Hi, I'm Sumi

Day three was a border.

Nicholas has been to Colorado before. Pokin has not. Chestnut has not. I had not. So three quarters of the vehicle were about to unlock a new state, and that is the sort of thing you pull over for.

The sign is not subtle about it. WELCOME TO COLORFUL COLORADO, in white letters on black, bolted between two stone pillars in the middle of nothing.

Two states in three days. I am collecting them now, apparently. That makes two of us with a collection.

Mug Number Two

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First stop in the new state was Colorado National Monument, and my bud walked into the visitor centre and bought a mug before he had looked at a single canyon.

I raised this in the last post as a possible one time event. It is not a one time event. It is a policy.

The Man With The Shovel

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Here is the part I actually liked.

This place exists because of one deeply strange man. John Otto walked into these canyons in 1906, decided they were the heart of the world, and then stayed. He lived out there alone with two burros. He cut the trails himself, by hand, with a pick and a shovel, so that other people could come and see the thing he had found. He named the formations after patriots and historic events, which is why the big one is called Independence Monument and not something sensible about geology.

Then he wrote letters. Hundreds of them. To newspapers, to politicians, to the actual President of the United States, all of them saying the same thing, which was roughly you need to come and look at this.

It worked. On 24 May 1911 Taft signed it into being, and Otto was made the first custodian of the monument at a salary of one dollar a month. He did the job for sixteen years.

A month after the monument was created he married a Boston artist called Beatrice Farnham at the base of that tower. She lasted a few weeks. Her explanation on the way out is one of the best sentences ever written about a marriage:

I tried hard to live his way, but I could not do it, I could not live with a man to whom even a cabin was an encumbrance.

Otto climbed his 450 foot tower every Fourth of July to plant a flag on top of it. Climbers still go up and do it for him every year. He died broke in California with forty four dollars to his name and was buried in a pauper’s grave, and it took local people fifty years to get him a headstone.

A man who spent twenty years hand digging trails so strangers could enjoy a view, and got paid one dollar a month for it. I have opinions about monuments, mostly that I deserve one, but I will step aside for Otto.

Too Hot To Walk

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The plan was a hike that afternoon. The plan died.

We were up on the rim at nearly six thousand feet (1,800 m), which is meant to be where the heat gets better, and the heat did not get better. It sat on the whole valley like a hand. Nobody was hiking anywhere.

So the afternoon got written off, which made the night the only thing left. Unfortunately the monument faces the wrong way for astrophotography. The canyons open north over Grand Junction and its lights, and the Milky Way core sits low in the south. Beautiful in daylight, useless after dark.

So we looked at the map and found something forty minutes further out, on Glade Park, called Miracle Rock.

The Potato

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Miracle Rock is a boulder eighty four feet tall (26 m), weighing a claimed twelve thousand tons, sitting on a piece of sandstone about a foot wide.

It is on the edge of a canyon. It has been there a very long time. It will presumably not be there forever, and everyone who visits works this out within about four seconds of arriving.

Locals also call it Potato Rock, because it looks like a potato. I want it on record that a rock this dramatic was named twice, once by someone with a sense of occasion and once by someone who had just been to the shops, and both names stuck.

We got there with the sun still up, which is the correct way to arrive at a night shoot. You want to see the ground before you have to walk it in the dark.

I supervised from a juniper. It was a good juniper. I had a clear view of the rock, the camera, and both humans, and I did not have to hold anything.

The Light

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They had also downloaded the trail on AllTrails before we set off, because the word from other people was that finding your way back from this rock in the dark is genuinely hard. Remember that. It comes up later.

Camera went on the tripod. Sun went down. Everything was going well.

And then a light came on below us.

Somebody had decided to camp down in the canyon, which is entirely their right, and they had a lamp, which was also their right, and that lamp pointed directly up into the one bit of dark my bud needed. He did not say very much about it. He did not have to. I have known him fourteen years and I can hear the exact quality of silence that means a man is recalculating an entire composition around a stranger’s tent.

Then came the part of astrophotography nobody photographs, which is the hour and a half of standing on a plateau in the dark waiting for a specific arrangement of the sky. Back and forth. Back and forth. Two adults pacing a slab of sandstone with their hands in their pockets, waiting for the galaxy to get into position.

Worth It

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Look at the colour low in that sky. The green and the faint pink are not light pollution and they are not the camper. That is airglow, which is the upper atmosphere quietly giving back energy it soaked up from the sun during the day. The whole sky does it every night. You simply cannot see it, because your eyes are not a twenty second exposure.

He got the shot. Then he wanted one more shot. Then it was very late and everybody was blinking slowly, and we gave up while we were ahead and put the headlamps on for the walk back down.

The Drive Home

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Then, on the road out, in the headlights, there was a bear.

A real one. Wild, black, unbothered, trotting down the centre of the road ahead of us like it had somewhere to be.

We could not get round it. So for a few minutes we simply followed it, at bear speed, in the dark, accidentally herding a large wild animal along a road in Colorado, until it worked out it had options and went off into the trees.

I have been in a lot of photographs and nobody ever asks about the bear. That night there were two of us and I still did not get asked.

And Then The Insult

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The next day, in a shop, Pokin bought bear spray.

For bears.

Having spent fourteen years travelling with one.

I am choosing to take this personally, and I intend to keep taking it personally for the remaining six days of this trip.

Although.

We had been standing on a dark plateau forty minutes from anywhere, an hour after sunset, and then walked back to the road by headlamp on a trail that people specifically warn you is hard to find in the dark. That bear had been out there the whole time doing its own thing in the same handful of square miles.

So I will allow it. Once.

Day two began exactly like day one.

Nicholas had calls. Long ones. I had assumed the whole point of a spontaneous road trip was that nobody could reach you, and I was wrong about that in a way I intend to keep bringing up.

He brought a Starlink. He packed a satellite dish, for a holiday, and then aimed it at the sky from increasingly absurd places so that a meeting could continue. Red rock, no phone signal for miles, a landscape that has been quietly eroding since the Jurassic, and a man in the middle of it saying “sorry, can you repeat that, I lost you for a second.” He did not lose them. That was the tragedy. The dish worked perfectly every single time.

So we got into Arches in the afternoon, again, and the first thing my bud did on arrival was buy a mug.

Not a postcard. Not a map. A mug, from the visitor centre, with the park’s name on it. He has apparently decided that he is now a man who collects a mug at every national park, and that this decision is retroactive and binding for the rest of the trip. I want it noted that nobody voted on this.

I gave it about a day before I started checking whether the next park had good ones.

The Windows

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Arches has a standard loop and we did the standard loop, because the standard loop is standard for a reason. First stop was the Windows Section, which is a cluster of arches all within a few minutes’ walk of each other, so you get an extremely good ratio of arches to effort.

The two big openings sit side by side in one long fin, and from the right angle they line up as a pair. The park calls them the Spectacles. I have no notes. That is exactly what they look like.

You can climb up inside the openings, which people do, and then stand there being a silhouette in everyone else’s photograph. Nicholas did not go up. Nicholas stood at the bottom getting quietly furious at the people who did, waiting for a gap in the queue of strangers posing in his shot. There was no gap. There is never a gap.

Sand Dune Arch

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Then a short stop at Sand Dune Arch, which is down a gap between two fins and feels completely unlike the rest of the park. You walk in through a slot, the walls close over, the temperature drops, and the floor turns to deep soft sand that swallows your feet.

Every child in southern Utah is in there at any given moment, throwing sand. I respect the operation.

The Delicate Arch Decision

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Here is where we had to choose.

It was getting on, and the light was going, and we could do Delicate Arch or we could get to Landscape Arch. Not both. Delicate Arch is the famous one, the one on the licence plates, and I am told the walk out to it is a proper uphill slog with a crowd at the end.

We went to Landscape Arch instead. I have been informed this was a scheduling decision. I am recording it as a choice, because Landscape Arch is by far the more interesting object and I will explain why.

Look at how thin it is. At its narrowest that ribbon of sandstone is about six feet (1.8 m) thick, holding a span longer than a football pitch.

And this is the bit worth knowing. Sandstone is excellent at being squashed and terrible at being stretched. A short, fat, steep arch like Delicate Arch is basically a thick lintel sitting on two thick legs, and almost all of the weight goes straight down through the rock as compression, which sandstone is happy to do all day. A long flat span is a different problem entirely. The underside of it is in tension, being pulled apart, and that is the one thing this rock cannot do. So the span gets thinner, and the thinner it gets, the less there is to share the load.

Landscape Arch is not being coy about this. It dropped a 60 foot (18 m) slab off its underside in 1991, with people standing underneath it, and shed more rock in 1995. The trail that used to run under the arch has been closed ever since. You look at it from a rope line now, at a polite distance, the way you would look at something that has already told you what it intends to do.

Delicate Arch will still be standing in a very long time. Landscape Arch is a countdown. That is why it is the better one to go and see.

Broken Arch

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Then Nicholas announced the plan for the night.

The plan was Broken Arch. He had been eyeing it all afternoon for one reason: it is an arch you can stand well back from, on open slickrock, with a clean view through the opening and nothing in the way. Which is another way of saying it would frame the galaxy nicely, and everything else that day had been reconnaissance.

That notch across the top is the whole reason for the name. The span has a proper fracture through it and it has simply declined to finish the job so far.

The Mosquitoes

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We settled in to wait for dark. Packs down, dinner out of the containers, headlamps ready, several hours to burn before the sky did anything interesting.

And then the mosquitoes arrived.

In the desert. In a national park made almost entirely of rock and sand and the absence of water, at an arch on an exposed slab, there were mosquitoes, and there were a lot of them, and they found Pokin immediately.

She got bitten a great deal. Nicholas got bitten a great deal. I have never once been bothered by a mosquito in fourteen years of travel and I sat there watching the two of them slap at their own arms in the dark like it was a hobby.

Pokin’s position, delivered several times, was that this had better be worth it.

It Was Worth It

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The Milky Way core came up over the arch and stood there.

There is a faint streak on the left of that frame. Before anybody asks, yes, I checked, and yes, it is almost certainly another satellite. I have made my peace.

Then he set up the one I actually care about.

That is the three of us sitting under a rock that has been slowly falling apart since before anybody was around to name it, under the arm of a galaxy, in the middle of a road trip where nobody had decided where we were sleeping.

Not bad for a Friday.

Pokin’s Contribution

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Pokin also attempted an astro shot. On her phone. Handheld.

I want to be fair to it. It is a photograph of a man standing in an arch under the stars, and all of those elements are technically present. The stars are there. The arch is there. The man is there with his hands on his hips, doing the pose, fully committed.

It also looks like something recovered from a haunted camcorder. Pokin submitted it entirely without shame, which I respect more than the photo.

Walking Out

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We hiked back to the car in the dark with headlamps, over slickrock, following little reflective markers and Nicholas’s memory of where the trail had been in daylight. Pokin was still itching. Chestnut had opinions about the dark and they were, as always, positive ones.

Two parks in two days, one mug acquired, an unknown number of bites, and one photograph that will end up on a wall.

Day three, nobody knows yet.

Do you realise the last time we went on a proper spontaneous road trip was 2014?

Twelve years. Twelve years of flights and hotels and airport lounges, which I am not complaining about, but there is a specific kind of trip where nobody knows where they’re sleeping tomorrow and you just point the car somewhere and go. We hadn’t done one of those since Route 66.

It was time to rectify that. Especially since my bud might be about to get locked down by a job that eats his calendar.

So we went. Chestnut came too. He has travelled plenty, but he has never done a road trip, and a road trip is a different animal. No itinerary. No bookings. No agreed end. He was about to find out what nine days of that does to a horse.

First stop: Moab. Canyonlands. Then Dead Horse Point after dark, because Nicholas has decided he’s an astrophotographer now.

Except First There Were Calls

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So many calls.

Nicholas had work calls all morning. Then more work calls. Then a call about the calls. We did not leave the hotel until four in the afternoon, which for a bear who packed at dawn is a personal insult.

In fairness, it was too hot to be outside anyway. Everyone was wilting. Everyone except Chestnut, who thought the whole situation was fantastic, because Chestnut thinks everything is fantastic. That horse has never had a bad day in his life.

They grabbed sandwiches from a new place in town called Coyote Outpost so we could stay out late, and the owner threw in a tip with them: skip the pavement, take the dirt road. Go through Long Canyon.

I’m always down for an offroading adventure.

The road out of town runs right along the base of a wall that goes up forever. You drive with your nose almost touching the window.

The petroglyphs are carved into that wall, right at the side of the road, thousands of years old. No fence, no ticket, no gift shop. You pull over on the shoulder and there they are. Everybody stands in the gravel and looks straight up, which is exactly what people have been doing on this spot for a very long time.

Long Canyon

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Then the pavement ran out and the good part started.

Long Canyon Road climbs out of the river bottom on a dirt track that gets narrower and more enthusiastic the higher it goes. Loose rock. Big drops. Nobody else out there. This is the kind of road where nobody is quite sure we’re going to clear that rock, so you go for it and find out.

And then we got company.

They were everywhere out here. Once you spot the first one you can’t stop seeing them, parked on ledges no animal has any business standing on, entirely unbothered by any of it.

I would like it on record that I spotted one of them. I will accept a medal at any time.

That’s the La Sal Mountains out in the haze, which is a genuinely odd thing to see from the middle of a desert. Red rock in every direction and then snow-capable peaks over 12,000 feet (3,700 m) sitting there at the back of the frame like they wandered into the wrong photograph.

The best bit comes near the top, where an enormous slab has peeled off the wall and landed against the opposite side, and the road just goes underneath it. Nobody built that. It fell that way and somebody decided to drive under it.

We came out at the top right near the entrance to Canyonlands, exactly as promised. Best sandwich-shop advice we’ve ever been given, and I didn’t even have a sandwich.

Mesa Arch

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Canyonlands has an arch that sits right on the edge of a 500 foot (150 m) cliff, and the entire point of it is that it frames the whole park behind it. Buttes, canyons, the La Sals on the horizon, all of it lined up in a stone window.

Photographers queue here at sunrise. We showed up in the late afternoon with the place mostly to ourselves, which I consider the superior strategy, because it involved no early morning whatsoever.

Grand View Point

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Then we drove to the end of the road, where the mesa stops.

Grand View Point sits at about 6,080 feet (1,853 m) and it does what the name says with no imagination whatsoever. You walk out to the rim and the ground simply stops, and then there is nothing but canyon for a hundred miles.

It doesn’t photograph properly. Nothing this big does. Your eye keeps looking for something familiar to measure it against and there isn’t one.

Then you walk back to the car. That turned out to be the shape of most of this trip: drive somewhere, walk out to the edge of it, look, walk back.

Dead Horse Point

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We made it to the point for sunset.

Quick history, because the name deserves an explanation. Dead Horse Point is a mesa connected to the mainland by a neck of rock only about 30 yards wide. In the 1800s cowboys worked out that if you fence off the neck, you’ve got a natural corral, and they used it to hold wild mustangs while they picked out the ones worth keeping. The story goes that one band of horses was left up there behind the fence and died of thirst, in full view of the Colorado River 2,000 feet (600 m) below them.

So that’s a cheerful bit of local colour. It became a Utah state park in 1959, and if the view looks familiar, it’s because it’s the cliff Thelma and Louise drive off at the end of the film. The film says Grand Canyon. The film is lying.

There were other photographers up there, which turned out to be the good kind of crowd. Everybody spread out along the rim, tripods up, all pointed at the same thing.

We ended up hanging out with them for the rest of the night. Nicholas pulled up the timelapses he shot at Everest and that was the end of any further conversation about camera settings. Nothing beats a man showing strangers the Milky Way turning over the Himalaya on a phone screen in the dark. I was there for those, incidentally. Nobody asked about the bear.

The Actual Reason We Were There

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Ever since Nicholas got those Milky Way shots at Everest he’s decided this is a thing he does now, and early September in southern Utah is about as good as it gets for it. So the plan for this whole trip is simple: when the sky is clear, we shoot.

The sky was clear.

Here’s the composite he put together from that night. Two thousand feet of canyon, the Colorado doing its horseshoe, and the core of the galaxy standing straight up over the top of it.

There’s a bright streak across the middle of the frame. I would love to tell you that’s a meteor. It is almost certainly a Starlink satellite, which as a lifelong SpaceX bear I am contractually required to be delighted about, and which as a photographer’s bear is deeply annoying.

Then we drove back to the hotel and I took my usual spot in bed, because it had been a very long day for a bear who got up at dawn for a four o’clock departure.

One day down. Eight or so to go, and nobody has decided where we’re going yet.

I wonder how far we can get.

A while back I posted a preview. One frame, color graded on a phone in a freezing lodge, with a promise that the real versions were coming once we got home to actual monitors and actual software.

We’re home. They’re done. Four nights of no sleep at altitude, and here is what survived.

A quick reminder of what went into these, because I am not going to let it go. Four nights, Nicholas climbed out into the cold while the rest of us were sensibly unconscious and let the camera shoot the sky for hours. I supervised from inside a sleeping bag, which is the correct division of labour.

First, the Sherpa Memorial at Chukpi Lhara, near Lobuche. The one from the preview, except now it looks the way it was supposed to look. The Galactic Center over the valley, the snow peaks catching starlight, and a single cluster of lights at the bottom, which is the village of Dingboche being very far away and very small. Full story: Redemption at the Sherpa Memorial.

Second, Everest, from Kala Patthar at 1 AM. The highest and coldest of the bunch. No valley, no village lights, just a wall of jagged snow peaks and the most colorful sky of the set, a band of orange airglow on the horizon with a faint touch of green off to the side. The climb behind it: The Kala Patthar Speed Run, at 5,164 meters on three hours of sleep.

Third, Thukla, on the way back down. The hill Nicholas crossed an unfinished bridge to reach, because the sensible route did not exist yet and that was apparently not reason enough to pick a different hill. The path winds down toward more village lights, the core parked right over the central peak. The saga: Sleeping on the Mountain.

And then there is the one that got away. The first frame from the night framed on Ama Dablam, with a new moon and the Milky Way set to rise right behind the peak. You can see it starting. The dust band curling out from behind the mountain, green airglow along the ridge, and the Galactic Center still tucked behind that big peak on the left, about to climb into the open.

It never made it. A frozen lens quietly dropped its aperture a few frames in, and everything after this went pure black. Five hundred photographs of nothing, and one early frame that survived to show what it would have been. The full, gutting story is in The Astrosaster.

The stills are only half of it. The real point of standing in the cold for hours was the motion, the stars actually wheeling over the Himalayas, which does not fit in a photo. So Nicholas cut it into a short film.

Four nights of suffering, three keepers, and one bear who stayed warm the entire time and regrets nothing.

We had one last day in Kathmandu, and we had missions.

Mission one: Manoj needed shoes. The man had spent three weeks walking slowly behind Pokin over snow and ice in a pair of beat-up tennis shoes with actual holes in them, like footwear was a suggestion rather than a requirement. This was unacceptable. So we all went to a local sporting goods store to get our guide his first real pair of hiking boots.

Mission two: Nicholas needed to stop looking like he lived under a bridge. Three weeks of trail had turned him properly scruffy, so he wandered into a random barbershop and asked for a shave. With a straight razor. By a man he’d met four seconds earlier.

Then we met Manoj back at the hotel for his own sendoff. He’d brought scarves and tea for everyone. No cocoa? I question his gift-giving sensibilities.

Remember Alice? She’d escaped a day early on that one sketchy helicopter seat out of Surke. When she left, D.B. had handed her an extra piece of luggage to carry back for him. No big deal. Then, while we were all sitting in the airport that evening, D.B. called her. “Alice, Alice, I need you to do something for me. I need you to take the chicken out of my bag.”

The chicken. Out of the bag.

We assumed he was joking. He was not joking. There was, in fact, a bag of actual chicken in his luggage, given to him by one of the porters’ families on the way out as a parting gift. Alice had unknowingly couriered a chicken down from the mountains. So the next day she packed the chicken back up and brought it to the hotel, to hand to Manoj, to give back to D.B. A whole relay of people moving one chicken across Nepal.

And then Manoj left. The last of our guides, off to his next group of people who had no idea what they were walking into.

With the goodbyes done, Nicholas was free to do the thing he does in every interesting country on earth, which is hunt down weird instruments.

First up, singing bowls. Pokin tracked down one of the top singing bowl masters in the country, who happened to have a shop in town. We walked in and Nicholas started sampling bowls, working through them one at a time, until the master pulled out a special collection tuned to a full octave of notes. That was the end of any restraint. Sold.

Then, walking down the street, we found a guy named Ashish sitting on the ground in a tiny shop making his own drums by hand. Of course we had to stop. Nicholas and Ashish talked for a long while, played a few together, and he showed Nicholas some beats. Then he customized one of the drums right there, cutting fresh leather for the head. Nicholas walked out with an armful of new instruments.

At which point the obvious question became: where exactly are we going to fit all of this? A full octave of singing bowls, a pile of hand drums, and everything else we’d hauled down a mountain. We crammed it all into the bags through sheer force of will, and then it was time to go.

Goodbye, Nepal. We had many plans, none of them went the way we planned, so we made many new plans, and that didn’t go as planned either, but we made it. I’m glad to be headed home, but knowing Pokin, I’m sure she’s already re-planning to see you again soon.

We woke up very early at Surke and braced for the worst, because the weather report had promised the worst. Then we looked outside. It was not the worst. There were still clouds everywhere, but you could see things. Mountains. Sky. The general concept of “up.” After the fog wall that had stranded us the day before, this counted as optimism.

A reminder of where we’d spent the night. The “rooms” at the Surke airport were not exactly the soft-bed-and-hot-shower situation we’d been promised back in Lukla.

So we packed up fast, because mornings are when the clouds are highest and your odds are best. And then we spotted him. Our pilot. Already out at the helicopter, prepping it to fly. The same Fishtail Air machine, parked among the same casual barrels of gasoline strewn around the field, because nothing says aviation safety like jet fuel lying loose in the grass next to the helipad. This was it. Our ride home was warming up.

He climbed in. He started it up. And then he took off.

Without us. Without a single word. We watched our ride lift off the pad and disappear into the clouds while we stood there holding our bags like a group of people who had just been very thoroughly stood up.

Oh. Well then. Back to the lounge.

That is when the Sherpa explained how the morning after bad weather actually works. The clouds had been bad the day before, which meant a lot of people higher up the mountain never got their flights. So the morning after, every helicopter commits its schedule to rescues. They start at the top, where the clouds clear first, and they work their way down as the fog lifts, grabbing the stranded people in order of altitude. We were not up high. We were at the bottom of the list. Our pilot hadn’t abandoned us out of spite. He’d just gone to collect people with a better claim on him than us.

So the plan became: wait, and hope somebody, anybody, swings low enough to scoop us up before the clouds came back down and closed the whole valley for the day.

We settled the bill for our luxury accommodations.

Nicholas hauled the bags back outside.

And then we did the thing trekkers do best by this point in the trip. We stood around outside and waited for the sky to make a decision.

The fog got thicker. Nicholas started doing the grim math and landed on “we are staying another night.” A reasonable conclusion. The valley was closing up.

And then the same pilot came back. The one who’d ditched us at dawn. He set the helicopter down, leaned out, and said, “Okay, we’re going back to Kathmandu before it gets any worse.”

It was not the helicopter we were supposed to take. At this point I did not care which helicopter it was. We piled in.

The flight is about 45 minutes, and we spent most of it dodging clouds, the pilot trying very hard to stay VFR all the way. Then the clouds thinned, the valley opened up, and there it was. Kathmandu. Pavement. Buildings. The end of the mountain.

First order of business in Kathmandu: food. We reunited with Alice, who had escaped Surke a day ahead of us on that one sketchy seat and was, reassuringly, also alive. Then we found a place with a giant momo platter.

You already know how everyone feels about momos. Pokin had been ordering them at every single stop on this trip, and now there was a nice plate of them waiting in Kathmandu. Do they make chocolate momos? No? Then I’ll wait.

That night, D.B. and Manoj took us out for a proper sendoff. A dinner with a cultural show, Nepali dances and music performed on a stage in front of a painted mountain backdrop. The kind of “cultural experience” you have to brace yourself for.

After dinner, D.B. handed out awards. Actual framed plaques, for completing the trek. Or, in some of our cases, for attempting the trek, which I think is the more honest wording given how many horses, helicopters, and hospitals were involved in our particular “completion.”

D.B. was leaving the next morning for another trek, with another group of people who had no idea what they were in for. We had one final day in Kathmandu before we headed to the airport ourselves.

We’d made it off the mountain. Barely, and not on the helicopter we planned, but off.

The trek was officially behind us. We’d said the goodbyes, handed out the red envelopes, eaten the farewell dinner under the golden dragon ceiling. All that was left was the easy part. Pack up, walk over to the Lukla airport, climb into our helicopter, and float back to Kathmandu in time for a hot shower and a soft bed. After two weeks on the mountain, we had earned the lazy exit.

Then we woke up and looked outside. Rain.

Here is the thing nobody tells you about flying in the Himalayas. The helicopters and the little planes can only fly VFR. That stands for Visual Flight Rules, which is exactly what it sounds like. The pilot flies by looking out the window. No flying through clouds, no trusting the instruments to thread you between two mountains you cannot see. If it is socked in, you do not go. And I can fly, so I am allowed to be smug about knowing this.

So a rainy morning at Lukla is not a delay. It is a maybe.

We went anyway, because the airport tells you to come anyway. They handed Nicholas a fan of boarding passes for a helicopter that was not there and might never be.

Just wait a little, the airport said. The sun might come out. The helicopters might make it up. We looked out the window. The sky was getting foggier, not clearer.

After about thirty minutes, D.B. explained how this actually works. The cloud layer settles down into the valley as the day goes on. Mornings are clearest. So the longer you wait at Lukla, the worse your odds get, not better. But there was a move. If we left right now and hiked straight downhill for an hour and a half, we could reach the next town, which sits low enough that the clouds were still above it. The helicopters could land there. We could still get out today.

The catch with simply waiting it out: if the weather goes bad, everyone who was supposed to fly today is stuck in Lukla too. Then tomorrow there are twice as many people fighting for the same flights. A few bad days in a row and you get a genuine traffic jam of trekkers with no way down. There is always walking, of course. That only takes about two weeks. Or you can take a jeep from the next town, which is two days across the kind of washed-out dirt roads that are somehow less safe than flying through clouds.

So we made the call. Book it downhill on foot and try to beat the weather to the next helipad. A race against the sky.

Nicholas and Pokin did not look convinced that the weather was going to be any better down the hill. Pokin especially, who was still sick and now hiking again instead of sitting on a helicopter like a normal recovering person.

The skies did not improve. They committed to the bit.

Halfway down, the crew stopped at a trail hut to regroup and practice looking optimistic. Po On, Alice, Steve, Nicholas, and the guides, all wearing the specific expression of people who have decided that smiling at the weather might help.

We passed loaded pack mules and the trail got properly rugged. This was not the gentle victory-lap descent anyone had pictured.

Then Surke came into view, a village with a half-built monastery on the hill above it. Somewhere down there was the helipad that was going to save us. In theory.

We got to the airport. I use the word loosely. It is a couple of helipads, a little terminal-slash-restaurant run by a Sherpa, and a whole lot of weather. Two helicopters were on the pad when we arrived. One of them lifted off almost immediately, empty, bolting for the valley before the clouds dropped any further and taking none of us with it. The clouds were not above us anymore. They were around us. There was no version of this that counted as VFR.

The porters peeled off here too. We’d already given them the proper send-off back in Lukla, dinner and tips and cookies, so this was just the practical goodbye. They were catching jeeps home from Surke, and they were not about to stand around in the fog waiting on our flight that clearly was not coming.

Here is where it got interesting. That second helicopter, the one still sitting on the pad, was not ours either. Ours, like most of the others, had tried to come up and been forced to turn back. But this pilot was about to make his own run for it, ducking out under the clouds toward Kathmandu before things got worse. He had room for exactly one more passenger.

That seat had originally been D.B.’s. With the rest of us grounded, he offered it up. Alice took it.

And off Alice went, alone, into a sky that was, in my professional aviation opinion, absolutely not fit for flying. The pilot swore it was clear down low and he had a line of sight out. Maybe. I am a bear who can fly under my own power, and I would not have braved that. But Alice has more nerve than sense, which I respect, and she made it.

The rest of us went inside to wait. The man running the terminal, a Sherpa who clearly does this every season, promised the sun would burn off the fog and our helicopter would land in just a little bit.

It did not.

We got drinks. We got lunch. We kept looking outside. At one point we heard a helicopter, which we should not have, and a Fishtail chopper somehow came down out of the murk and landed. Not ours. He dropped some people off, took one look at the sky toward Lukla, and parked. Too foggy to climb back up. D.B. immediately booked him to take us out instead the moment things cleared.

Spoiler: things did not clear.

Our buddy Sven from the trail turned up too, also bumped from a canceled flight, also stuck, on his way to attempt the two-day jeep escape. He stopped in to say hello to the rest of the grounded.

So we sat. And sat. The fog whited out the windows. Nicholas stopped pretending to be cheerful about it.

There is a hard cutoff. Around three in the afternoon, the last flight has to leave with enough daylight to reach Kathmandu safely. By then the fog had only thickened. The pilot of the parked helicopter made the call: he was camping at the airport overnight and trying again in the morning.

So that was that. We could hike three hours back up to Lukla to try our luck there in the morning, except that is three hours uphill and Pokin was in no condition for it. The weather down here was the better bet anyway, even if the forecast for the next few days looked, in the technical meteorological term, grim. Our porters had already left with the jeeps, so we had no way to move the bags even if we wanted to.

Which left the Surke airport’s accommodation. Two beds in a box. The most basic rooms I have ever lowered my standards into.

Looks like we were camping a little longer than planned.

Our last full day in Lukla.

On the way in, Nicholas and Pokin never actually saw the town. They were sick, we took a helicopter straight to Phakding, and Lukla went by as a blur of “please let the rotors keep spinning.” So today we wandered. Properly. Up and down the back alleys, no duffel bags, no agenda.

The Most Dangerous Airport in the World

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Lukla Airport has a reputation. Short runway, hard slope, a cliff at one end and a mountain at the other, and a habit of showing up on every “scariest airports” list ever written. We went and watched a few planes land on it, which is a deeply strange thing to do for fun.

Good news for me: we’re flying out by helicopter tomorrow, not by one of those. Apparently a helicopter is the safer option here, which tells you everything you need to know about the planes.

Shopping, and a Basket Situation

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We did some shopping around town, and this is where it got serious. Someone had woven one of the traditional head-baskets, a doko, in a size that was suspiciously, perfectly, me-sized.

Naturally we had to get it. I am a bear of refined taste and I now own a tiny artisanal Himalayan basket. I have no plans to ever carry anything in it. That is not the point.

We also passed a bunch of chickens and a pile of tiny chicks, which was more interesting than it sounds. Lukla is about as high as chickens go. Any higher and they don’t make it, so all the chickens on the trek live down here at the bottom. The whole way up the mountain, no chickens. Come back down, and suddenly poultry everywhere. Nature has opinions about altitude.

The Goodbye Dinner

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Then it was time for the real reason today mattered. The farewell dinner for the crew.

These porters hauled our gear up and down a mountain for three weeks. Our duffel bags, the food, the boxes of fruit, all of it, on their backs and headstraps, while we struggled to carry ourselves. Tonight was the thank-you.

Nicholas spent a good chunk of the afternoon counting out tip money into red pockets. There were stacks of rupees and dollars laid out on the windowsill, and at one point he looked less like an engineer on vacation and more like a small-time crime boss doing his books.

We brought treats too. A friend of ours owns a cookie company, so we’d hauled a stash of her cookies all the way to Nepal, and the porters got plenty. They seemed genuinely pleased about it, which is the highest praise a cookie can earn from people who carry sixty kilograms uphill for a living.

And then the part they’d actually earned: the red envelopes.

It was a good night. Everyone fed, everyone tipped, everyone in one piece after three weeks of mountain.

Tomorrow morning, the helicopter back to Kathmandu. The trek part was officially behind us.

So I did what any reasonable bear does at the end of a long expedition. I claimed the best bed in the room and went to sleep.

Time to say goodbye to the Gurkha Inn.

The plan was simple. Hike from Phakding back up to Lukla, get there early, and have a buffer day before Steve and Alice rolled in. We didn’t want to be cutting it close on the last leg, so an early start it was.

One problem. Nicholas and Po On were finally, fully better. Pokin was not. She’d been the one who couldn’t shake it, and she still sounded terrible. Some people just don’t recover at altitude, and she was firmly in that camp.

While Nicholas did math at the breakfast table, the porters started hauling our gear into the courtyard and packing it down. After all the days we’d spent at the Gurkha Inn, the family gave us a proper send-off. Scarves, photos, the whole ceremony.

They also handed over a farewell treat plate. I assume the apples were for the horses. The Oreos and the small pile of wrapped candy, however, were clearly meant for me.

Then we geared up and headed out.

The Bridge, The Donkeys, The Usual

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The way out of town crossed one of the big suspension bridges, which meant the usual ritual: stand there and wait while a cargo train of donkeys decides whether or not it’s their turn.

After that it was just trail. Down, then up, then more up. Lukla sits higher than Phakding, so the last stretch back is a climb, not a stroll.

This is the part where I have to bring up the horse situation.

Pokin vs. The Horse

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Here is the thing you need to know. This entire trip, every single time a horse came up as an option, Pokin refused. Flatly. She watched Po On ride one back to Tengboche days earlier. Saw it work perfectly. Still said no. She wanted to do the whole thing on her own legs, which is an admirable instinct right up until your legs and your lungs disagree with you.

I never understood this. I make my bud carry me everywhere and it’s fantastic. I have no notes on the system. The system is perfect.

So we’re maybe two hours of solid uphill from Lukla, and Pokin starts coughing in a way that isn’t “I have a cold” so much as “I might fold up on this trail.” Real fits. The kind where you stop walking because you have to.

Nicholas watched it for a bit and told her, flat out, that he was getting a horse. You’d think that would settle it. It did not. Pokin just kept walking, having quietly decided that if she could outwalk the horse, she wouldn’t have to ride it. The horse did not even exist yet and she was already racing it.

So Nicholas went back, found Nilman, negotiated the horse anyway, and then caught up to her on the trail. By this point Pokin had thrown so much energy into outrunning a hypothetical, not-yet-purchased horse that she’d completely wrecked herself. She was now too tired to walk back to where the horse actually was.

So the horse came to her. She lost a race against an animal that hadn’t been hired when the race started. Chestnut, somewhere back in Las Vegas, just felt a great disturbance and has no idea why he’s suddenly so happy.

The horse that showed up was big. Not pony big. Intimidatingly, structurally big. His name was Rocky, which felt about right. He looked at the trail ahead like it had personally wasted his time.

And then something annoying happened. She felt better immediately.

You could see the relief from the ground. One minute she’s coughing herself inside out, next minute she’s up on this enormous animal cruising toward Lukla like she’s leading a parade. I rode shotgun for part of it, purely in a supervisory capacity.

The horse hauled her up that mountain like the elevation didn’t exist. The rest of us scuttled along behind on foot, trying to keep pace with a creature that climbs Himalayan trails for a living. We lost.

Lukla, and the Hotel That Was Too Fancy to Feed Us

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We made it into Lukla without any further drama, which after this trek felt almost suspicious. Checked into our hotel, which was very nice. Too nice, it turned out. The kind of nice where the restaurant is more interested in looking good than feeding you.

So we went next door to a place called the Yak Hotel. Everyone assumed it would be a downgrade. They said the food was excellent, but I’m still not convinced it wasn’t just relief that they’d survived another hike.

There were noodles, pancakes, a mountain of rice with eggs and cashews stuck in it. I did not partake. None of it was cocoa. None of it was chocolate. I observed, judged, and approved of their enthusiasm from a safe distance.

And that was the day. We made it to Lukla, settled in, and decided to hunker down for the night and wait for Steve and Alice to arrive in the morning.

One more night up here. One more round of goodbyes coming, to the porters, the crew, to D.B., and then the helicopter back to Kathmandu.

The mountain was almost done with us. We were almost done with the mountain. Pokin, for the record, finished the last leg in the saddle, and I will be bringing it up forever.

Remember this? A speck of a monastery floating in the mist on a far ridge above the village, a whole valley away. Back when we first spotted it, it was barely a smudge in the fog, the kind of place that looks like it’s deliberately not wanting to be found. Nicholas took one look and decided it was a main quest he absolutely had to complete.

He was still sick, still coughing, and the smart move was to rest. So obviously he went looking for a way up instead. And he reached it, eventually, three-quarters of the way up the hill before the building finally stopped hiding and resolved into something real.

But getting there is the whole story, so let’s back up.

The Hunt

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Here’s the problem: there was no marked trail. Just a hillside full of paths that all looked promising and then dead-ended, or split, or wandered off toward someone’s potato field. Nicholas spent the rest days doing reconnaissance. Up one route, back down. Up another, back down. Slightly higher each time, mapping the hill by trial and error like he was clearing fog off a minimap.

Eventually he found one that kept going. Up through the pines, past stone walls and prayer flags, higher than any of the false starts. This was the one.

And then he hit the gate. And the gate won.

He climbed all that way, found the right path at last, and ran straight into this thing: a few wooden bars laid across the trail. And he stopped. He looked at it, concluded the monastery was closed, and walked back down the mountain.

It’s a cow gate. It is the lowest-effort obstacle a Himalayan hillside can produce. The bars just slide out and lift away. Its entire job is to inconvenience livestock, who are, on average, smarter about it than he was that day. A wall of sticks meant for cows successfully repelled Nicholas like a confused heifer.

He only figured it out later that you can just move the bars. Slid them out, walked through, slid them back, because he’s not an animal. (For the record, I was in the backpack the whole time, judging. Both times.)

Getting There

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There were ponies working the village, hauling supplies around. The cows, on the other hand, mostly just wandered the trails getting in the way. (More on the cows later.)

And then the steps. The final approach is a staircase of rough stone climbing straight up to the building, because of course the reward for finding the unmarked path is more climbing.

There’s a large, beautifully painted prayer wheel, and directly behind it, a sign for the toilet. The sacred and the practical, sharing a wall. Even monasteries have priorities.

Inside, a covered courtyard with a mandala painted right into the floor, leading toward the prayer hall. I stayed in the bag for this part. You don’t bring a bear out in a working temple. It’s disrespectful, and I have a reputation to maintain.

Young monks were out on the lawn, robes drying on a line, a dog supervising. Regular life, at altitude, with the entire Himalaya as a backyard.

Bringing the Girls

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Pokin and Po On had heard all about the monastery and were, understandably, jealous. So once they started feeling stronger, Nicholas became a guide.

It didn’t happen all at once. Pokin was still weak, so it was a build. A little higher one day. A little higher the next. Until the day they both made it all the way up.

The climb also produced the cow incident. Somewhere on the way up, Po On vanished. Five minutes pass. Nicholas is standing there going where the heck is Po On, and finally trudges back down the trail to find her frozen in place, held hostage by cows. A few of them had claimed the path and she was too scared to push past, with no idea you can simply tell a cow to move. So it stood there. And so did she. Indefinitely. A standoff she was losing.

Nicholas groaned, walked up, went “sha! sha!”, slapped a few rumps, and the cows grudgingly shuffled aside about three steps, exactly enough for Po On to scurry through. Then he made fun of her the entire rest of the way up for getting held captive by cows. Correct response. They’re cows.

The viewpoint at the top is the payoff, and it does not disappoint. Mountains on one side, the whole forested valley dropping away on the other, and the village they’d been staring up at it from now a cluster of dots far below. From up here, the smudge was looking down on everything else. Role reversal. I respect it.

Evening Prayer and the Third Monastery

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Nicholas went back up alone that evening, because of course he did. This was now his fifth or sixth lap of the same hill. He sat and listened to the monks chant for a while, and recorded some of the music they made up there.

Afterward, someone mentioned there was a second monastery. Higher up. Secret. And the directions to it were the kind of vague that gets a tourist hopelessly lost on a mountain in the dark.

Rather than wander somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be, Nicholas asked if someone could actually show him. One of the young teenage monks volunteered and led him up the hill to it.

This one was a platform with an outlook, the entrance guarded by a pair of carved stone lions. No monks living there yet. The interior was being rebuilt, so that part stayed off limits, which honestly only made it better.

The payoff was the viewpoint itself. Golden deer flanking a dharma wheel along the parapet, the young monk who’d brought him up there leaning on the wall beside them, and beyond all of it, nothing. The mist had rolled all the way in and swallowed the entire valley. You couldn’t see the mountains, you couldn’t see the village, you couldn’t see anything. Just two golden deer, a guide in maroon robes, and a wall of white.

So the main quest, the smudge in the fog he’d stared at from the village and refused to let go of, turned out to have a hidden second stage. A half-finished secret monastery on a mountaintop, reachable only if a teenager decides to take pity on you, with a viewpoint that showed you nothing at all. You don’t find that by resting when you’re sick. You find it by being too stubborn to.