 1.5 boot-lengths, and shortened by the time I got to the top. I actually got passed by two yaks on the way up. My mantra became, “No pride, just progress.”

There were two really cool things about reaching the top. One of them was being at the top. The other thing was turning around.

That plain below is where we started

Continuing on a short distance from the crest of the uphill stint came the first sight of Lobuche Base Camp.

The most welcome sight of the day

It was only about another fifteen minutes trek to the Lobuche base camp itself.

Nestled conveniently at the foot of Mt. Lobuche

We were at Lobuche BC in time for lunch. The rest of the day, though, was something of a wash for me. Or, at least, the next four or five hours. I felt pretty disassociated. The most similar feeling I have previously felt was after riding 100 km at Hotter N Hell. I recovered by evening time, with the help of some hot chocolate, and a special treat. As previously noted, trekking of this nature provides one with a tremendous degree of dietary freedom. Camp is stocked with a variety of goodies, and what appealed to me most was imitation Nutella spread upon Walkers shortbread cookies.

Don’t try this at home…

Tomorrow is an acclimatization day; we will sleep another night at Lobuche BC.