How I made it to the ground floor of the tallest mountain in the world, Mt Everest

But from where I stood, all I could see was a slightly taller conical top behind the much grander looking Mt Lhotse. Utterly underwhelmed, I whispered to our Sherpa, Sagar, “It looks further away than I thought.” “That’s because it’s quite high, no?” he retorted with a smirk, “You are just touching its base camp.” There I was, put in my place as the mountain quietly continued to loom over me.

From its daunting height, the Sagarmatha thus looks upon climbers unfazed. Its magnificence requires no spectacle — history is littered with records detailing decades of effort poured into numerous failed expeditions and the lives lost in a bid to scale the mountain until on May 29, 1953, Nepalese climber Tenzing Norgay Sherpa and New Zealand mountaineer Edmund Hillary touched the summit of the Himalayan crown. Today, trekkers tread on the paths navigated by Norgay and Hillary in northeastern Nepal’s Khumbu region to walk one of the most popular routes among global climbing enthusiasts: the Everest Base Camp (EBC) Trek.

The tussle between life and death

Every year, one of the highlights of my calendar has been packing up my haversack and setting off into the Himalayas to wade through swathes of verdant hills, to cross ridges and treacherous snow-clad passes on high altitude trekking trails. In April 2024, this meant embarking on a 15-day-long adventure to gape at the colourful tents fluttering in the wind, inhabited by mountaineers attempting to summit Sagarmatha.

Following the infamously turbulent flight to Lukla begins the EBC climb that leads trekkers to the famed Namche Bazaar, a picturesque hill town carved inside the Sagarmatha National Park. The goal is to reach base camp, steadily acclimatising to the rising altitude, and to return via much the same path, ultimately covering a distance of 137 kilometres on foot.

This long journey to base camp and back takes a climber on a route that reads like a love poem dedicated to the two climbers immortalised in the history of mountaineering. It is filled with plaques, museums and audio-visual experiences commemorating their monumental feat.

The trek route is also an insight into the stories of those sherpas and mountaineers, who, akin to Norgay and Hillary, put their lives on the line in pursuit of scaling the tallest peaks in the world. This is evidenced in the memorial ground created atop the tough Thukla Pass ascent where dozens of stones pay tribute to courageous climbers. One among them memorialises Babu Chiri Sherpa, known for creating multiple world records, including for the fastest ascent of Sagarmatha in 16 hours and 56 minutes, and for once surviving 21 hours on the mountain without oxygen.

Sherpas are indeed the life blood of high altitude trekking. Narrating the challenges involved in attempting to summit the Sagarmatha, Sagar tells me that during the ‘Everesting season,’ “It is the sherpas who go ahead and do the groundwork of manoeuvring crevasses and glaciers to tighten ropes and ladders upon which mountaineers climb to attempt summit.” In a game where the stakes are as high as the tussle between life and death, the mountaineering communities of Nepal gamble it all.

The route from Lobuche to Gorakshep

Our group’s principal local leader on the trek route is the charismatic Angs Gyalzey Sherpa. He has scaled Sagarmatha twice and climbed some of the tallest mountains in the world like the Shishapangma. Every morning, Gyalzey would greet us smilingly, yet his eyes would be alert, scanning our faces for any sign of trouble from injury to altitude sickness.

The Solukhumbu region is immersed in Buddhist influences with the Tengboche Monastery on the EBC route being a famous pitstop for climbers. This has perhaps translated into a culture of generosity and warm hospitality that gushes from the porters, sherpas and the waitstaff in the cafes littered across the towns where trekkers make camp.

Taking a bite of a warm apple crumble while sitting at a bakery across from the monastery, I venture to ask the baker how he procures fresh produce to run his snug little shop. “Everything comes from down below,” he says, casually referring to the mountain road used by porters to ferry 30 kg to 50 kg of load on their backs at a height of nearly 4,000 mtrs above sea level.

My porter for the trek is Saumina, a sprightly 21-year-old girl, who carries my bigger backpack while herding the gorus (a cross between yaks and bulls) bearing our luggage from lodge to lodge. On the way to Gorakshep, the last point before base camp, we ascended side by side.

The route from Lobuche to Gorakshep standing at 5,164 meters is filled with multiple climbs. At this altitude, the body responds differently to strenuous activity. With trees left behind, oxygen drops amidst barren mountains laden with rock and sand and every breath is audibly wheezy. Moving a handful of steps is massive work and the challenge remains to breathe steadily to avoid overwhelming the lungs.

Unsurprisingly, Saumina’s breathing is even though she keeps up a constant chatter. She saunters alongside me, a hefty haversack slung carelessly on her back and as if sensing my trepidation each time a bend in the mountain hints at another climb, she says, “We will be there soon.” But she has been saying so for over an hour and I have lost faith in her reassurances.

Instead I listen closely to the words that tumble from her in broken English. She hails from Solukhumbu district, she says, and married young, is now mother to a five-year-old. As with most porters, she left her home in a hilly Nepalese village to come looking for work on the famed EBC and Gokyo Valley — Cho La Pass trekking routes.

Tenzing, our 55-year-old porter from Okhaldhunga district, shares a similar story. Ahead of the trekking season, he arrives in Lukla and is hired by sherpas like Gyalzey heading uphill. With a daughter and a son settled abroad, he heads home to his wife and youngest daughter after the season ends in May to work the fields, look after their cattle and wait out the winter. During our descent back to Lukla, he insists on carrying my small day pack for a distance of 40 kms covered in two days, humming happily, “Tenzing aur miss saath saath chalega!” (Tenzing and miss will walk together!)

A Final Ascent

En route Gorakshep, when Saumina and I come upon yet another precarious bend, I look at her in desperation. “How far?” I whimper. My voice comes out in a strangled whisper and Saumina replies, “Five minutes.” This time she is telling the truth!

I turn the curve and stare elated at the green and blue tops of the sparse lodges indicating the remote region of Gorakshep. We drop our luggage at our lodge, grab a bite to eat and set off on the final lap of our ascent to base camp.

EBC is a fine treat for trekkers — unlike alpine tent stays, here we spend our nights in lodges wrapped in warm blankets that protect us from the biting chill of the dropping mercury. But this comfort does little to ease the strenuous hike to base camp where every step is as arduous as it is exhilarating.

To reach Sagarmatha’s base camp, we climb a ridge along the Khumbu glacier and five kilometres later, there we are. Ahead of us lies the famous stone that states simply: Everest Base Camp 5,364 mtrs. The only other signpost is a hoarding in front of the stone celebrating Norgay and Hillary.

We have arrived.

Yet, after gazing so long at the magnificent snow-clad mountains like Lobuche and Ama Dablum on our path, we reach only to find Sagarmatha buried in clouds. The disappointment is apparent. However, when we look back at how far we have come and spot in front of us tiny bobbing specks of mighty mountaineers acclimatising at base camp, a feeling of triumph cannot not help but wash over our amateur trekker selves.

Perhaps this is what the journey to base camp has been telling us all along: to appreciate the immense feats our bodies and minds are capable of. EBC is a trek that tests endurance and patience. For days on end, we climb the quietly demanding ascents of Khumbhu’s mountains and they demand from us perseverance and steady effort. At the end, we reach the base camp after much work to realise that in the hustle of ‘fast speed’ everything, the mountains alone stand tall and still, yet remain notoriously difficult to conquer.

In that stoic silence and quiet magnificence of the mountains converging on us, Tenzing and I sit on the cold ground leaning against a rock and stare enraptured at the soft grey cloud cover embracing the Sagarmatha.

I revel in this solitariness of two wanderers having found a quiet spot to nestle in and let all epiphanies sink in, before I am broken out of my reverie. “Time to go,” says our leader much too soon. More climbing beckons and I haul myself up, emboldened to descend down the lengthy way we arrived…