First Summit
6/3/2022 10:50:20 AM
First Summit 5650m
No News from the hills of Himalaya.
To celebrate the Friday, we decided to flex our limbs that were numb from all of the rest that we’ve gotten. So we did a little trek for a day. We decided to trek to the Gorak Shep mountain village, that lies at about 1,5 hours walking distance from the Base Camp.
Mikko from Lhotse-Everest group joined us, while Tomi and Joni selected to go to Kala Pattar. Moving after a five-day break felt really good and the trek was a very relaxed one. In Gorak Shep we planned to use the Internet café’s services to do some internet banking and to manage some insurance services. Not excluding, of course, the updates in Facebook and in this blog. The bandwith in the Internet Café is much better suited for moving larger chunks of data than the limited satellite connection we use in the Base Camp. You could have read the disappointment from our faces when the lady at the Café told us: “Internet closed”. What made us feel a little better was that this was no one-time issue, rather than they had been offline for the previous two weeks.
We enjoyed a Coke in the sunny terrace and decided to head back to the Base Camp (5.545 m) via the summit of Kala Pattar (5.650). This summit, we agreed, had now to serve as our first summit. JIIHAA!!
In about an hour, we did climb on top of Kala Pattar, but to our misfortune, the clouds did gather up to hide the Himalaya View that we planned to store in the memory cards of our cameras. We tried to make the best of it and started trekking back to the Base Camp with a very gusty wind following us all the way.
The discussions during dinner turned toward the Everest and all the epic stories from the hills of the mountain. Some tails, tragic as they may be, showed us really well how strong the belief within the locals is: the mountain and the Gods of the Mountain decide who gets to climb the mountain and who doesn’t. We all have our beliefs, but here, surrounded by a different culture, we do place our faith on the broad shoulders of Mother Nature. The weather forecasts seem to push the summit date further and further away, but we’re hopeful that the weather will favor us and that we get to keep the dates of our return flights. According to our information, the Finnish ladies Carina and Anne-Mari have started their way to Camp 3 with the target to reach the summit between 16th and 17th of May. We follow the progress of the ladies with great interest and wish the all the luck and Godspeed for the summit.
All is well.
Mika Pitkämäki