Mounting and Expedition

10/10/10 Met my Sherpa Guide today and we set off to outfit the expedition. It’s a bit difficult to do the shopping here bc of the fakes and such. There are 3 actual legit stores here: North Face, Mountain Hardware, and Lowe Alpine. They are of course normal US prices, if not more. So you want to buy the fakes, but you want to make sure that they are good quality still. The guide took me to one place, but the prices were a bit higher and he quality didn’t seem as good as a place I had visited the previous day. The place I had been before was a bit outside of Thamel, so the rent was cheaper, and it was also managed by a guy who had climbed Everest 15 times (5 times with Colorado clients including a kid from Boulder with lung cancer). You really have to be careful around here with buying and booking things etc so you don’t get ripped off or not get what you wanted. When I took my laundry in, the guy weighed it on his scale and it was 4kgs. This seemed quite heavy as I am usually at 1.5 Since they charge by the kilo, that can add up. So I took my liter of water and weighed it on the scale…sure enough it weighed 2.5kilos. 1 liter of water at sea level should weight 1kilo! So you can be assured I went somewhere else.
Anyways, we did most of our shopping there. I managed to buy a -20 down sleeping bag, an expedition down jacket, a pad, gore tex gloves, and snow glasses, and a fleece long underwear set and rent a zumar, new harness, crampons, ice ax, plastic boots (similar to alpine ski touring boots), ice screws, stove, gaiters, and a few other things for a grand total of about 230 dollars. Not bad to fully mount an expedition. I have most of the stuff at home, but it would have been a pain to have carried all that stuff around.

10.11 Today I fly to Lukla (if the weather holds). I am then doing a roughtly 25-30 day trek first up to Mera Peak (6470m/21220ft), then over amphu labtsa pass, then up to everest base camp, then climbing Kala Pattar (5500m) then over another pass to Gokyo Ri (5300m) then down to Lukla again. I am very excited, but still a bit nervous about the health issues. But I am hopeful that it all turns out great. Cant wait to get up their hiking in the snow and big Himalayas!