Everest: A Trekker’s Guide - Trekking in Nepal and Tibet

Everest and the Khumbu region of Nepal is one of the great trekking regions of the world. The guide includes all the main trekking routes, including from Lukla (and Jiri) to Namche, and routes to Thame, Gokyo, Thangboche, Lobuche, Kala Pattar and Everest Base Camp. Includes the route in Tibet from Tingri to the North side and Rongbuk monastery/glacier.

Mountains are fountains, not only of rivers and fertile soil, but of men. Therefore we are all, in some sense, mountaineers, and going to the mountains is going home.
John Muir

For all its great bulk and a height of 8848m (29,028ft) Mount Everest is remarkably shy, and for many days successfully eludes the gaze of trekkers approaching from the south. On the walk-in from Jiri there is one memorable stretch of trail between Junbesi and Sallung where for a few glorious minutes an amazing line of snowpeaks, including Everest, marks the far horizon. Then it’s gone, not to appear again for several days until a bend on the final slope leading to Namche Bazaar grants but a brief, tantalising glimpse.

Beyond Namche, however, the summit pyramid, often devoid of snow, appears from a variety of viewpoints as a black crown perched on the Nuptse–Lhotse ridge. All around other peaks, of varying altitudes and degrees of grandeur, jostle for attention while Everest impresses, as has been said, not so much by its great height ‘but by the suggestion ... of the immensity of its unseen mass’.

For most trekkers following the trails in this book a clear view of the world’s highest mountain will be the lure. That is understandable. But Everest is merely one among dozens of stunning peaks that crowd each day in Khumbu. Stand on the summit of Gokyo Ri and a truly remarkable panorama displays rank upon rank of snow, ice and rock peak, each carved with its own savage profile, while far below shines a turquoise lake and beyond its walling moraine the longest glacier in Nepal stretches grey, bleak and rubble-strewn.

At the head of Gokyo’s valley, Cho Oyu – one of the first ‘eight thousanders’ ever to be climbed – presents an almost featureless white face, a vast wall of snow-covered ice, while neighbouring Gyachung Kang provides a neatly sculpted contrast, appealing yet formidable with its bare-rock buttresses rising steeply from the glaciers.

Then there are the ice-crusted walls and pinnacles of Kangtega and Thamserku soaring above Namche, and nearby Ama Dablam, as easily recognised and as eternally memorable as Machhapuchhare (the ‘fish-tail’ peak) in the Annapurna Himal. From the trail above Namche, as from Khumjung and Thyangboche (or Tengboche), graceful Ama Dablam dominates views along the valley of the Imja Khola. Yet if you trek farther upvalley and view it from the north, the mountain is transformed entirely, and still it remains handsome, aloof and seemingly unattainable.

From Kala Pattar below stately Pumori, directly opposite Everest itself, the impressive west flank of Nuptse with its fluted peak, its great daubs of meringue-like snow and hanging glaciers, shames its more illustrious neighbour with startling beauty. If ever there were a crystal mountain Nuptse, seen from this view, would be it.

These, and other magnificent peaks, provide all the visual drama for which Nepal is so justly famed.

Nepal claims 8 of the 10 highest mountains in the world. Of these, three are Khumbu mountains (Everest, Lhotse and Cho Oyu), while a fourth (Makalu) is seen from specific viewpoints on and above the trail. Not without good reason did the much-travelled Bill Tilman call this ‘the grandest 30 miles of the Himalaya’.

Yet trekking in Solu-Khumbu is more than a simple adoration of mountains, for there are other aspects of the region that will enhance the whole experience of travel there. Villages along the trail, for example, reflect a way of life long forgotten by the developed world. Men and women still work the land either with the aid of water buffalo (in the foothills), or simply by hand (in the higher regions). As there are no roads there are no wheeled vehicles and all goods must be transported on the backs of porters or by strings of ponies or yaks. Along the trail prayer flags, prayer wheels, mani walls, chortens and gold-topped gompas all symbolise a tranquillity of spirit ignored by our industrialised society.

For many, trekking in the Khumbu can become almost a spiritual experience, a communion with both nature and man. Along the trails described in the following pages one has an opportunity to touch heaven every day.

Everest and the Solu-Khumbu Region

The pull of Everest was stronger for me than any force on earth.
Tenzing Norgay

Tucked away among a bevy of huge mountains in northeastern Nepal, Mount Everest forms a pyramid with three great ridges, along two of which runs the border with Tibet. The most southerly of these drops to the South Col, then rises to the summit of Lhotse (8501m: 27,890ft), from which other ridges stretch out to the west and east. An enormous horseshoe, known as the Western Cwm, is created by the linking of Everest, Lhotse and Nuptse, out of which the Khumbu glacier cascades in an immense frozen cataract.

It is the river which springs from this glacier, and other tributary glaciers feeding into it, that waters the Solu-Khumbu region on its tumultuous journey south – out through the middle hills and foothills of Nepal, out to the steamy, low-lying Terai and the Gangetic plain of India.

Khumbu is the mountainous Sherpa-inhabited region fanning southward from Mount Everest to the junction of the Bhote Kosi and Dudh Kosi rivers below Namche Bazaar; Solu, the middle hills that drain into the Solu Khola west of the Dudh Kosi. Linking the Solu district with that of Khumbu is the region known as Pharak – ‘the area that connects’.

South of the Nuptse–Lhotse wall a tributary valley joins that of the Khumbu just below Pheriche, bringing with it the meltwater of numerous glaciers, three of which form an icy moat round the trekking peak of Imja Tse, more descriptively known as Island Peak.
Below the junction of these two valleys the river flows southwestward and is known as the Imja Khola, but it soon trades this name for that of the Dudh Kosi at Thyangboche. For it is here that another major tributary flows from the frontier mountains – the Dudh Kosi, born in the Ngozumpa glacier that noses through the Gokyo valley from Cho Oyo and a host of stunning peaks.

Once the Dudh Kosi and Imja Khola rivers merge the valley narrows with huge walls rising on either side, and south of Namche Bazaar it becomes a veritable gorge. Then the Bhote Kosi swells the Dudh Kosi immediately below Namche, having drained more frontier mountains on the ridge continuing west of Cho Oyu. At the head of the Bhote Kosi’s valley lies the Nangpa La, a pass traditionally used by generations of Tibetans for cross-border trade with the Sherpas of Khumbu, while above Thame, the main village in the valley, the pass of Trashi Labtsa provides a potentially dangerous route into Rolwaling.

The Dudh Kosi gorge begins to open out at Mondzo, a trailside village on the edge of the Sagarmatha National Park. Some 1200 square kilometres (463 square miles) of mountainous country north of Mondzo – in effect all of Khumbu except the villages which are excluded from its authority – were incorporated into the National Park in 1976, and the Park declared a World Heritage Site three years later.

South of Mondzo the Dudh Kosi ploughs a long straight furrow and its valley remains narrow, squeezed in places by mountain spurs pushing from either side, and only on rare occasions flat-bedded and broad enough to encourage villagers to turn its banks to agriculture. However, from Kharikhola down, the hillsides have been immaculately terraced and a variety of crops flourish in the lower altitudes and more benevolent climate.

All the main river valleys hereabouts run roughly southward between long foothill (or middle hill) ridges, several of which are connected by ancient passes. West of the Dudh Kosi the Beni Khola joins the Junbesi Khola above Phaplu to become the Solu Khola. The headwaters of the first of these rise in the snowfields and glaciers of Numbur and Khatang, then flow between pine-clad hills and orchards of apples, peaches and apricots. From the ridge crests, as from Sallung, long views north show an immaculate row of white teeth etched upon the horizon – Khumbu peaks rising over a succession of intervening ridges.

This is Solu-Khumbu, a magical land full of charm and grace; a trekker’s dream world.