Trekking to Everest Base Camp

I was a professional athlete at the time (triathlon), I prepared, I monitored my O2, I drank lots of water...and I still got high altitude sickness. But this trek was still a wonderful experience.

Back in 2018 I was competing for Team USA in triathlon, I was in graduate school and working a shift job on an ambulance to pay for school. It was a lot. I look back even now and wonder how I managed all of it, but I did and I am proud of 25 year old Katie for sticking through it all. I decided I needed a break part way through my degree and found the perfect window before racing season took off and after the semester ended to go on a trip.

I don't remember how, but I landed on Nepal. I wanted to see Everest with my own eyes. I have zero interest in ever attempting to summit her. Like, ever. But I saved up my money where I could, worked extra shifts and convinced my coach I would keep my fitness up by trekking through the Himalayas.

Since I was traveling alone, I decided to go with a local tour guide who knew the mountains. Once we landed in Kathmandu I picked up a few more items I needed (water cleaning tablets I still love you forever) and grabbed our flight from the main airport towards the mountains. This is that flight that seems to go viral on the internet every year for being the most dangerous flight in the world. You hop on a small plane that fits maybe 10 people in folding seats and the pilot navigates through the fog in the Himalayas to land at Lukla Airport. Which...is on a cliff. And has the shortest runway I've ever seen.

So basically if the pilot doesn't stop in time, you die. If they don't take off quickly enough, you die. If the winds are bad, the planes won't fly. It is pretty wild and I did get very, very motion sick. But so did everyone else and we signed up for this so we all drank some tea at the airport when we landed and got over it.

The trek was supposed to be 10-12 days depending on weather and how everyone was feeling. We ended up moving pretty quickly and were estimated to reach Everest Base Camp on Day 6.

Each day you wake up at a tea house, eat breakfast and then set off for your morning walk. Then you stop at another tea house, lunch and rest your feet while you pet the local dogs and do it again. I would estimate we walked 10-15 miles a day and I never found it physically difficult on the legs but you do notice a higher heart rate and fatigue rate the higher you go. Once you reach Day 3 you have to stop for 2 nights and do some acclimatization. Which means you stay in the same village for 2 nights but on your in between day you take a steep day-hike and then come back down. Hike high, sleep low is the motto. This methodology is to help your body adjust to having less oxygen in the air at the increasing altitude you climb.

Now, this is the Himalayas. One of the largest mountain ranges in the world. So the altitude is no joke. For the locals that are born in the mountains, this is their everyday life up in the thinner air. But for visitors, it feels like you're getting less and less fit as you get higher each day. Altitude effects people differently and for the first 5 days I felt completely fine honestly.

I didn't have a working phone with me because I was too broke to purchase an e-sim back then and didn't feel the need to buy wifi at the teahouses. Each day I got to meet new people from around the world and learn more about the Nepali people. Each night at the tea houses we would play card games and chat. Unfortunately, this was the year of the record number of deaths of climbers attempting to summit Everest and we would get the news each night on a 48 hour delay. That was depressing in some ways but it's also the reality of mountaineering and the overcrowding at the summit that year. Sitting in the tea houses you could tell who was on the way to the mountain by their bright eyes and eagerness, and you could tell who was coming down from the mountain by their raccoon sunburn and exhaustion.

On the night of Day 5 we reached the final village we would stay in before reaching Base Camp the next morning. I went to bed feeling absolutely fine and woke up the next morning feeling like I'd been hit by every illness I'd ever had. Altitude sickness had reared it's ugly head. To me it felt like someone had clamped vices all around my head, I had the flu, I wanted to vomit, all my muscles were cramping and the whole room was spinning. My face was swollen and moving my head caused everything to get worse.

Altitude sickness is something that just happens. The body doesn't adjust or stops compensating for the altitude and low oxygen in the air. Your brain can swell (high altitude cerebral edema: HACE) or your lungs can fill with fluid (high altitude pulmonary edema: HAPE). I had HACE and acute altitude sickness piled on top of asthma (that had been fine till now!). My guide went looking for the village doctor and returned without him because a family of 4 in the tea house next door had passed away in their sleep overnight from altitude sickness as well.

I felt absolutely horrific and I was by myself sitting in a tea house at 16,500 feet in the air. I didn't know what to do honestly because I had the travel insurance to helicopter back down to Lukla but I didn't want to give up only 3 hours from base camp! My guide also had this odd point of pride of never having sent a person back down in a helicopter so he was adamant I not take that option. That still sticks out to me as weird to this day since the average person who walks to base camp gets a ride back to Lukla in a helicopter to save time on the trek so it's not like the helicopters were hard to come by.

I decided ultimately to buy some wifi and text my parents. I got ahold of them and filled them in on what was going on and as most parents would advise - you need to decide what's best for you because only you know how you feel. And that's when I decided to walk back down.

It was a hit to the ego but GOSH was the relief of my symptoms nice once I got 500 feet lower than I had been. That's really all it took. Just dropping down a few hundred feet and my body let the pain train go. I walked down with a local man and a stray dog that decided to join us for the next 3 days. We were quite the trio as he only spoke Nepalese, I spoke English and the dog listened to no one. I decided to make my walk down a little more interesting and took a different route than I had come up. The scenery was beautiful but since it was the end of the season, I was really the only foreigner on this trail.

I made friends with the local kids hanging around the tea houses, read all the books I had, taught my traveling companion about the Rocky Mountains of Canada in the most broken Nepalese I'm sure he's ever heard and journaled - a lot. My symptoms got better each day but the fatigue of the overall journey set. It took 6 days to get back to Lukla and I learned so much about myself in those days. I had friends back then who couldn't eat a meal alone because they hated their own company and here I was not seeing another person I could converse easily with for 6 days. It sounds like I'm whining but I honestly don't know many people are signing up to go to an extremely remote part of a foreign country and enjoy that much time alone, despite what they may say they would do. Luckily I do enjoy my own company, but boy do you learn things about yourself in a situation like that. I also learned that Avril Lavigne is very popular in remote Nepal so I did bond with a few local families over their Avril posters.

My trip to almost Everest Base Camp was hard, it was wonderful and it was challenging in so many ways. It's exactly what I should have been doing in my 20's so I'm glad I did it. Don't take this story as discouragement or a "sign" not to take trips with risks. I'd still recommend trekking in Nepal and I will be going back very soon to do a different route.

I'm a firm believer that the stress we feel in nature (physical and mental) and by taking risks to try new things is what the human stress response is for. It teaches us and shapes us as humans. It also helps us be more resilient at home in our everyday lives when we are exposed to things that "stress us out", but in are no way actually a threat that will harm us (the internet, our jobs, traffic). Coming home from this tripe after altitude sickness, a motorbike accident and then an attempted mugging (stories for another time) all while traveling alone...ya it changed my stress tolerance.

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