Today is my birthday and I’m spending it alone in Kathmandu, Nepal. I came here to see the Himalayas again, after the taste Kendall and I got in India. She has gone home now, and is grappling with the shock of reentering the American world after so long in Asia, and also enjoying reunions with her parents, girlfriends, and I’m sure, solitude.

The trekking season usually starts in Nepal at the beginning of March. I arrived March 9 expecting clear skies and technicolor spring blooming. But, this was the longest and harshest winter they’ve had in Nepal in 62 years. I spent my first two days in the obscene tourist areas of Kathmandu, the capital, and Pokhara, a beautiful city at the base of the Himalayas that has become the trekking homebase, gathering information and supplies for my trek to the Annapurna Base Camp. For those of you who don’t dream about mountaineering at night, Annapurna is the 10^th highest mountain in the world, and the highest of a string of enormous peaks called the Annapurna Range. I planned my trek to the base camp of expeditions that set out to climb it. Everyone thought I was crazy, or at least really unfortunate to have such bad luck and timing, as almost no one had been able to reach the base camp yet because of all the snow.

But, this was what I came here for, so I decided to give it a shot, hoping that the rainy days (which I knew meant more and more snow on the mountain) would stop and turn beautiful at some point on my way there. I bought all the extra gear I needed (hats gloves maps sunglasses iodine polyester, a permit and a nalgene), rented a mountaineering down jacket and thick, heavy waterproof pants. I tried my absolute hardest to meet someone to walk with, so that I wouldn’t be marching through the snow alone, but all I could find were Israeli circus clowns (they travel in packs, I tell you) and they can’t hike because even if they could carry their guitars and drums up the mountain, the 50 pounds worth of cheap hippie scarves and bags and bells and whistles they all wear would just weigh them down too much. They stay in the valleys and do their best to either annoy or royally piss off every single Nepali person in the country – hey, I guess it’s easier here than India since the overpopulation isn’t so bad.

Anyway. I couldn’t find a trekking partner, and the older I get the more conservative and boring, so I hired a porter (aka Sherpa, even though this is a misnomer) to walk with me and carry half of my weight. His name is Tulsi, and he’s a nice guy, but I think was pretty sour about having to be my porter when he is really an out-of-work trekking guide, simply because the winter is still booming.

We took a bus to the trailhead and walked for 5 hours through thick clouds and light rain, from one remote village to another. Finally in the afternoon I could see that the clouds were about to bust open, so I took a room at a nice family’s guesthouse just minutes before the downpour. The treks in Nepal are mostly teahouse treks, meaning that you stay in simple lodges and eat homecooked food the whole time, occasionally taking a hot shower, even, which is really really nice. There’s nothing like hot food and a roof over your head at the top of a mountain after walking in the rain all day. That first night I sat in the small kitchen/dining room of the family’s house and, even though I was the only tourist there, watched the woman cook dinner for 8 people, in the dark, over an open fire, with one hand, while nursing a 2-year old the whole time.

Days 2, 3, and 4, were pretty much the same, though I finally ran into some other tourists in the lodges and had some good times at night watching old German guys get drunk on rum and tea and listening to a crazy Korean girl’s story about how her guide ditched her at the top of a mountain and she walked on through the enormous snow drifts by herself without sunglasses and wearing jeans. I met and made friends with a really nice Turkish guy named Ahmet (in his forties, like all the other travelers Kendall and I have liked), and we ended up walking together for the rest of the way up. We kept hiking, through beautiful green mountains and beautiful wildflowers and terraced rice fields, passing schoolchildren and women carrying enormous loads of grass to feed their buffalo. Everyone we met coming the opposite direction had walked towards Annapurna Base Camp unsuccessfully, and turned around because of avalanche danger or snow that was just too deep to walk.

For 4 days it rained and snowed and rained and hailed and was so cloudy that we just had to use our imagination about what the amazing Himalayan peaks that we knew were just overhead, actually looked like. It was kind of like knowing that even though there was nothing under the Christmas tree, all your presents were somewhere in your parents closet – only that we had very little reason to think we would ever get to open them. And we knew that every drop of rain meant that much more snow at higher elevations.

At the end of the 4^th day we had walked in the snow for a few hours and the afternoon sun was making it pretty slippery, so we took rooms and ate dhal bath (lentils and rice with vegetables, the meal that Nepalis eat 3 times a day). We were just a bit before the avalanche danger area, a 2-hour stretch through the really narrow river gorge that we had been working our way up. 3 people died here a few years ago in an avalanche, so this is where a lot of people were turning around.

But as we went to bed that night, the sky turned clear and full of billions of stars. We awoke the next morning before dawn, packed our bags using headlamps, ate a Snickers bar for breakfast, and headed out into the cold. Avalanches in this area are, by far, most likely to happen in the afternoon, so we scurried through the beautiful snowy gorge at the coldest part of the day, stopping only to take pictures, oh, about every 10 minutes. It was that gorgeous.

By 9:00 we had reached the first base camp, the one for a very holy and sacred 23,000 foot mountain called Macchapuchre (Fish tail) that no one is allowed to climb. Not sure why it needs a base camp, but hey who’s counting. We ate some oatmeal there and drank tea, knowing that we were out of the avalanche danger. Even there, we were still meeting people who were telling us that it was impossible to get to ABC, our goal. They were turning around and headed down the mountain. But as we geared up for the sunshine and enjoyed the stillness and peace of our first blue sky, we saw porters coming down from ABC with baskets full of provisions. Sure, there was more snow in the valley than there probably was in the whole state of Utah at the time, but they had broken a good trail that morning, and the lodges were open! I convinced our group, which had grown to 7 now for the sake of safety, to pack up quickly and give it a shot.

The next few hours were some of the best in my entire life. We walked in brilliant sunshine through an absolutely stunning snow-covered valley which I can only describe as a superhighway which was one half glacier and one half banked snowboarder’s halfpipe. The center line was a dramatic craggy ridgeline which reminded me of every picture I’ve ever seen of someone climbing Everest. I felt like a mountaineer, even though we were only at 13,000 feet. The snow was still hard and dry and the walking was easy, as long as you didn’t fall into the halfpipe, or off the other side of the ridge onto the glacier. But with no wind the only danger was loosing your footing because you were too busy staring at the 10 different enormous peaks looming overhead, curved around you in a horseshoe shape and cradling you in a sugarbowl of love.

When we finally reached the basecamp I still couldn’t believe that we had arrived. What I thought was the worst timing in the world and a disappointing, unsuccessful trip to Nepal, turned out to be all the more glorious because of the 5^th day unveiling that I had waited so long for. I stared a lot. I ate dhal bhat to give me an excuse for drooling. I took about 300 photos. In 23 years I’ve seen an unbelievable amount of this planet’s natural beauty, but nothing as awe-inspiring as this place.

I awoke the next morning at 5:00 and on my way to the toilet stopped to stare at the peaks in the dark, in the middle of the most star-filled sky I’ve ever seen. Then back to the sleeping bag until dawn, when we watched the sunlight descend slowly down the peaks and took as many photos as we could without losing fingers to frostbite (it was somewhere around 0 degrees Fahrenheit).

We walked back along the ridgeline the way we came, enjoying the second crystal clear blue sky almost as much as the first. Descended the last 3 hours of snowy terrain pretty much on my butt, as by that time the snow had softened everything up and I couldn’t keep traction to save my life. After a while I perfected a nice technique of grabbing rocks and very ungracefully sliding 10 or 15 feet at a time, as if I were on roller skates.

We walked about 20 miles that day, passed out, and the next day walked 20 more – much to the dismay of my lazy porter who wanted to descend in 3 days so he could make more money. That afternoon, with leg muscles of jello and a stench that you could have probably smelled by satellite, we ran up the last hill before the road just as a bus was violently honking its horn and headed out of town – we jumped on while it was still moving and took the only 2 seats left. What can I say – when you got it, you got it. I have faith that if Kendall had been with me, where I felt so powerfully that she belonged, there would have been 3 seats left.

I am taking this day to give thanks for the wonderful 23 years of life that I have had so far. I know I’m really young, and there’s nothing like Nepal to drive home just how much I’ve seen and done in such a short time.

How fortunate I am to be here.

Thane