Lobuche to Gorakshep

Depart at 0720, May 29th 16,170 feet.

This is the day for the Everest Marathon, EBC (Everest Base camp) to Namche Bazaar.  It's a tough one with high elevation,  terrible track, pedestrian and yak interference.

As we left out teahouse this morning, we sawthe Lobuche check station, marking 7.5 km into the race.

Marathoners padsed us all morning.

Our trail led (surprise,  surprise) up. Sometimes the trail was so broken up and full of boulders, I wondered how the yaks negotiated it.

In fact, two didn't. We came around a bend in the trail and saw two dead yaks at the bottom of the rock slide marking the edge of the trail. It looked to me like the animals got too close and the edge gave away.

I resolved to be even more careful.

Despite the dangers, the yak trains continue to serve as the transport system of the day. See how they pick their way through the broken trail.

We followed the west side of the Khombu Glacier as  we  worked our way up the edge of the valley created by the glacier.

The glacier is melting back and leaving lakes which are subject to burst the earthen dams and flood the area below.  We saw warning signs in several places about the dangers of glacial lake flooding.

Starting down, I thought we would be crossing another river.  As we climbed down into the valley, I saw that we were walking on a glacier that had fed into the Khumbu. Now it too was melting, leaving a massive overburden of rocks and debris.

We crossed the small river on a natural stone bridge, subject to collapse at any time and changing  location from year to year as the ice below melts and the rocks shift and settle.

Up one last hill and then down into Gorakshep. W arrived at 1234 and 16,925 feet.  This is where we're staying.

This is the rest of the town

Unlike the other towns we've seen, where water is gravity fed through pipes from higher sources of water, this town is above any source of water so water has to be packed up from the river. There's no running water anywhere and bottled water is about $4 per liter.

We were scheduled to visit EBC this afternoon but Mike has been flirting with mountain sickness. Ramesh changed the schedule so we'll go up there in the morning.