People have been asking about the astrophotography.
Fair enough. We’ve spent the last several posts talking about Nicholas destroying his body for these shots. Three consecutive nights at extreme altitude. Zero sleep. Getting sick. Sleeping on a literal mountain. All for photos that are still sitting on an SD card in a camera bag in a Himalayan lodge.
We don’t have a computer up here. The Z9 files are massive and there’s no way to properly edit them on a phone. But Nicholas pulled one frame off the camera, opened it on his phone, and did a quick color grade so you can at least see what all the suffering was about.
This is not the final edit. This is a phone preview of a raw file. It’s going to look a little blown out, a little rough around the edges. The real versions will come when we’re home with actual monitors and actual software.
But even rough, it’s something.
First, here’s what the location looks like during the day. This is the Sherpa Memorial at Chukpi Lhara, near Lobuche. Nicholas scouted it during the afternoon hike and immediately started planning the night shoot.
The view from the Sherpa Memorial by day. Pyramidal peak on the left, valley funneling toward the glacier, snow-covered summits all the way across the horizon. Not a bad spot.
And here’s what it looks like at 3 AM.
The Milky Way over the Himalayas. Shot from the Sherpa Memorial. This is a quick phone edit of one frame from the timelapse. The real versions are coming.
The Milky Way. The Galactic Center. Arcing over the entire Himalayan skyline, with the snow on the peaks still faintly visible in the starlight. Thousands of stars, dust lanes, nebular structure. The valley below disappearing into darkness with a single point of light from Dingboche far below.
This is one frame from one night. There are three more nights of timelapses on that SD card.
The full edits are coming when we get home. For now, this preview will have to do.
Rest day in Phakding. Pokin and Po On are recovering. Nicholas is about 40% better but still coughing. Everyone’s supposed to be taking it easy.
So naturally, Nicholas went for a walk.
He came back an hour later and said, “Sumi, this village is a video game.”
He wasn’t wrong.
This is where a quest NPC lives. You find this cabin, talk to the old hermit inside, and he sends you to retrieve something from the bottom of the river. You die three times trying.
I’ve played a lot of games. Skyrim. The Witcher. Every open-world RPG where you wander into some village and every building looks like it was placed there by a level designer who wanted you to feel something. The stone walls. The handmade wooden fences. The mysterious hut on the cliff that’s definitely hiding a side quest.
Phakding is that village. Except nobody designed it. People just built it this way because that’s how you build things when you’re in a Himalayan river valley with no power tools and a lot of rocks.
Starter area farm. Handmade ladder for +2 Agility. Branch fence crafted from local materials. The cliff in the background definitely has a cave you’re supposed to explore later.
The farm plots have handmade wooden ladders propped against stone walls. The fences are built from branches. Not treated lumber. Not hardware store posts. Actual branches lashed together. It looks exactly like what happens in a game when you visit a village in the first act before you have access to any real materials.
Herbalist’s house. 100%. You knock on this door and an old woman sells you potions. There’s a vegetable garden out front because of course there is.
Then Nicholas found the crafting district.
The Lumber Mill. NPCs processing logs into planks. The cow is either a quest marker or part of the ambient wildlife system. Hard to tell.
People were hauling raw logs down from the forest, bringing them to this open-air camp under tarps, and hand-turning them into boards. With hatchets. No table saws. No planers. No power tools of any kind. Just hatchets, hands, and chisels. Then they were building a house with the boards they just made. From trees they just cut. The entire supply chain was visible in one frame.
Log delivery. Manual fast travel. These two are carrying full tree trunks through a village alley like it’s a normal Tuesday errand.
And the quarry.
The Stonecutter’s camp. Hauling rocks up from the mountain, breaking them with sledgehammers, stacking them into walls. This is how buildings get built here. No cranes. No forklifts. Just people and hammers.
Someone was hauling boulders up from the riverbed, and another person with a sledgehammer was smashing them into building-sized stones. Then they’d stack those stones into walls by hand. An entire house, built from rocks you broke yourself from bigger rocks. If this were a game, this would be a crafting minigame that reviewers would call “surprisingly satisfying.”
Then Nicholas looked up and spotted these:
Wild beehives. Hanging from a cliff. In a game, you’d need to climb up there to gather Rare Honey for a cooking quest. In real life, same thing, except the bees are also real and they’re enormous.
Giant wild beehives, clinging to a sheer cliff face. Unreachable without climbing gear or a very questionable decision. In every RPG I’ve ever played, there’s a moment where you see a collectible on a ledge and think, “I can definitely get up there.” This is that ledge. Except the collectible fights back.
And just when you think it can’t get more video game:
The Runestone. Walk up to it and press A to absorb ancient power. Or just read the Tibetan inscription, which is probably ‘Om Mani Padme Hum,’ which is basically the same thing.
A carved mani stone in a misty forest clearing. Prayer flags draped from the trees. Tibetan script painted in white across the dark rock. If you stumbled onto this in Skyrim, you’d hear a choir start singing and a skill tree would light up. Here it just sits quietly in the fog, which honestly makes it more powerful.
The Monastery. Up in the mist. On a cliff. With no visible way to get there. This is either end-game content or a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon set piece. Either way, you’re not getting up there at Level 1.
A monastery. On a cliff. In the mist. With no discernible path to reach it. In a game, this would be the area you can see from the starting zone but can’t access until you’ve unlocked flying or completed a 40-hour questline. It just sits up there, reminding you that you’re not ready yet.
If you’ve seen a more video game village than Phakding, let me know. I’ve been to 30+ countries. I’ve been to actual medieval towns in Europe. None of them hit like this. This place has handmade ladders, cliff beehives, runestones in the fog, a lumber mill staffed entirely by people with hatchets, and a floating monastery.
Phakding isn’t a rest stop on the EBC trek. It’s a starting zone in the greatest RPG nobody’s made yet.
Nicholas spent the evening listening to Pokin cough.
Tengboche is at 3,860 meters (12,664 feet). Lower than where they’d been, and the heated room at The Himalayan was the best lodge on the trek. But the fluid in Pokin’s lungs wasn’t clearing. HAPE doesn’t get better at altitude. It gets better at lower altitude. And 3,860 meters is still very much altitude.
The next stop down would be Namche Bazaar at 3,440 meters (11,286 feet). Still high, and the hike to get there is a full day of steep, grueling trail. There was no way Pokin was doing that hike. Po On wasn’t in much better shape after her own respiratory infection.
So Nicholas called in air support.
A helicopter would fly into Tengboche in the morning, pick everyone up, and take them down to Phakding at 2,610 meters (8,563 feet). The very first town they’d stopped at on Day 1 of the trek, back when Nicholas and Pokin had arrived by helicopter with fevers and spent the night at the Sherpa Shangri-La wondering if the trek was over before it started. Full circle. Quiet, low, and warm. Perfect for recovery.
But as a treat, Nicholas booked the helicopter to do a flyover of Everest Base Camp and a landing at Gokyo Lake on the way down. If Pokin couldn’t make it to these places on foot, she’d see them from the air. Po On had wanted to see Gokyo Lake, the last part of the original Three Passes route that got scrapped. This way she’d at least get a look.
First, though: goodbyes.
The crew at The Himalayan. Po On, Pokin, Nicholas, the two porters Kerman and Nilman, and one of the lodge staff who really looked after Pokin during her recovery. Kerman and Nilman were about to leave for the seven-hour hike down to Phakding carrying all the bags. These guys don’t stop.
The porters had headed out earlier that morning, carrying all the duffels down the trail by hand. Kerman and Nilman, doing what they do. Meanwhile, we took the lazy way.
The walk to the helicopter pad. Uphill. Because of course the helicopter pad is uphill.
The “helicopter pad” in Tengboche is a loose stone circle on a hill behind the village. No terminal. No windsock. Just some rocks arranged in a vaguely circular pattern and a pile of construction piping.
There she is. Our ride out of the mountains.
We piled in. Headsets on. Doors shut. And then we were up.
Pokin riding shotgun.
The pilot took us north, threading through the valleys toward Everest Base Camp. From the air, you can see the entire Khumbu Glacier, the tent clusters at Base Camp, and the peaks that Nicholas had been staring at from ground level for the past two weeks. It’s a completely different perspective. Everything that took days to hike past takes about four minutes in a helicopter.
The Khumbu Glacier and Base Camp from above. All those yellow specks are expedition tents. The helicopter shadow gives you a sense of how high up we are.The Khumbu Icefall. This is where the glacier breaks apart into a maze of ice towers and crevasses. It’s one of the most dangerous sections of the Everest climbing route, and from up here you can see why.
On the way over, we spotted climbers on Lobuche Peak. Tiny figures in a line, working their way up a steep snow face.
Climbers on Lobuche Peak. Single file up the snow. From the helicopter they looked like ants on a wedding cake.
Then we banked west toward Gokyo.
Gokyo Lake. 4,750 meters. The mountains reflected in the water like someone pasted in a stock photo background. Except it’s real.
The helicopter landed right at the lake. We got out, stretched our legs on the rocky shoreline, and took in the view. The water was perfectly still. The mountains reflected in it like glass. Po On finally got her Gokyo Lake moment, even if she arrived by helicopter instead of over Cho La Pass.
Group shot with the pilot. He seemed genuinely stoked to be there, which tracks. This is his office view.
Back in the helicopter. Headsets on. Time for the actual destination.
Here’s where it got interesting.
The pilot wasn’t told we were going to Phakding. He thought we were going to Lukla, which is the normal helicopter destination in the region. Lukla’s got the airport, the infrastructure, the helipads. Phakding is a tiny village with no obvious reason for a helicopter to go there.
So when we landed in Lukla, the ground crew looked at the passengers, looked at the paperwork, and said: “No, no. They’re supposed to go to Phakding.”
Pilot: oh.
Back in. Five more minutes of flying. Landed in Phakding.
Touchdown in Phakding. For real this time.
But here’s the thing nobody mentioned: there are multiple helicopter pads in Phakding. DB had booked us a family-run inn right next to the pad near the Sherpa Shangri-La, the same area where Nicholas and Pokin had been dropped at the very beginning of the trek. That’s where the family was waiting for us.
The pilot dropped us at a completely different pad. Somewhere we had never seen before. In the middle of what appeared to be someone’s farm.
The helicopter took off. We stood there.
This is not where we’re supposed to be. The helicopter is gone. We are standing in a forest.
No obvious path out. No signs. Just us, some farm plots, and a lot of trees. We stood around looking confused until a very old woman wandered through the farm, sized us up, and wordlessly motioned for us to follow her. She led us through her property and out to the main trail.
Navigating the back alleys of Phakding. We’re a mile from the lodge and nobody knows we’re here.
We checked the map. We were about a mile from where we were supposed to be. Uphill and downhill. The family that runs the inn had been waiting at the other helicopter pad for two hours wondering where we were.
We messaged DB. He tried to reach the family. We started walking at whatever pace the girls could manage. After a while, a woman came running down the path toward us. “Are you from DB?” We said yes. She laughed. “My father has been waiting at the helicopter pad! He’s been there for two hours!” She led us back up to the lodge.
Almost there. The lodge tucked into the valley ahead.
The inn is basic. Family-run, small, homemade food. But it’s warm, it’s low, and the family is genuinely kind. We settled in and decided to just stay for a few days and see how everyone feels.
Claimed my spot. Window seat. Sunlight. This will do just fine.
Tengboche to Gokyo Lake to Everest Base Camp flyover to Lukla to the wrong helicopter pad in Phakding to an old woman’s farm to a mile-long walk to a family inn.
Not exactly how anyone planned it. But we’re at 2,610 meters, the three of us are settled in, and the coughing might actually stop now. Steve, Alice, and DB are still up in the mountains doing the Three Passes. We’ll see them on the other side.
Nicholas came straight off the mountain to breakfast. No shower. No change of clothes. Sleeping bag rolled up, camera packed, ready to go. The plan was always to head down today — back to Tengboche, back to Pokin, back to lower altitude where humans can breathe without having to think about it.
But there was a problem he didn’t know about yet, because he’d been sleeping on a mountain.
Po On was not doing well. She’d been struggling for a couple days, but overnight it got worse. Not just the altitude anymore. She was getting genuinely sick on top of the altitude sickness. DB took one look at her that morning and made the call: she was not going over any more passes. She was done. She’d be heading down to Tengboche with Nicholas and me.
The question was whether she could actually hike it.
She didn’t think so. So what did we do?
We rented a horse.
Obviously I had to test it first. Safety inspection. Very official.
Chestnut is probably back in Las Vegas right now beaming. “I’m so proud! Horses are so helpful! One of my fellow equines out there helping Po On in her time of need!” He’d be insufferably optimistic about the whole thing. He always is.
The horse’s name was Sunny. Or Suni. Or Soy. Or Soya. Honestly, every time the guide said it, it came out slightly different. We asked him to write it down. What he wrote had no obvious relationship to anything he’d been saying out loud. So the horse’s name remains a mystery. I’m going with Sunny because it makes the most sense.
But first — a look at what Nicholas was leaving behind.
This was the room at the lodge in Thukla. Shared squat toilet. Blue water barrel. The works. Given the state of things in there, Nicholas was actually glad he’d spent the night outside on a mountain instead. Better stars. Better air. Fewer things you don’t want to think about.
Meanwhile, back in Tengboche:
Pokin at her heated lodge in Tengboche, having breakfast with a view of the entire Himalayan range. Some people really do have it figured out.
Yeah. Two very different mornings.
So the new plan: instead of going straight to Tengboche, they’d swing back through Dingboche on the way down. Nicholas had already visited the doctor there twice with Pokin, so why not make it three for three? Same clinic, same doctor, new sister.
Po On and me on Sunny. I already did the safety inspection, so naturally I stayed on for the ride. Someone has to supervise.
Po On rode. Nicholas walked behind with the porters. Down through the valley, past the settlements, retracing all the steps he’d been speed-running upward just a few days ago. The whole thing was a lot more pleasant going downhill, aside from the part where everyone was sick or becoming sick.
Trail committee. Horse, baby horse, and a dog who looked like he was in charge of both of them.
They made it to the doctor in Dingboche. Nicholas walked in and said, “Hey, I’m back. With the other sister.”
Nicholas at the doctor’s. He looks exactly like a guy who slept on a mountain, speed-ran EBC, and then hiked all day with a horse.
Po On’s diagnosis was similar to Pokin’s. Respiratory infection, probably from the altitude and cold. Same antibiotics. The good news: no HAPE. No fluid in the lungs. Less severe than Pokin’s situation. The bad news: she still needed to go down. No more high altitude for her.
So they kept going. Down from Dingboche, through the valley, up the final climb to Tengboche.
Almost there. Tengboche appearing through the trees.
That last stretch into Tengboche is deceptive. You’re descending for most of the day, everything feels like it’s winding down, and then the trail goes straight up. Steep switchbacks through the forest, right when your legs have already decided they’re done.
Made it. The sign says ‘The Himalayan.’ Nicholas’s face says ‘I need to sit down for approximately three days.’
Pokin spotted them coming up the trail from her patio. Reunion at the lodge. Everyone alive, mostly functional, varying degrees of sick.
The porters unloading at Tengboche. Kerman and Nilman, as always, making it look easy.
So here we are. Back at The Himalayan in Tengboche. Pokin has her heated room. Po On has antibiotics. Nicholas has a cough that’s getting worse and a body that’s finally catching up with three nights of no sleep at extreme altitude.
But the three of them are back together. Steve, Alice, and DB are still up there doing the Three Passes route, but this crew is reunited. That counts for something.
Three for three. That was the goal. The Sherpa Memorial timelapse had worked. The Kala Patthar Milky Way over Everest had worked. One more clear night, one more shot, and Nicholas would have pulled off the entire astrophotography redemption arc.
The problem was that Nicholas had absolutely destroyed himself getting here. Back-to-back all-nighters, the EBC speed run, the Kala Patthar climb, and then four hours of porter duty with a namlo. He knew the overexertion at this altitude was probably going to get him sick. But tomorrow they were descending to Tengboche to meet Pokin, dropping to lower elevation, warm hotel, rest and recovery. If he was going to blow himself out, tonight was the night to do it.
As soon as he’d dropped off the porter bags, Nicholas went scouting. He’d noticed a hill right outside the hotel in Thukla, maybe two minutes away, that looked promising. Good framing on Ama Dablam, nice open sky.
It didn’t work. There was a light right where you didn’t want it, and it looked like it might be on someone’s property. Scrapped.
So he walked further, heading back along the route toward Dingboche, looking for higher ground. He found a hill about 30 to 40 minutes down the trail with a big rock at the top and the exact view he wanted.
The catch: getting there meant crossing a gorge. Thukla sits on the other side of a river, and they’re in the middle of building a suspension bridge over the ravine. The steel cables are strung across, but the bridge itself doesn’t exist yet. So for now, you have to hike all the way down from Thukla to the river, cross a tiny bridge at the bottom, and climb all the way back up the other side.
The future bridge. Currently just cables and ambition. For now, you take the long way around.
Forty minutes each way. With 25 pounds of camera gear. At night. After everything he’d already put himself through.
He skipped dinner. Went to bed. Set the alarm for 11 PM.
When the alarm went off, Nicholas was extremely tempted to go back to sleep. He’d earned it. Every muscle in his body had earned it.
He looked out the window. Perfect conditions. Fresh coat of snow. Clear sky.
Up we got.
Down the ravine. Across the river. Up the other side. Found the hill. Climbed to the top. Forty minutes with the full kit. By now, the routine was dialed in. Emergency poncho blankets laid down as a ground layer. Sleeping bag on top. Camera on the tripod. Battery wrapped to keep it warm. Shot framed. Timelapse started. Six hours this time, running all the way through to dawn.
The setup. Camera, sleeping bag, emergency blankets, and a bear. Somewhere on a hillside in the Himalayas at midnight. This is either dedication or insanity. Probably both.
Then we crawled into the sleeping bag, tucked under the big rock to block the wind, and slept.
Actually slept. On a mountain. In the Himalayas. Under the stars. At altitude. While the camera clicked away every twenty seconds, frame after frame of the Milky Way rotating over the peaks.
About every hour, Nicholas would wake up, peek at the camera preview, confirm it was still working, and go back to sleep. Every time: stars. Working. Good. Sleep.
It was the longest, cleanest timelapse of the entire trip. The best weather. The best conditions. Six uninterrupted hours of clear sky.
5 AM. Waking up on a mountain. The camera’s still clicking. The bear’s still here. Everything worked.The view from our bedroom. Not bad for a night on the ground.
Around 6 AM, with the sky brightening and breakfast at 6:30, Nicholas stopped the timelapse and packed everything up. Forty minutes back to Thukla. Down the hill, across the river, up the ravine. Back to the lodge just in time.
Three nights. Three successful shoots. The Astrosaster was fully redeemed.
Nicholas definitely knew he’d blown himself out. The overexertion, the altitude, the lack of sleep. It was going to catch up with him. But they were heading down today, back to Tengboche, back to Pokin, back to oxygen and warm rooms.
You’d think after summiting Kala Patthar at 1 AM, shooting the Milky Way over Everest, trail running back down at dawn, and getting maybe two hours of sleep total, Nicholas would take the easy hike to Thukla and, I don’t know, rest.
You’d be wrong.
See, with only two porters left for the four of us, the bags were overloaded. We hadn’t packed light. Five large duffels, two porters. Our guys, Kerman and Naben, are absolute machines. Either of them can carry three bags, probably four, without breaking a sweat. It wasn’t a problem.
But a few days earlier, Nicholas had tried on Kerman’s namlo, and it planted an idea.
A namlo is the traditional Nepali porter carrying system. It’s a woven strap that loops around your forehead, with the load hanging on your back. No shoulder straps. No hip belt. No frame. Just a strap across your forehead and the full weight of whatever you’re carrying pulling on your neck. The porters use these to haul 30, 40, sometimes 60+ kilos through the Himalayas. It looks like it shouldn’t work, but the biomechanics are actually clever. The head strap channels the weight axially down the spine, the strongest load-bearing column in the body. You lean forward to keep the center of gravity over your feet, and the weight distributes straight down through your skeleton instead of pulling backward on your shoulders like a backpack does. In some ways it’s more efficient, especially on steep terrain. It just requires neck muscles that most people haven’t developed since infancy.
Nicholas tried Kerman’s a few days ago and thought: “That’s not so bad.”
“Hey DB, can you have the porters make me a namlo? I want to carry my own bag to Thukla.”
DB, who by this point had learned to take Nicholas seriously no matter how insane the request, still said no. “No, no, no, bad idea.”
Nicholas insisted. “Let me try. If it doesn’t work, they take my bag back. No problem.”
DB relented. The porters fashioned a namlo, found the lightest duffel (still sizable), and strapped it on.
Spot the tourist. Kerman and Naben have been doing this their whole lives. Nicholas has been doing it for about four minutes.Thumbs up. The neck muscles haven’t started screaming yet.
Nicholas took off ahead with the porters while the rest of the group stayed back with DB for the normal pace. The porters powered along, taking breaks, trading snacks, and generally having a good time. Nicholas kept up.
The namlo wasn’t terrible. Definitely awkward on the neck, using muscles that don’t normally get invited to the party. The balance was tricky. And you couldn’t look up at anyone on the trail. You just had to keep your head down and march. But the weight was manageable, and the four hours to Thukla went by.
Two porters heading to Thukla.
The best part was the double-takes. Every guide and porter on the trail did the same thing: glance at Nicholas, look away, then snap back and stare. All the porters here are clean-shaven local men. Nicholas is a white guy with two weeks of trail scruff on his face, hauling a duffel on a namlo like he belongs. He did not belong. Everyone knew it. But he was doing it, so they just stared.
Rest stop with the crew. At this point, Nicholas has been fully adopted.
At one point, the other two porters went on ahead after lunch and Nicholas was on his own. He pulled up to one of the porter rest stops, a place where they set down their loads on stone ledges. It was snowing. One other porter was resting there.
Nicholas dropped his bag like he’d done it a thousand times, then coughed a few times, clearing his lungs from the cold air. The other porter looked at him. Did a double-take. Then reached into his bag, pulled out a half-finished Coke, and offered it to Nicholas.
Apparently, it’s pretty easy to get adopted into the porter community. Just show up with a namlo and trail scruff.
They made it to Thukla by the afternoon. Surprisingly, Nicholas’s neck was totally fine. The namlo did its job. What got him were the shoulder straps, which left bruises where the bag shifted against them. But he’d carried his own bag the whole way, and somewhere on that trail, for a few hours at least, he wasn’t a tourist. He was just another guy hauling gear through the mountains.
12:30 AM. The alarm went off. Nicholas had skipped dinner again, gone straight to bed after speed-running the entire length of Everest Base Camp, and managed maybe three hours of sleep. At 5,164 meters (16,942 feet). In a tea house where the walls are plywood and the wind finds every gap.
He looked outside. Clear sky. Stars. No clouds.
Time to climb the highest point of the entire trek. In the dark. At 1 AM. Because apparently this is just what we do now.
Nicholas had been refining his warmth strategy across three consecutive nights of freezing his extremities off at extreme altitude. Night one at the stupa: nothing but layers. Night two at the Sherpa Memorial: Pokin’s emergency poncho blankets. Tonight, he leveled up again. He packed his actual sleeping bag.
The plan was to set up the camera at the summit of Kala Patthar, start the timelapse, and then crawl into the sleeping bag and wait. Revolutionary stuff. Someone should have thought of this sooner.
He also knew he didn’t have the energy to haul 25 pounds of camera gear straight uphill for two hours at this altitude. That’s where Kerman came in. The man had volunteered the night before, and at 1 AM he showed up ready to go, camera bag on his back, looking annoyingly fresh.
Kerman set off confidently into the dark. Nicholas followed. They started up a hill. Twenty-five minutes in, Kerman stopped.
“Uh-oh. Wrong way.”
Of course.
They turned around, hiked back to the lodge, and started over. It was now 1:45 AM. The Milky Way was rising, and they were forty-five minutes behind schedule because apparently nobody can find a trail in the Khumbu Valley after dark.
Nicholas was not going to miss the shot. Not this time. He’d read online that a fit hiker could summit Kala Patthar from Gorak Shep in about two hours if they weren’t suffering from AMS. The elevation gain is about 464 meters (1,524 feet) over roughly 2 kilometers of steep, rocky trail. At 5,000+ meters, where every breath gives you about half the oxygen your body expects.
With Kerman carrying the camera bag and Nicholas carrying nothing but trekking poles and stubbornness, they powered up.
One hour and twenty minutes. Summit. 5,644 meters (18,519 feet).
For context, a normal trekker takes two to three hours. A fit one does it in an hour and a half to two. Nicholas did it in one twenty, at 1 AM, in the dark, after days of altitude exposure and back-to-back all-nighters. Those weighted stairmaster sessions back in Vegas apparently paid off.
He set up the camera just in time. The Milky Way was there, arcing over the Himalayas. And from up here, unlike everywhere else on the trek, you could actually see Everest. The whole peak, not just the tip peeking out from behind its neighbors. Everest, Nuptse, Lhotse, the Khumbu Glacier, and the frozen lake of Gorak Shep far below, all laid out under a sky full of stars.
He started the timelapse. Click. Preview. Stars over Everest. Working. Click. Preview. Still working.
Then he unpacked the sleeping bag, laid it out on the rocks, and got in.
I want to pause here and note that Nicholas was sleeping in a sleeping bag on the summit of Kala Patthar at 18,519 feet, watching the Milky Way rotate over Mount Everest while his camera captured it frame by frame. There are worse ways to spend a night.
Pre-dawn from the summit. Everest in the center, frozen Gorak Shep lake below, and the lights of Everest Base Camp glowing in the bottom left. We’re the only ones up here.
Now here’s the thing. Nicholas had told Kerman and DB that he only needed help carrying the gear up. Once the camera was set up, Kerman could go back down to the lodge, sleep, and Nicholas would descend with the sunrise group later.
Kerman said “Okay.”
Then he went and hid behind a rock.
He didn’t go back down. He didn’t tell Nicholas. He just found a rock, sat behind it, and stayed. No sleeping bag. No warm gear. Just his jacket and whatever internal furnace powers that man. At 5,644 meters. For hours.
Nicholas woke up around 4:45 AM to the faint light of sunrise creeping over the peaks, and heard Kerman talking to himself, trying to stay warm.
“What are you doing up here?!”
Kerman shrugged. “You take photos for a very long time.”
Nicholas gave him his electric hand warmers. Poor Kerman. But what an absolute beast.
Me and my bud. 5,644 meters. Highest we’ve ever been. Everest behind us pretending to be casual about it.The whole scene. Everest, the glacier, the frozen lake, and a bear who just woke up from a nap at 18,500 feet.
My official portrait with Everest. First spirit bear on Kala Patthar. First spirit bear to sleep under the Milky Way at 18,500 feet. Keep up, history.Kerman. The man who carried camera gear up a mountain at 1 AM, hid behind a rock for four hours in the cold, and is still smiling. Absolute legend.The summit team. One of them is an experienced high-altitude porter. The other hasn’t slept properly in three days. Both got the shot.
Another hiker we’d met at the tea house the night before, Sven, made it up for sunrise too. We took some photos of each other, and then Nicholas had one more idea.
No camera bag. Kerman had it. The sun was coming up. The trail was visible for the first time in hours. And Nicholas thought to himself: “I bet I won’t ever have another opportunity to trail run down a mountain at 5,644 meters.”
So he did. He trail ran the entire descent of Kala Patthar in the early morning light.
When he got back to Gorak Shep around 6 AM and told me what he’d done, I had some things to say. I was there for all of it, tucked in his backpack the whole climb, but hearing him recap it out loud really drove home how unhinged the last few days had been.
“You absolute maniac. You power-hiked to the summit of Kala Patthar at 1 AM, shot the Milky Way over Everest, napped in a sleeping bag at 18,500 feet, and then trail ran down? After the Sherpa Memorial shoot the night before? After speed-running the entire length of Everest Base Camp? After not sleeping for essentially three days?
At the summit, the effective oxygen is about 10.5%. That’s roughly half of sea level. Between Everest Base Camp and Kilimanjaro’s summit. Every breath gives you about half the oxygen your body expects. Your muscles were running on nothing. Any normal person’s body would have shut down somewhere around hour two of night one.
I’m not mad. I’m impressed. And slightly concerned about your judgment. But mostly impressed.”
The timelapse photos are still on the camera, unprocessed. But from what we saw on the previews, the Milky Way over Everest shot from that night is probably the best photo Nicholas has ever taken. It’s getting framed on our wall the moment we get home and have a chance to process it.
Back at Gorak Shep, it was already time to wake up because it was 6 AM. Po On had been told she couldn’t climb Kala Patthar due to AMS symptoms. Steve had bailed from exhaustion. Alice was the only other one who made the sunrise climb, heading up with DB around 3:30 AM.
Nicholas had two options: gun it all the way back to Pokin in one day, which was a stretch, or join the group heading to Thukla, the settlement he’d passed on the way up that had a perfect view for one more night of astrophotography.
Thukla was only about three hours away. A rest day, basically. Everyone else was totally gassed. Po On couldn’t go higher. Steve was running on empty. Alice had just done the sunrise climb. The whole group was happy to agree that Thukla was the move. Have some breakfast, easy hike down.
But of course this is the EBC speed run. You know Nicholas isn’t going to make it that easy on himself.
One hour of sleep. That’s what Nicholas got between returning from the Sherpa Memorial astrophotography session and the alarm going off again. One hour. And now we were hiking to Everest Base Camp.
The plan: Lobuche to Gorak Shep, have lunch, then the final push along the ridge to EBC. Take photos at the rock. Hang around for ten minutes. Turn around. Sleep at Gorak Shep. Simple enough if you ignore the part where we were doing it at 5,300 meters (17,400 feet) on a combined sleep total that wouldn’t fill a nap.
Back in Namche, we’d run into another group at the hotel. One of them was a guy named Kia who, at some point in the conversation, casually mentioned he was in “god-tier shape.” Now, I respect that energy. I consider myself a god-tier bear, so I appreciate when someone commits to the bit. Turns out Kia actually backed it up. He was heading to Everest Base Camp to summit Everest. For the third time.
Why would anyone climb Everest three times? I don’t know. Nicholas wanted to find out.
Kia invited us to visit their camp when we got up to EBC. “Come find us, have some tea, hang out.” Their tent was the very last one, the biggest camp, at the far end of Base Camp. Sounded great. We thought nothing of it at the time.
Nicholas and Alice on the morning march. This is the face of a man running on one hour of sleep and pure stubbornness.The squad. Me, Nicholas, Po On, and Alice. Everyone’s smiling now. Give it two hours.
The hike from Lobuche to Gorak Shep was where the oxygen started to thin out in earnest. Walking felt like wading through something. Every step required a little more effort than it should, like someone had turned up the gravity a few percent. Nicholas thought it was manageable. Po On was starting to struggle. The altitude was creeping up on her: tiredness, dizziness, slowing down. AMS doesn’t announce itself politely.
Me and my bud with Pumori watching over us. We look way too cheerful for people who can barely breathe.Po On taking a tactical power nap on the rocks. I decided to join. Solidarity.
Past Gorak Shep, the trail turns into something else entirely. The ground is glacier moraine: loose rock, grey dust, and ice. Yak caravans haul supplies through like it’s a highway, except the highway is made of rubble and sits at the altitude of a small airplane.
Yak logistics. Still more reliable than most delivery services.Standing on a rock because at this altitude, you take any excuse to stop moving and call it a photo opportunity.
And then we were there. Everest Base Camp. The rock. The one you see in every photo from every trekker who’s ever made it this far. We climbed on it.
Me and Nicholas on the EBC rock. 5,364 meters (17,598 feet). I am officially the first spirit bear to reach Everest Base Camp. You’re welcome, history.The three of us. Po On looks ready to collapse but she’s smiling, so it counts.Official banner shot. Proof we were here. As if the altitude headache wasn’t enough proof.Our friend Lauren owns a cookie company. So naturally we brought her cookies to Everest Base Camp for a photo. Marketing at 17,000 feet.
Here’s one thing they don’t tell you about Everest Base Camp: despite being called the Everest trek, you don’t really see Everest. It’s tucked behind other mountains the entire time, just the tip peeking out occasionally like it’s shy. You’d think the mountain named in the trip title would show up more. Kala Patthar, a nearby peak at 5,545 meters (18,192 feet), is where you go if you actually want a view. But that’s tomorrow’s problem.
Everest Base Camp. Dozens of expedition tents stretched along the glacier. Somewhere in there is a guy who climbs Everest for fun. We just have to find him.
Po On looked at the tents stretching into the distance and asked DB if she could quickly run to the far end to find Kia’s camp. DB laughed. Not a polite laugh. The kind of laugh that means “absolutely not.” He explained that getting to the other side of EBC wasn’t a quick walk. It’s over a mile of navigating ice ridges, moraines, and crevasses. It would take ages. And Po On looked like she was about to pass out from the altitude, so she gave up.
DB looked at him. “Yeah, sure. Meet you back at Gorak Shep.”
So while Po On and the group turned around to head back, Nicholas and I started blitzing through Everest Base Camp. And here’s the thing about Base Camp that you don’t appreciate until you’re in it: the place is enormous. It stretches over a mile across the Khumbu Glacier, a sprawling city of expedition tents, supply depots, and ice ridges. Getting from one end to the other isn’t a stroll. It’s a full hike across unstable moraine and glacier, at 5,300 meters, and it took Nicholas about 45 minutes of speed-hiking to cross. Kia said his tent was the very last one at the far end. Fine.
The scale of this place. Those tiny dots are tents. Those bigger dots are also tents. The white wall behind them is the Khumbu Icefall, which is currently closed because it keeps trying to kill people.
Nicholas finally reached the far end and started asking around. “Hey, do you know Kia?” Everyone said “Kia who?” Not helpful. So he started doing what Nicholas does: pulling out the camera and interviewing random climbers. “Hey, what are you doing here? Oh, climbing Everest? Can I ask you some questions?”
Mid-interview, someone popped their head out of a tent. “Are you looking for Kia?”
“Yeah! Where is he?”
“The tent at the very end. The one with the giant pirate flag.”
A pirate flag. Of course. A man who climbs Everest three times, calls himself god-tier, and flies a pirate flag over his tent. That’s either someone you want to know very badly or someone you want to avoid entirely. No middle ground.
Unfortunately, Kia had just left for a hike and wouldn’t be back for hours. Nicholas was disappointed. I was devastated. A kindred spirit. Someone who clearly operates on the same level of ambition and self-regard as me, and we missed him by minutes.
Somewhere in the middle of Base Camp. Still hiking. Still looking for pirates.
With daylight running out and no headlamp (because of course he forgot it), Nicholas turned around and speed-ran the entire length of Base Camp back to the ridge, then down to Gorak Shep.
The wildlife at EBC: big, fat, fearless birds that just stand there. Nicholas asked DB if they were tasty. ‘No, no. Very protected.’ They probably taste like chicken.
Nicholas got back to Gorak Shep and looked at the schedule. The group was set to wake up at 3:30 AM to climb Kala Patthar for sunrise photos. Kala Patthar is 5,545 meters (18,192 feet), the highest point on the entire trek, and one of the only spots where you can actually see Everest properly.
And Nicholas’s brain, running on trail dust and whatever neurochemical is responsible for bad decisions at altitude, thought: “What if I went up Kala Patthar tonight? For astrophotography? Milky Way over Everest?”
The hike from Gorak Shep to the summit of Kala Patthar is a three-hour slog straight uphill. At night. In the cold. At extreme altitude.
Nicholas found DB. “Hey, are any of your porters crazy enough to carry my camera gear up Kala Patthar at midnight if I tip them well?”
DB thought he was joking.
He was not joking.
DB asked the group. Kerman, the absolute goat, said “Sure, I’ll do it.”
Departure time: midnight. That left a few hours for another nap.
Let’s see how this one plays out. It can’t possibly work.
There are no photos in this post. It was pitch black, well below freezing, and Nicholas wasn’t about to pull out his phone to stage a portrait of me next to a cairn at midnight. So you’re getting words. Deal with it.
The alarm went off at 11:30 PM. Nicholas had slept maybe four hours after skipping dinner and collapsing into bed the moment we reached Lobuche. He looked outside. Clear sky. Stars everywhere. No moon.
He considered, very briefly, going back to sleep. Then he remembered 500 black frames.
So we got up. Packed the camera, the tripod, lenses, batteries, and me into the big backpack. Strapped on the headlamp. Stepped outside into dead silence. Lobuche at midnight is the kind of quiet where you can hear your own heartbeat, which at this altitude is doing more work than it probably should be.
The plan was simple: hike back down the trail we’d come up that afternoon, find the Sherpa Memorial, set up the camera, and shoot a timelapse of the Milky Way rising over the valley. About 45 minutes each way. Easy.
Here’s the thing about hiking in total darkness at 5,000 meters (16,400 feet) with no moon: you can’t see anything. The headlamp throws a little pool of light a few meters ahead, and beyond that it’s just black. There was fresh snow on the ground covering most of the trail markers. Nicholas was moving fast, head down, watching his footing, crossing little frozen streams, crunching through frost.
At some point the trail split. He didn’t see it.
He kept walking confidently in what he was sure was the right direction. Crossed a few more streams. Scrambled over some rocks. The terrain felt a little different than he remembered, but it was dark, and everything looks different in the dark.
Then he looked up.
A dome. A white geodesic dome sitting in a rocky basin, surrounded by tents. Like something out of a Mars colony.
Lobuche Base Camp. The mountaineering staging area we’d looked down on from the ridge that afternoon. He’d walked right past the split and descended into the valley below.
Nicholas pulled out his phone. No signal, no internet, but the offline map showed his location and a marker for the Sherpa Memorial. The memorial was up on the ridge above him. The trail back to where he’d missed the split was somewhere behind him in the dark, distance unknown.
He had two options. Option one: retrace his steps, find the split, take the correct trail. Sensible. Safe. Slow.
Option two: ignore the trail entirely, point himself directly at the memorial marker, and just climb straight up the hill.
If you’ve ever played a video game and thought “I bet I can skip this entire section by just climbing the wall,” that’s exactly what Nicholas did. No trail. No switchbacks. Just straight up a steep, dark hillside at nearly 5,000 meters (16,400 feet) with 25 pounds of camera gear and a bear on his back, hoping there wasn’t a cliff face in the way. At that altitude, walking on flat ground makes you winded. He charged up this hill without stopping. I have no idea how his lungs were doing this on four hours of sleep in the last two days. Any normal person’s body would have quit halfway up.
There wasn’t a cliff. We hit the ridge, and there it was. The Sherpa Memorial, right where it was supposed to be. The whole detour took about the same time as the actual trail would have. Thirty-five minutes, give or take.
This time Nicholas knew what he was doing. After the Astrosaster, he’d dug through every menu on the camera and found a setting buried three levels deep that previews each frame after it’s taken. No more blind shooting for four hours and hoping. Every twenty seconds, the screen would flash the latest frame. If something went wrong, he’d see it immediately.
He set up the tripod, framed the valley looking south with the mountains on either side, and started the timelapse. Click. Preview. Stars. Click. Preview. Stars. Working.
For the next three or four hours, we sat against a rock wrapped in emergency poncho blankets, trying to stay warm. Pokin had insisted we bring them before she left. Smart woman. It was still freezing. Nicholas couldn’t feel his toes or his fingers. But there was almost no wind this time, which made it considerably less miserable than pacing circles around the stupa the night before. The emergency blanket wasn’t big enough to lie down in, so we wrapped ourselves up, curled into a ball, and tried to sleep sitting on our knees. Neither of us succeeded.
The weather held. The camera kept clicking. Every preview showed stars.
I saw the previews on the camera screen, and yes, they look pretty great. But that’s all I can tell you right now. Nicholas has no computer and no Wi-Fi out here. The photos are trapped on the camera’s memory card, unprocessed, unedited, unseen at full resolution. We’ll post them after we get home.
For now, just trust me. The bear saw them. The bear approves.
We packed up at dawn, hiked back to Lobuche the normal way this time, and got in just in time for maybe an hour of sleep before the alarm went off again. Next stop: Everest Base Camp. No time to even download the photos to see how good they really were.
While Pokin headed down to Tengboche, we headed up. Nicholas, Po On, Kerman, and me. Destination: Lobuche, about 4,940 meters (16,207 feet). Higher than anything we’d done so far, and Nicholas was doing it on zero sleep.
The plan, if you could call it that, was insane. Today: Dingboche to Lobuche. Tomorrow: all the way up to Everest Base Camp and back to Gorak Shep. That night or the next: Kala Patthar. Then sprint back down to Tengboche to meet Pokin. Three days to do what most people take a week to do, with astrophotography attempts every clear night. The original three high passes they came here for? Scrapped entirely.
Nicholas wasn’t in much of a mood. He’d just watched Pokin walk the other direction with fluid in her lungs. He hadn’t decided if he’d made the right call. He was running on nothing, emotionally and physically, and the camera stayed mostly in his pocket. The photos in this post are sparse because the day felt sparse.
Dingboche from above. Hard to believe this place nearly broke us.
Nicholas’s backpack. Covered in prayer flags, marching uphill on fumes.
The hike from Dingboche climbs steadily through increasingly barren terrain. The last scraps of alpine shrub give way to rock and dust. Trees are a distant memory. Even the yaks start looking like they’d rather be somewhere else.
Rush hour on the EBC trail. Ama Dablam in the back, doing its thing.Nicholas and Kerman. Kerman’s carrying roughly four times his body weight and somehow looks less tired than Nicholas.
Partway through the day, the trail drops into the small settlement of Thukla, a cluster of tea houses wedged into the valley before the steep push up Thukla Pass. A place to eat, warm up, and stare at the hill you’re about to climb.
Thukla. Last stop before the pass. The yaks look unimpressed.
At the top of Thukla Pass sits one of the most sobering places on the entire trek. The Sherpa Memorial at Chukpi Lhara is a collection of stone monuments, chortens, and plaques dedicated to the Sherpas and climbers who have died on Everest and the surrounding peaks. Prayer flags stretch between the cairns, and white khata scarves drape over the stones.
It’s quiet up there. Not the kind of quiet where nobody’s talking. The kind where nobody needs to.
The Sherpa Memorial. Every stone up here represents someone who didn’t come back.
Nicholas and Kerman taking a break. Kerman’s still smiling. Nicholas is running on fumes and stubbornness.
But Nicholas noticed something else up here. Looking back down the valley from the memorial, the view was wide open to the south. Mountains framed perfectly on both sides, the valley stretching out below. Exactly the kind of composition that would look spectacular with the Milky Way arching over it.
The view from the memorial. Nicholas saw a photo opportunity. The galaxy had other plans. Or maybe this time it didn’t.
He filed that away. The memorial was about 45 minutes from Lobuche. Not close, but not impossible for a middle-of-the-night astrophotography run.
Past the memorial, the trail follows a high ridge before dropping steeply into a valley. And that’s where things got interesting. Down below, tucked into a rocky basin at the base of Lobuche East, sat the Lobuche Base Camp. Not the village of Lobuche where we’d be sleeping, but the actual mountaineering base camp where climbers stage their attempts on the peak.
Lobuche Base Camp. Dome tents and what looks like a Martian habitat. Someone down there is having a worse time than us.Me and my bud. The valley behind us is everything we’ve already climbed through. Ahead of us is everything we haven’t.
We made it to Lobuche by early afternoon. Higher than we’d ever been, thinner air than we’d ever breathed, and Nicholas still hadn’t slept.
But he wasn’t done thinking about the Sherpa Memorial. That valley view, wide open to the south, mountains framed on both sides. If the weather cooperated tonight, he could hike back out there and try for the astrophotography shot. Redemption for the Astrosaster. Forty-five minutes each way, in the dark, at nearly 5,000 meters, on zero sleep.
He skipped dinner, went straight to bed, and set his alarm for 11:30 PM. Just to check the sky.
