20,000 Leagues Over the Sea (Part III: Coming Home Early)

With a kind of fresh perspective on our trip now that mountaineering was behind us (but all the gear still in our bags) Mana and I made quick work of the Dzongla valley and Cho La, a glaciated high pass. They all said it couldn't be done and they all said it especially couldn't be done if you had a late start, long lunch, and don't leave Dzongla until 1pm, but we were still determined to do the whole pass in one day. Well they were right. At dusk we descended rocky scree after traversing the glacier and watching a top-three sunset, Mana unable to find his headlamp. The talus field below was so littered with Honda-sized boulders that it took us at least an hour and a half in the dark to find somewhere to pitch a tent. That night Mana made it clear that he was headed straight down the Gokyo valley to the airport the next day, while I had been simmering a plan to take our last week and try finding Tibet somewhere to the north. It wasn't on our map but on the plane into Kathmandu I met a European fellow who told me in detail how he planned to visit the border from a pass in the north, methodically get lost, and then accidentally wander into Tibet. I thought that trekking to the border would be an appropriate send off for our trip, until I woke up in the Gokyo valley with Brendan's bronchitis. Maybe better prepared I would have done it, but going so far north would have put me short on time, I would have been carrying all of Mana's extra food on top of my 60 lbs, and the bronchitis really took the wind out of an already exhausted boy. I'm 20 years old and almost indestructible, but this time I wasn't, so for a day I hung my head in defeat and shuffled behind Mana as he hustled south.

Cruising into Lukla Mana and I literally saw the two-prop mountain plane land that would take off about ten minutes later, with us in it. Right then I was thinking about how good a plate of fried chicken momo's would be, but after a week I'd be remembering how good the Dal Bhaat was in that smoky, crowded, one room Sherpa lodge where the floor was cleaned with a rake and the cardboard behind the yak dung stove occasionally caught on fire. Funny that when squashed into patties yak dung is pretty unoffensive, and I swear that on fire it even smells sweet.

The scale of the Himalaya is like nothing that words or pictures could do justice, its like going out west for your first time after seeing only hills in Vermont and New Hampshire, your eyes don't quite know what to make of it. And Everest is neat, it's definitely the biggest black rock I've ever seen, but man Ama Dablam, the Lhotse face and Cholatse are some of the most humbling and mind blowing things I've ever seen. Ama Dablam is actually almost symmetrical on four sides like it has four jagged, Gothic flying buttresses coming off at right angles to each other. That said I don't think I would go back, not anytime soon at least. It was crowded, clearly set up for tourists with money. And the most interesting cultural experiences I had were with other trekkers from around the world because the local Sherpa are so conditioned to tourism that the authenticity is lost. I don't think there was anything enlightening about our trip to the Solukhumbu, but I don't think you can chalk it up to an eccentric vacation either. So call it another profitable experience in mountaineering and in life, as long as I get some good Facebook photos out of it.

I've learned that carrying a 50 lb. pack for three weeks at 17,000 feet is as much work as it sounds, that I know just enough Nepali to be dangerous if someone will listen to me without laughing, and that the next time I'm mountaineering I might bring a full length toothbrush but leave the half kilo of yet-to-be-eaten kidney beans and two meter-long aluminum snow pickets at home.


Lastly, a quiet prayer for October 8th and three empty seats.

20,000 Leagues Over the Sea (Part II: Climbing)

Island Peak base camp was quite a site, probably a smaller version of Everest base camp despite the peaks' 3000m difference, though we never went that far north. Here we congregated with one of the British climbers who stayed a night at our flat and took an extra rest day as it looked like Mana was inheriting the bronchitis that Brendan was enduring. Both were slowed down by the infection and a lot of weight was shifted between packs, but we knew that if we took it easy and made sure it didn't get any worse than bronchitis we'd be fine. Maybe with this on our minds we didn't pay enough attention to acclimatization, because at base camp Brendan and I both got headaches, which is pretty normal though, and just means we gained altitude too fast. Here Brendan decided to take Diamox (helps your body acclimatize) and we found out that the peripheral tingling side effect might be worse than the small headache you were trying to get rid of. Really ibuprofen was the only drug we ever really needed on the trip.

After some advice from a friendly Canadian doctor Brendan decided to give it another rest day while Mana and I tried the southeast ridge. I decided against making a high camp above base camp, so we went to bed with the sun on our rest day and woke up at 3am for an "alpine" ascent from 5,070m to the summit, 6,189m, and back before the winds pick up in the early afternoon. My body didn't like something about the food, altitude, and early start so I ended up vomiting a few times, but I figured if that was the worst of it then I'd be fine. So we geared up and set out under a moon so full we needn't use our headlamps. The route climbs steep and loose rock of varying quality and color all the way to the snow line, and without a clear path we sometimes veered into rock climbing territory, which at least once ended up with a fantastic shortcut.

After an incredible sunrise we were nearly at the snow line when I looked up to see our British friend stumbling his way back down with his Sherpa. I knew he didn't have enough time to summit and thought something might be up, so I asked how he was and got a confused answer involving a headache and chest infection. "Jez" claimed that he was just dehydrated and that the dry cough was from well before, but he was completely disoriented, stumbling, and for how high we were, was presenting just like a cerebral or maybe pulmonary edema patient. I'm not a doctor, but Jez is an army medic and reasonable climber in his mid twenties, and even ataxic he agreed that I should go down with him. I sent Mana ahead to look for oxygen and a stethoscope at base camp in case he worsened, while Jez's Sherpa and I slowly helped him to the bottom. I was hoping to never need the dexamethasone we brought, but after little improvement in 2 hours of descending and sipping water I was seriously considering it. Fortunately he wasn't getting any worse, the cough didn't become productive and after some oral rehydration salts and a nap at base camp he was fine. I couldn't believe that on the best day of weather we had seen yet and after rallying after being sick, that our first summit attempt would end this way. But sometimes these things happen and there's nothing to do but keep a straight head. Jez if you're reading this, you owe me 4mg of dex that I gave you to hold on to, a packet of rehydration salts, a Snickers, and my first 6000m summit attempt. Just kidding, I'm pretty glad he pulled through alright. As Mana put it "its pretty exciting that our first summit attempt ended in failure."

The next morning the three of us woke at 2am, an hour head start and a better idea where the route went would be helpful if we we were slowed down. Thick clouds rolled up the valley the afternoon before, but lucky enough it was a perfect sky when the sun came up over Tibet. Brendan and Mana did at least as well as the clients for having bronchitis, and soon we were at the middle of the pack of 30 climbers, stopped to put on crampons and don ice axes. We quickly went over glacier travel basics but the hike up to the summit ridge was well beaten around the crevasses and most parties went unroped. I was in shock that clients who had never self arrested (stop your self from sliding with an ice axe) in their lives would be allowed to walk around on a glacier without a rope, but soon I found out that most Sherpa can't belay and don't think twice before rappelling (coming down on a rope) off an unlocked, locking carabiner. So really we were one of the safest parties out there.

Standing in an almost flat snowfield a few acres in size, we panted and wheezed and coughed up different colors while looking at the summit ridge a few hundred meters above a 70-ish degree snow face. The commercial groups were all jugging, or ascending, up fixed ropes with expensive and heavy jumars, which we didn't bring. I had planned on leading the face with an axe and a picket (snow stake), but seeing 70 degrees in real life I reminded myself that neither Brendan nor Mana could self arrest if I fell. I decided against it and moved to plan B, which was to wrap cord around the fixed ropes in a safe "prussik" friction knot and shamefully jug up to the summit ridge like the clients. Brendan, I think feeling bronchitic and intimidated, abstained and felt content hanging out in the sun with the people coming off the summit. So I lead up the face for awhile and then tied onto a fixed rope, and Mana and I made for the summit two or three steps at a time.

The summit ridge was incredible, we got our first views of four of the world's tallest mountains up close as we clipped in to more fixed ropes and carefully walked the knife edge ridge up another hundred meters or so. The summit of course was breathtaking. The top was intimate, with no room for more than a couple people at a time. Which was good, because we summited late and were lucky to find one other person to take a picture. It wasn't like some of the paperback novel sized rock belay ledges in Red Rock Canyon, NV, but the 1000m luge down to rock on either side of us gave us pause. I wish I reflected here and thought about building rural schools next, or thanked Dartmouth, my mom, and the academy - but actually I remember just feeling supremely spent and pretty satisfied to have a slug of whiskey higher than any point in North America. Cheers, to the guy holding his white Russian staring out the window of his mountain flight.

After Island Peak Brendan headed back south to Lukla and then Kathmandu, where he would find out by email that he'd been accepted as a Rhodes scholar in an Oxford physics graduate program. Congrats Brendan, that's what granite does for your brains. Mana and I then headed up a valley north towards Everest base camp, but turning west towards Lobuje East base camp. One day in Dingboche we went to buy bread and the shop owner offered us tea. Nothing is free on the way to Mt. Everest, so it took five minutes in Nepa-glish to find out he didn't want anything but to know who we were. He told us about a gompa (monastery) high on a hill that most tourists avoid because of the walk, so that afternoon we dropped our packs and checked it out. Two hours later we understood why tourists avoided it, but the view was one of a kind as we could see up and down two of the three major valleys in the region. In Lobuje we ate in a shack that was clearly meant for Sherpa guides and porters, but the Dal Bhaat was the best yet and we met an outgoing Israeli couple who were also carrying all their own stuff and living simply. Yoav was a bio student in Israel had a lot to say about conditions there and relations with the US, and I mustered what I could from a high school middle eastern history class, enough to make conversation anyway. I lamented that every time I met someone we defaulted to my first language instead of another, but after trying to describe US economic sanctions in Spanish we fell back into English and I felt very self consciously American.

Though we only had a climbing permit for Island Peak we considered doing Lobuje East, of similar height but slightly harder. When we asked around for a Sherpa guide we were introduced to a man who's name I can't remember, but had summited Everest over ten times and said he happened to have a few days off when he could take us up Lobuje East for $1500. We quickly told him we didn't have that kind of money, to which he replied that if we were thinking of climbing without a permit it could cost us three months in a Nepali jail. The small crowd that built up around our conversation gave me the feeling that we just had a brush with a celebrity, and google confirms that only around seven active Sherpa have summited Everest over ten times. I'm humbled to remember that I instinctively used the most respectful forms of 'hello' and 'you' in Nepali. Later we found a liaison officer camping with an Ama Dablam expedition warming up on Lobuje East, so with a third world country prison in mind we moved onward and upward to Cho La pass and home, there would be no more 6,000m peaks in our near future.

20,000 Leagues Over the Sea (Part I: Getting There)

We're back!

After about three weeks of trekking and small mountaineering in the Solukhumbu (click for a map) and some much needed apres r & r, Mana, Brendan and I are back at work in Kathmandu (actually Brendan is in the states now, but he was here for a bit). The Himalaya is everything you'd expect it to be including mind-blowing gorgeous and crowded. But unlike what you might expect it was usually quite warm, and while you could say it was a cultural experience it wasn't a particularly Nepali one.

Flying in to Lukla is an adventure in itself, so much in fact that travel agencies advertise mountain flights as a way of seeing the Himalaya with a cocktail in your hand. Nepal is a pretty disorganized if well-meaning country, so in our case the adventure was not picking out a brand of whiskey, but merely trying to get on the plane. The night before we left Nandu presented each of us with a Khada, a Nepali-Tibetan prayer scarf that symbolizes good luck while travelling and respect. It would prove to be more than a charm. The next morning while waiting in the hectic domestic flights terminal, we heard an announcement that weather had caused a small aircraft accident and flights would be delayed until tomorrow. Shaken but remembering that the "safest plane that ever flew was the first to take off after 9/11," I invited two British climbers who were in our same situation back to our flat, as they didn't have a hotel room anymore, and we got some food and repacked for the next morning. It took us three more days for the gods and the air traffic control room to agree on the weather, but finally our Twin Otter turboprop touched down on the 12% inclined mountain runway and we were off to see the wizard.

Two days of hiking up a temperate, wooded valley brought us to our first rest day in Namche Bazaar, where we secured a climbing rope and stove fuel, and got some of our first views of the glaciated Ama Dablam and it's precipitous neighbors. Brendan, after seeing a doctor, learned he was coming down with bronchitis and went on antibiotics, while Mana and I acclimatized (got our bodies used to the altitude) with a day hike up a nearby ridge. We ran into recent Dartmouth graduates who we met before in the airport, meaning there must be a total of a dozen Dartmouth students or alum in Nepal at any given time. Really, its astonishing. From Namche we trekked east up the valley on the same path that leads to Everest base camp, spending the nights in our tent and eating mostly Dal Bhaat (rice and lentils), bread, and ramen. By now even small trees were scarce as we migrated to alpine desert leading up to the sand-covered glaciers that were disappointingly smaller than on our climbing map, a reminder that world might actually be getting warmer.

We couldn't hike more than a few hours each day to keep from gaining altitude too quickly, but the packs were heavy enough that none of us complained. When we told a teahouse (lodge) owner that we were climbing Island Peak and didn't have a Sherpa guide or porter, he and his crony just laughed. But we did meet climbers from Seattle headed to Pumori who had a first ascent near our second destination, Lobuje East, and did it all without porters. So we're not crazy, just climbers. The wildlife in the Solukhumbu and traffic are one and the same - yak trains carrying trekking and expedition gear can pile up on narrow, steep trails and keep you dodging steaming piles of future firefood. One note about the yaks though, they were at least as polite as any of the French we met in the region. If there was enough room, they all seemed to step off to the side and let you past without a word from their driver. In Chukkung I tried on a porter's basket and was suprised to learn that it wasn't any heavier than my own, but of course they put all the weight on their foreheads and do three times the vertical we do in a single day.

About Home

Patan is a nice city, smaller than Kathmandu but cleaner and quieter because of it. When I first moved in I could only notice things that stuck out: the trash here and there, the people that would grow a full garden in their front yard, and the occasional glimpse of intense poverty or suffering. But since then I've realized that, for Nepal, I actually live a nice kind of suburban neighborhood where people walk their dogs, kids go to school every morning, and old men sitting on their doorstep shake their heads and chuckle when you jog by. Nepal is a poor country and you can tell, but it's people are easygoing and hardy, and are usually cheerful answering your questions, especially in Nepali. Soccer, dogs, children naked only from the waist down, chatting on cell phones, badminton, and uber-carpooling and are all popular, whereas beer, big SUVs, and expensive tastes seem to be reserved for tourists and the UN. 

Nepal is stuck, figuratively and literally, in between India and Tibet, and that seems to be reflected by a lot here. Most Nepali that I've met are either Hindu or Buddhist but everyone is tolerant of everyone else, though some Buddhists complain that the mass sacrifices during the Dashain holiday (now) are cruel and unnecessary and some Hindus insist that it was the Buddhist regions near Tibet that bred the Maoists, a militia during the civil war who just had their leader popularly elected as Prime Minister. Actually, I've heard that Nepal is the only place where Hindus and Buddhists will worship in the same place, though you see both stupas and temples everywhere. The political situation is stable while the whole country waits to see if the Maoist communist party comes through with promises of industry, education, and wider democratization. Today while eating lunch with Brendan and Mana (the newest intern, he got here a couple weeks ago) we met a man named who called himself B. S. Ram, and spoke fluent english with an Indian-British accent. He was talkative and almost giddy getting the chance to talk to someone about American economics and politics, and then we talked about the Nepal government. He rued that Nepali academics can only recite things and aren't able to look at the country and solve problems, and that the world should have been more suspicious of the Maoist success in the popular vote. It was a funny meeting, especially since he was with his family and dressed up for the festival, and Brendan later recognized that his last name suggested that he was of the ruling family before the last monarchy ended. 

When we're not fixing rural bridges or tinkering on the circuitry for the company's new solar PV and pedal-powerd electricity system, we'll head into Kathmandu where the happening Thamel district has posh cafes, bars, and trekking shops full of fake North Face gear. Thamel is fun and we've found some really great hookah bars and lunch spots, but its where you feel the wealth gap the most. It's more authentic than a lot of tourist districts, but after a day in Thamel you're pretty burnt out and just want to see trees and grass. But I guess its also the place that runs the tourism industry, which is definitely the country's only source of foreign income. I've been running almost every day here because its harder to get together a game of soccer and there isn't any good rock climbing nearby. Patan is just small enough that you can run through areas with less traffic and still get to stretch your legs out, but what I really like doing is getting out to the fields and flood plains around the Bhagmati river. We sometimes go by the start of a 300 stone-step hike to the top of a hill, where a temple overlooks the entire city. Our boss Nandu wakes up at 5 every morning and walks to the top for his daily "puja." Some morning I want to get up and run to the top to catch the sunrise, I can only imagine it would be epic.

On Saturday afternoons Mana, Brendan, a few of our other friend, and I go to something called "the hash." Actually, first, I should tell you about the NGO subculture here. The US, UN and various countries pour aid money into Nepal - 40% of its operating budget is aid. So because of that there's so many NGOs, there's plenty of expats (expatriates, westerners) living and working in Kathmandu and Nepal. There's a place called the American Club (no Nepali allowed, can you believe the world hates us?) and a few spa's ect, but no weekend soccer games or tupperware parties to partake in. So "the hash" must have been the result of a group of expats looking for something to do on the weekend that involved getting outside the city, exercise, and middle-aged ridiculousness. The hash is a 2-3 hr run or walk that takes place in the hills around the Kathmandu valley every Saturday at a slightly new spot. Two "hares" are chosen the week before and mark the trail with small piles of cut up paper, the "grandmaster" emcee's the beginning and ending rituals of songs and belittling, and leeches, knee high mud, river crossings, and short shorts are commonplace. Really, its pretty ridiculous. Our first week Mana nearly had to drink a beer out of his shoe because it was brand new and clean, and after changing a hasher's motorcycle spark plug I was knighted "sparky" with half a liter of lager poured over my head. The hash is great for the exercise, but its also neat meeting other people from all around the world living in the area.

I've learned that there's always room on a Nepal bus, the UN doesn't do much besides ride around in big white SUVs, and that the only two things in excess in Kathmandu are dogs and speed bumps, so one must be made out of the other.

So... Nepal

Well a lot has happened since I started work here in Kathmandu about a month ago. 

The flights over were painless - even pretty enjoyable. Cathay Pacific had good food and didn't lose any of my luggage, and my six hour layover in Hong Kong was enough to see some of the hectic Asian city. One thing stands out though. From JFK we flew right over the Arctic circle, and a little ways of seeing nothing bus ice out the window a voice came over the intercom asking if a doctor was on board. The EMT in me snapped to attention and I dutifully shuffled to the front of the plane in my complimentary socks. At the front of the plane I met an older gentleman with a stent who was having a chest and neck burning sensation after taking a dozen medications that morning, and believe it or not a radiologist Dartmouth alum. We tried calling for medical direction, but the call was cut and the flight attendant told me that we'd lost phone contact for two hours over the pole. Bummer. However the man's vitals were stable and he was fine otherwise, so we made sure someone kept watch on him and that a medic was waiting at the Hong Kong gate. I swear that since getting my EMT two years ago things like this follow me around.  

Moving in was a quick transition to a strange, new place.. oddly inhabited by a lot of Dartmouth students. I was driven back to the apartment that EcoSystems puts its intern up in, just south of Kathmandu, and met the two other interns at the time, Brendan Huang '08 (a physics major) and David Drennan '07 who finished his undergrad at Dartmouth and is doing the engineering-business masters degree. Also there was Rosie Hughes '07 who is working in Kathmandu for an NGO, the IRC, doing disaster relief work. The weekend was my introduction to Kathmandu and the smaller town of Patan where we live. 

For my very first day of work I was asked to come for a two-day bridge site visit 100km west of Kathmandu to do some maintenance and to try a new trolley design David Drennan had been working on. Traffic was thick and smelly for the first 50km out of the valley, then it opened up and we would go awhile without seeing other cars. The road usually followed a roughly 100m wide river with a precipitously sleep 100-200m bank in between them. I instantly saw why bridges are so important in rural Nepal - during the summer monsoons these deep but slow moving bodies of water are torrential rapids for months at a time, and bridges that go across are often miles apart and shaky wooden things at best. As we drove along, we would occasionally come to a nice, large suspension walking bridge that spanned the gap, but this would only be around a very large town and looked expensive given that nothing bigger than a cart could get across. Also, as we drove by I could see all the schools were on the road-side of the river, presumably for better access to supplies and maybe even teachers. 

This makes a pretty good case for the wire "cable-car" bridge design that EcoSystems built 8 years ago at the village Thumka. The design is 10-15% of the cost of a comparable suspension bridge, and in the two days we spent in Thumka was used by tons of villagers, most of whom were carrying large loads of crops to be sold at the market. Scanning the hillsides we could see houses and farms hundreds of meters up and all along the valley, and the nearest bridge to us could have been 10km in either direction along the river. It was pretty clear why in Three Cups of Tea, before Mortensen could build a school he had to build a bridge so kids could actually get to the school, and so villagers could actually sell their crops in market without the help of their children. 

What's also interesting about the bridges is that they're not donated by aid because EcoSystems is technically a company, if a nonprofit. This means that, with the help of the company and NGO's (non governmental organizations) the local villages have to raise funds or pay for some of the bridge themselves, so there is a sense of ownership and responsibility. I've heard from friends here that often when you just give a village solar panels and a battery, they use it until something breaks then throw it aside. But when we stayed in Thumka we also fixed a pedal-powered electric generator that had been carried 3 hours down from the mountains, because the village had paid for it and depended on it for power. 

The work was some of the hardest and sweatiest I had done in a long time, and when the villagers started to pile up with their groceries waiting for the bridge we would work even faster. But they seemed to know who we were and seemed to appreciate what we were doing, even if they were clearly confused why we were dismantling the whole thing for the sixth time. Thumka was a good manual labor introduction to Nepal. 

I've learned that the body can basically survive off lentils and rice and its not bad (dal bhaat, the national dish), the army thinks a Buddhist stupa is an okay place for a strategic 50 caliber gun post, the average Nepali is half my height and can carry an oversized refrigerator on his or her forehead, and to not eat anything that is given to you in suspiciously small portions.

First Post

(EcoSystems founders David and Haydi Sowerwine)

Hi, I'm Michael Wood and this journal is of my experience interning for four months with a humanitarian engineering company in Kathmandu, Nepal.

First, some background on how I wound up in this mess. This summer I learned through Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering HELP student group (Humanitarian Engineering Leadership Projects, think Engineers Without Borders) about a relationship between the engineering school and the organization I'm working for, EcoSystems, through a member of the board of trustees. Soon I found out that a Thayer grad student was already working for EcoSystems partly because of Thayer and HELP’s growing interest in collaborating current micro-hydro electric projects in Rwanda with what EcoSystems was working on. EcoSystems has two projects, a wire “trolley” bridge that aims to develop rural infrastructure in 30 sites for something like 10% of the cost of traditional suspension bridges, and a pedal-powered electric generator providing light and cell phone charging in off-grid towns. I applied for funding through Dartmouth, was lucky to receive it, and bought a one-way plane ticket to the Maoist capital of the world.

On September 5th I’ll fly out of Boston to live and work just south of Kathmandu, returning around the middle of December. For the month of October a Nepalese holiday closes down EcoSystems and most of the country, so on the 4th I’ll fly into the Himalaya around Everest with the goal of doing a couple of the 5 and 6,000 meter “trekking” peaks within sight of Everest and Ama Dablam. Joining me is Mana Francisques, a rising Dartmouth sophomore who worked with HELP on the Rwanda micro-hydro project and is also working for EcoSystems this fall, and anyone else we can get to come with us. Then I’ll get back in November and continue work until sometime in December when I’ll fly back to Boston.

I’m really excited and feel pretty lucky to be doing this, hopefully it’ll be a great engineering and life experience, and of course some amazing trekking and mountaineering during the best season for it. Whether you’re a friend, family, or found this link on a Dartmouth website I’d love to hear your comments by blog, email, or whatever.