The idea of hiking to the Everest Base Camp had been planted in my head many months before, as a small inkling of a desire I didn’t know I had. It was a chilly fall day on campus, I was studying in the stacks of the furthest library away from my dorm. I was shuffling along an ice covered pathway when my bladder decided it was full and begged me to relieve the building pressure. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any access to any of the academic buildings along the way back. While I trudged my feet forward contemplating turning back to the library, by some gift from above, I saw a door propped open by a small stone in the English building to my left. I slipped in quietly and found a bathroom. On my way back out the same door I was startled to see an older man standing by a lecture room who excitedly said, “You must be here for the lecture!”
There must have been something about this man and his enthusiasm or maybe it was the begrudging knowledge that I would soon be back to laboring over my assignments if I continued on to my dorm, that made me stop. I simply smiled at him and uttered a “yes” as I made my way into the open lecture room.
I came to find out that this man had managed to summit Mt. Everest three times by two different routes. He joked the third time was his last as he felt he had cheated death enough and his luck would run out at some point. Extraordinary is what he did, but my mind was focused on the very beginning of his presentation, as he spoke of his flight to the airport with the shortest runway in the world and his hike to the base camp, where ordinary people hike all the time in the right seasons.
The vivid images of rocky peaks covered in snow and big wooly looking yaks loaded down with supplies played through my mind, twirling, then striking and embedding into my thoughts just as a mosquito buries its pointed mouth through layers of skin.
Those thoughts continued buzzing and penetrating into the front of my mind over the next month. I swatted them away thinking there was no way, no way possible I was doing that. I got an email at the end of those fall months from our Outdoors Club inviting me to a talk about hiking to the Everest Base Camp with a group. Apparently this company takes college students to several different places in the world and the Everest Base Camp was offered that year. They showed amazing photos and videos of the treks, promising life changing moments. It all seemed good and dandy until the end came and they talked about fundraising for the money that they required for their services.
As a college student on financial aid, I was already working three jobs to pay for school supplies, textbooks, my student contribution, and any internships I would be taking over the summer. The money they were asking for was way too far out of reach for me even with all of the work I put in. The idea of the hike died a bit.
It wasn’t until late winter, around February, when I began to entertain the idea again. I had settled on a multi-week internship in Thailand and had a little extra money after some scholarship help. I looked at plane tickets to Nepal which again seemed too expensive. Then I began reading and browsing articles and blogs about the hike. I asked people who had completed it and almost all but one recommended a guide (again in which I could not afford). I read of people going with companies who had yaks carry their items from one stop to the other and it seemed a bit like cheating to me. I couldn’t do this trek if I couldn’t do it for myself.
Spring came around, finals ended, and I knew my decision for what I wanted to do in the first month before my internship had to happen. I finally checked airline tickets again. To my great surprise, the tickets dropped severely to an affordable rate, that was leaving in two days.
I spent the next two days frantically reading and packing my hiking bag with my stuff for Thailand, as well as the great hike I was to endure. I wasn’t sure what I would truly need so over-packed is putting it lightly.
This mosquito of a plan had brought more than just a pinch of pain, it introduced a virus that infected me and forced me forward on this idea of an adventure I was wholly unprepared for.
