Hi, I'm Sumi

The mechanics finished. The door closed. The rotors spun up. And we lifted off from Lukla with no guide, no group, and a maintenance guy riding along to make sure nothing went wrong.

The flight to Phakding was short. A few minutes over the valley, dodging the same clouds we’d been fighting all day. The pilot found a landing spot behind a building and dropped toward it.

I use the term “landing spot” generously.

The Landing

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It was a circle of stones. Not a helipad. Not a paved surface. Not even cemented cobblestone. Just loose rocks arranged in a rough circle behind the Himalayan Sherpa Hospital. Not where I would choose to land a helicopter, but nobody asked me.

The mechanic swung the door open with the rotors still running. He had us jump out, then dragged our duffel bags onto the rocks. Then a 20-kilogram box of apples and pomegranates that D.B. had sent along for the trek. Then he slammed the door, gave a thumbs up, and took off. Not a single word spoken the entire time.

So there we were. Two sick trekkers and a bear, standing on a stone circle behind a hospital in a Himalayan valley, surrounded by duffel bags and a giant box of fruit, with absolutely no idea where our hotel was.

No guide. No group. No cell reception.

Finding the Hotel

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We started hauling our 20-kilogram duffels (plus the fruit box) down a cobblestone path toward what looked like it might be a town. It was not a dignified entrance.

Luckily, someone found us before we wandered too far. The owner of the Sherpa Shangri-La had gotten a call from D.B. and came out to collect us. Turns out our hotel was literally the next building over. We’d been dragging bags in the right direction by pure accident.

Sherpa Shangri-La

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The lodge was genuinely nice. Not “nice for a remote mountain village” nice. Just nice. A cozy lounge with Himalayan panorama photos on the walls, a painted Tibetan cabinet, cushioned chairs, and that particular kind of quiet that only happens when you’re the only guests.

Most flights to Lukla had been canceled that day because of the afternoon weather. Which meant most trekkers who were supposed to start their trek that day were still stuck in Kathmandu. Which meant Phakding was practically empty. We had the Sherpa Shangri-La almost entirely to ourselves.

Nicholas liked Phakding. It sat at 2,610 meters in the Dudh Koshi river valley, actually lower than Lukla, tucked between steep forested mountainsides. Quiet. Green. The kind of place where you could hear the river and not much else.

They napped. Hard. The kind of nap where you close your eyes at 3 PM and wake up to darkness and the sound of people arriving.

After Dark

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The rest of the group made it in after nightfall. Because our helicopter had been so late leaving Kathmandu, the hikers had started late too, and the three-hour hike from Lukla to Phakding stretched into the evening. Steve, Alice, and Po On arrived tired but healthy, which was more than Nicholas and Pokin could say.

Everyone had dinner together. First real group meal on the trek. First chance to compare notes on how the day had gone, which was mostly just everyone agreeing that today had been completely ridiculous.

The Problem

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Phakding was peaceful. The lodge was comfortable. The fevers were still there.

Tomorrow was the hike to Namche Bazaar. It’s the first real climb of the trek, a steep, relentless ascent that most guides describe as the toughest day of the first week. Not exactly what you want to tackle on day one of being sick.

Nicholas and Pokin talked about staying an extra night. More rest. More time to recover. But the plan had two nights built into Namche specifically for acclimatization, and those two days of rest would be there whether they arrived sick or healthy. Better to push through tomorrow and collapse in Namche than to fall behind the schedule and miss the rest days entirely.

So the plan held. Wake up early. Hike to Namche. Hope the fevers break somewhere between here and there.

Phakding was the kind of place you’d want to stay longer. But the mountain doesn’t wait, and neither did the itinerary.

They walked us across the lot to a helicopter. A Kailash helicopter. Tail number 9N-AJJ. The real deal. Whatever that guy at the counter had tried to pull, we were on the right aircraft.

We loaded up fast. Headsets on. Doors closed.

The Flight

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Nepal is entirely VFR. Visual Flight Rules. That means pilots fly by sight. No instrument approaches, no radar guidance, no flying through clouds. If you can’t see where you’re going, you don’t go.

We took off fast. After seven hours of waiting, we were airborne in seconds and immediately skimming over the mountaintops. The views were exactly what you’d expect from helicopter-level altitude over the Himalayan foothills. Valleys. Rivers. Terraced hillsides. Spectacular.

For about forty minutes.

Then we hit the Everest region, and the clouds came in thick.

Our pilot started circling, trying to climb above the cloud layer that was rapidly building around us. Swirling white in every direction. He kept calling Lukla on the radio for a weather update, but the mountains were blocking the signal. No response. Just static, clouds, and a helicopter trying to find a gap.

We were getting boxed in.

This is why you fly at 6 AM and not 1 PM. Morning air is calm and clear. By afternoon, the sun has heated the valleys, thermals push moisture up the mountainsides, and cloud cover smothers everything. We were living the exact scenario we’d tried to avoid.

The pilot aborted. We thought he was turning back to Kathmandu. Then he veered hard to the right, dropped into the next valley, and there it was.

Lukla.

The Most Dangerous Airport in the World

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Tenzing-Hillary Airport. Elevation 2,860 meters. The runway is 527 meters long (most commercial runways are ten times that), angled uphill at a 12% gradient to help slow you down, with a sheer mountain wall on one end and a 600-meter cliff drop on the other. You fly into a narrow valley, bank left, and hope.

Fixed-wing planes have to commit. Once they’re in the approach, there’s no going around. Miss the runway and you’re in the mountain or off the cliff.

We looked at it from the helicopter and felt very good about our choice of transport.

Landing

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We touched down on the helipad and piled out. The air was different up here. Cooler, thinner, and damp under a heavy cloud layer. Not exactly the sunny mountain welcome you see in the brochures.

We had about thirty minutes on the ground while bags were unloaded and sorted. Enough time to walk around and see the runway up close. That mountain wall at the end of the strip? It’s even more intimidating from the ground.

The Split

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Nicholas and Pokin were not doing well. The fevers hadn’t improved. The plan had been to hike three hours from Lukla to Phakding, the first stop on the trek. D.B. took one look at them and had a different idea.

The helicopter could take Nicholas and Pokin directly to Phakding. Skip the hike. Rest for the remainder of the day. The others would walk with D.B.

So the group split. Steve, Alice, and Po On geared up to hike with D.B. Nicholas and Pokin would take the helicopter to Phakding.

Small problem.

The WD-40 Incident

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While we’d been taking photos and sorting gear, the helicopter had been sitting on the pad. Three mechanics had climbed in, pulled out some of the instruments (possibly the radio), and started spraying things down with WD-40.

WD-40.

On the helicopter we were now supposed to fly in. Again.

Nicholas and Pokin climbed back into the freshly serviced aircraft. No guide this time. Just the pilot, two sick trekkers, a bear, and a maintenance guy who came along for the ride, apparently to make sure nothing fell apart mid-flight.

That’s the kind of detail that either reassures you or terrifies you. There is no in-between.

Onwards. To Phakding. In a helicopter held together by optimism and WD-40.

Remember how the last post ended with “hope for the best”?

Yeah. About that.

Nicholas and Pokin woke up with full-on fevers. Not “maybe it’s the pollution” sore throats anymore. Actual fevers. Two hours before a 6 AM helicopter flight to Lukla. The start of a twenty-two day trek through the highest mountains on Earth.

So much for wearing masks on every flight. So much for hand sanitizer. So much for skipping the temple visit to rest. The universe had other plans, and those plans involved being sick at the worst possible time.

They called D.B. to figure out options. Stay in Kathmandu and rest? That would mean canceling the flight, rebooking every tea house along the route (nearly impossible mid-season), and either splitting the group up or forcing everyone else to wait. Not great options when three other people are ready to go.

The decision: get to the airport, take the flight, take it easy on arrival, and reassess from Lukla. At least from there they wouldn’t need a second flight later.

The Helicopter Research

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Quick detour on how we even picked a helicopter company, because this matters for what happens next.

Pokin did what Pokin does: researched every operator flying the Kathmandu-to-Lukla route. And it turns out that flying to Lukla by fixed-wing plane is considered one of the most dangerous commercial flights in the world. The runway is short, sloped, carved into a mountainside, and ends in a cliff. The alternative is a 1 AM wakeup and a six-hour drive on Nepal’s roads, which frequently get washed out.

So helicopter is actually the safe option. But not all helicopter companies are equal.

Fishtail Air does a lot of high-altitude mountain rescues. Heroic work, but those rescue attempts carry a high fatality rate when they don’t succeed, and the numbers show it. Basecamp Helicopters had a recent fatality and was implicated in an Everest poisoning scam. Yes, a poisoning scam. On Everest. I’ll let that sink in.

Kalish was the only company Pokin could find that had never had a fatality. They were also the only helicopter to have successfully completed a rescue off the summit. So: Kalish. Done. Settled.

Right?

The Night Before

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The night before departure, D.B. told us Kalish’s helicopters were stuck on other mountains and couldn’t make our 6 AM flight. Would we like to fly Fishtail or Basecamp instead?

Absolutely not.

So the 6 AM became a 10 AM.

Now, here’s the thing about a 10 AM flight to Lukla versus a 6 AM flight. Mountain weather follows a predictable daily cycle. Early morning, the air is calm, cold, and stable. As the sun heats the ground, thermals build, clouds form in the valleys, and wind speeds pick up. By mid-morning the turbulence is noticeably worse. By afternoon, cloud cover can completely smother the mountain passes, visibility drops, and flights get canceled outright.

Every Lukla flight is scheduled for early morning for exactly this reason. A 10 AM departure was already pushing it. But between a calmer ride with a company that takes risks and a bumpier ride with the company that doesn’t crash, we went with the bumpier ride.

Pokin agonized over this. Hour-by-hour weather forecasts. Multiple conversations. But the logic held: pick the pilot who doesn’t take unnecessary risks, even if the air is choppier.

Loading Up

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Morning in the Aloft lobby. Duffel bags piled up, daypacks strapped on, everyone trying to look ready while two of us were running fevers and pretending we weren’t.

The Airport

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Kathmandu domestic airport is not like other airports. It is loud, crowded, and operates on a system of logic that I have not yet decoded.

The Fishtail Incident

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This is where it gets fun.

We checked in. We were told our 10 AM flight was Kalish. Great. Except our bags were suspiciously being weighed at the Fishtail Air office. Nicholas noticed this but figured maybe they shared facilities.

Then we got our boarding passes. Fishtail.

Nicholas asked the guy: “Hey, we’re supposed to be flying Kalish.”

The guy, without missing a beat: “Oh, Kalish wasn’t available until later, so I put you on the Fishtail flight.”

No. Absolutely not. We did not spend weeks researching helicopter safety records to get quietly swapped onto a different airline at the counter. Nicholas made a stink about it. The guy seemed surprised that anyone would care which helicopter company they flew with, which is maybe the most alarming part of all of this.

“Oh, okay, hold on.” He disappeared. Came back. Ran us over to the Kalish office. Magically produced Kalish boarding passes for the same terminal, same time.

Nicholas, not remotely convinced: “Is this just Kalish boarding passes, but you’re going to put us on the Fishtail helicopter anyway?”

“No, no. I wouldn’t lie to you.”

The man who had just lied to us said he wouldn’t lie to us. Nicholas raised an eyebrow so high it nearly left his face.

The Wait

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With Kalish boarding passes in hand and trust levels at an all-time low, we were led outside to a waiting area near the helipad. And then we waited. For over an hour. On the tarmac. In the sun. While sick.

So much for “take it easy today.”

The plan had been: 6 AM flight, gentle start, rest in Lukla. Instead: 6 AM wakeup, fevers, airline drama, an hour baking outside on the tarmac, and it was now past noon. The 10 AM flight was looking more like a 1 PM flight. Which meant afternoon weather. Which meant exactly the conditions we’d been trying to avoid.

But when they finally walked us to the helicopter, it was a Kalish helicopter. The real thing. The guy hadn’t lied the second time.

It wasn’t until about 1 PM that we actually lifted off. Seven hours after we were supposed to. Two sick trekkers, three overweight duffels, one airline bait-and-switch, and an hour on the tarmac.

And we still had to fly through afternoon mountain weather to reach the most dangerous airport in the world.

Onwards, I guess.

Two years of planning. Months of stairmaster training. Masks on every flight. Hand sanitizer applied with the frequency and enthusiasm of a nervous surgeon.

We were not going to get sick before this trek.

We arrived in Kathmandu at 9:45 PM the night before. It was exactly as chaotic as expected. Line up for the ATM. Line up for the visa. Line up for customs. Elbow-fight through a crowd of carts to find our bags. Then jostle outside to find D.B. holding a sign, garlands ready, van waiting. That part was covered in the last post. This post is about the next day: gear check, shopping, duffel drama, and the first signs of doom.

Gear Check

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Morning started with D.B. going through everyone’s gear. We got assigned our duffel bags, the big waterproof ones with the 3A Adventure logo. The deal is simple: everything the porters carry goes in the duffel. Everything you need during the day goes in your daypack. The duffel limit is 12 kilograms.

Pokin, Nicholas, and Alice showed up overprepared. Po On knew she needed a few things. Steve needed a bunch more. So the plan for the rest of the day: hit the gear shops in Thamel, and find a SIM card.

Thamel

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D.B. led the group into the maze of Thamel’s streets to find gear.

Kathmandu’s trekking district is wall-to-wall gear shops, and I mean wall-to-wall. Every other storefront is selling down jackets, trekking poles, glacier goggles, and knockoff North Face. The real stuff and the fake stuff sit next to each other and dare you to tell the difference.

Nicholas held me up so I could inspect the merchandise. Sunscreen, water filters, Aquatabs, down jackets in every colour. The shop smelled like nylon and ambition.

Nicholas already had his own glacier goggles, but that didn’t stop him from trying on every pair in the shop. These ones with the side shields made him look like a mad scientist. He stood there admiring himself for way too long.

Kathmandu Vibes

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While the others went off to visit a temple, Nicholas and Pokin headed back to the hotel. Their throats were feeling scratchy. Probably just the pollution. Kathmandu air quality is, to put it diplomatically, not great. They’d been wearing masks outside already. No reason to push it.

Duffel Drama

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Remember the 12-kilogram duffel limit? Nicholas and Pokin came in at 18 to 20 kilograms. Each.

Oops.

The original plan was two porters for the group. Now we needed a third. D.B. took this news with the calm energy of someone who has watched a thousand tourists overpack. No lecture. No guilt trip. He just nodded, and when we later arrived in Lukla, an extra porter magically appeared. Like he’d been summoned from the mountain itself. I have no idea how D.B. arranged it that fast, but this is apparently just what guides do.

Last Supper (Before the Coughing Started)

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Dinner was Nepali food. Dal bhat, momos, papadum, the works. Nicholas, Pokin, and Steve sat at an outdoor table and ate like people who knew their next few weeks of meals would be whatever the tea houses had.

Night was spent trying to cram 20 kilograms of gear into a 12-kilogram duffel and pretending that math works differently at altitude. Spoiler: it doesn’t.

The Part Where It Gets Suspicious

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So here’s the thing. Nicholas and Pokin did everything right. Masks on every flight. Masks in the airport. Masks outside in Kathmandu. Hand sanitizer. Early nights. They skipped the temple visit specifically to rest and stay healthy.

If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know where this is going. Greece 2023: Pokin sick on the flight to Santorini, Nicholas sick in Athens, two doctor visits in one trip. It’s a pattern. These two cannot start a major trip without something going medically sideways.

And right on schedule, as they packed their duffels and got ready for bed, the sore throats were getting worse. Not “maybe it’s the pollution” worse. “This might actually be a problem” worse.

The helicopter to Lukla was at 6 AM. The trek was starting in the morning.

Hope for the best, I guess.

Three flights. Two continents. One very comfortable bear. And a cursed set of airline tickets.

We’re headed to Nepal for the Everest Base Camp trek. Three passes, twenty-something days, altitude that would make most bears pass out. But first: getting there. Which turned out to be an adventure before we even left the ground.

The Cursed Tickets

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The original plan was Las Vegas to SFO, then through Dubai on Emirates. Clean routing. Easy. Then, three weeks before departure, Emirates canceled our tickets. Something about geopolitical issues. So: last-minute rebooking through Hong Kong instead. More expensive. More stressful. Fine. At least we had flights.

Fast forward to departure day. Nicholas and Pokin show up at Las Vegas airport with all their bags, an hour and a half before the flight to SFO. Walk up to the kiosk. Scan the code. The screen pulls up a very friendly message:

YOUR FLIGHT LEAVES FROM A DIFFERENT AIRPORT.

What.

Turns out Pokin had booked that leg as SFO → LAS. Not LAS → SFO. The flight was going the wrong direction. Normally Nicholas double-checks her bookings, but he’d skipped this one. Shortest leg. Route they’ve done a dozen times. What could go wrong? He also would have caught it checking in online the day before, except Pokin told him not to check in yet because she was busy transferring airline credit between carriers. So every guardrail that would have caught this was disabled at exactly the wrong time.

So there we were, standing at the airport, bags packed, flight leaving in an hour. In the wrong direction.

Luckily, they’d booked the SFO leg a full day early. The whole reason for the extra day was to avoid cutting it tight with connections. A buffer for flight delays, not for booking the flight backwards, but a buffer is a buffer. They logged in, changed to a flight leaving a few hours later, and ate the rebooking fee on top of the already expensive last-minute tickets.

Lesson learned? Let’s be honest. Probably not.

The Mingalaba Incident

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The real reason for the extra day in San Francisco, beyond the safety buffer that just saved us, was Mingalaba. A Burmese restaurant in Burlingame that Pokin loves. Friends were meeting us there. The hotel was only a mile away.

“Let’s walk,” Pokin said. “It looks nice and sunny out. San Francisco is always cold.”

They mapped it. One mile. One hour walk time. Why? Because you have to go around the highway. And they had exactly one hour before they were supposed to be there.

So off they went. Walking fast. In the sun. Which was not cold and pleasant like Pokin promised, but hot. Really hot. They were sweating. In their only set of clean clothes. The clothes that were supposed to last through a fourteen-hour flight, a twelve-hour layover, and another five-hour flight before they’d see their next hotel.

Nicholas was cranky. Pokin was texting friends that they might be a little late. They were power-walking through Burlingame in the California sun, destroying the one outfit they needed to keep fresh for the next thirty hours of travel.

And then they arrived. Twenty minutes early.

Apparently walking fast and cutting through a parking lot or two shaved a full twenty minutes off the estimate, and there had been absolutely no reason to rush or sweat through their clothes.

Nicholas was not pleased. Pokin got her Burmese food. So she didn’t care.

Actually Getting There

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With the ticket drama behind us, SFO was the real launch point. Quick domestic hop from Vegas (in the correct direction this time), then the long haul to Hong Kong on Cathay Pacific.

Nicholas parked us in the lounge while we waited. I sat on his lap and supervised. Standard operating procedure.

Business class. Pod seat. Full recline. I settled in immediately and did not move for fourteen hours. This is the kind of travel I was built for.

Landing in Hong Kong meant one thing: food. Well, two things.

Hong Kong airport has a ten-foot sleeping cat sculpture now. I have no idea why. Nicholas insisted on a photo. The cat did not move. Not that it would have mattered. I would have handled it.

The Cathay lounge in Hong Kong is legitimately good. Wonton noodle soup, siu yuk, steamed buns. Two bowls of soup between the two of them. But here’s the real crime: there’s an entire “tea lounge” in there. Walls of fancy tea. Every leaf imaginable. Not a single hot cocoa. In what world is that acceptable? Nicholas tried to make up for it by ordering some tea with “chocolate notes.” It was tea. With notes. I remain unimpressed.

Then the final leg: Hong Kong to Kathmandu. Shorter flight, smooth ride, but we were running on fumes after fourteen hours in the air plus a twelve-hour layover in Hong Kong. Everyone was cooked.

Kathmandu airport at night is chaotic in a way that SFO and Hong Kong are not. The girls put their masks on. I did not, because I’m fearless.

D.B. from 3A Adventure was waiting for us outside with garlands and a sign. Marigold leis for everyone.

Now, technically, they gave the garland to Nicholas. But obviously that was a mistake. Same thing happened in Hawaii a few months ago. They keep handing my garland to the tall one and I keep having to correct the situation. It weighs more than I do. I have never looked more regal.

The hotel had a welcome note, a little snack shelf, and fruit waiting for us. I inspected everything. The granola passed muster.

And then I did what I always do. Found the bed. Picked the center. Settled in.

Three countries in two days. Fourteen hours in a pod seat. One stolen garland. Tomorrow is trek planning day with D.B., but tonight? Tonight I own the center of this bed and I’m not giving it back.

We’re still up at the cabin in Brian Head while Nicholas and Pokin do their Everest Base Camp training thing. Every day it’s the same story. Wake up, put on seventeen layers, strap a bunch of gear to themselves, and go look for a mountain to suffer on.

This time the target was Brian Head Peak.

About seven miles round trip, around 1,200 feet of elevation, plenty of snow still hanging around, and enough altitude to make everyone look like they were preparing for some kind of polar expedition.

I, meanwhile, had my usual excellent system.

Nicholas carried me up the mountain in his backpack.

There was still snow all over the mountain, but the sun was out and the sky was doing that ridiculously dramatic deep-blue thing it does up high. The place looked good.

The trail was actually pretty decent. Snowy in patches, trees everywhere, good open views, and just enough uphill to make this count as training instead of a casual wander. They were carrying extra EBC gear too, because apparently just walking up a mountain isn’t enough any more.

At the top there was the Brian Head Peak sign, which informed us that we were at 11,307 feet. Useful. It also had the far more interesting detail that the stone structure up there was built in 1935 by the Civilian Conservation Corps, then renovated in 1995. So this wasn’t just some random pile of rocks Nicholas got excited about. It was an official historical pile of rocks.

The sign also said that from up there you can see parts of Utah, Nevada, and Arizona. Not bad for one little summit. Below us were ski runs and tiny people sliding around on them. Beyond that, mountains layered off into the distance doing the usual mountain thing.

At one point Eric’s shadow made him look weirdly Darth Vader-ish, and between the trekking poles and the shadows on the floor it looked like somebody was about to have a lightsaber duel in a 1935 CCC shelter. Completely normal mountain behavior.

Pokin and I got a proper summit shot together, which was only fair since I made the entire expedition possible by being there.

Then there was a full group summit photo with Nicholas, Pokin, Po On, Eric, and me, all bundled up like a gang of fashionable desert bandits.

By the end of it they’d done seven miles, about 1,200 feet of climbing, and a full summit in the sun and snow.

I reached 11,307 feet without taking a single step.

That’s what I call peak performance.

We’re up at a cabin in Brian Head, Utah. Nicholas and Pokin are doing their Everest Base Camp training thing, which apparently means finding any mountain with snow on it and marching up it with heavy bags until their legs stop working.

I had a different plan.

Chestnut had never seen it snow before. He’s from Hong Kong. The closest he’s gotten to weather is Pokin’s air conditioning. So when the flurries started this morning, he was absolutely losing his mind. “It’s so pretty! It’s like magic! Every single one is different!”

Look, I’m a mountain bear. Snow is kind of my thing. But there’s a difference between appreciating snow and marching through it with a heavy bag for three hours. Chestnut and I had the right idea. Window seat, heater on, front row to the show. He narrated every flake. I supervised.

Meanwhile, those two decided the snowstorm was an invitation.

Three hours. Five-plus miles. Twenty-pound packs. Through fresh powder, over the top of a ski slope, in conditions that would make a reasonable bear stay indoors.

They came back looking like they’d conquered something. Red-faced, snow-dusted, talking about how the trail just kept going up.

I reminded them that Everest Base Camp doesn’t have a cabin with heating to come back to. They ignored me.

Chestnut said they were brave and inspiring. I said the cocoa was ready.

Let me set the scene.

My bud and Pokin are in Cedar City, Utah, doing their daily hike training for Everest Base Camp. They pick a trail. The Thunderbird Canyons Trail System.

A trail. Named after thunderbirds. My species.

And they went without me.

Apparently when they saw the sign, they both looked at each other with that “oh no” face. Because they knew. They KNEW they messed up.

So the next morning, Pokin — who is clearly the smarter half of this operation — told Nicholas to take me back out there. Not a suggestion. A directive. “You need to take Sumi to that trail.”

And so at the crack of dawn, before the sun could even properly commit to the day, Nicholas strapped me up and we speed-ran the entire thing. Just the two of us. On a mission.

The trail winds through Red Hollow — all red sandstone, twisted junipers, and that dry Utah air that makes everything look like a movie set. Not too shabby at all.

But we weren’t here for the scenery. We were here for a specific destination Nicholas found the day before. Something he said I would lose my mind over.

Thor’s Lookout. On a Thunderbird trail. We were basically speed-walking a pilgrimage at this point.

And then we got there.

Someone — and I need to find this person so I can shake their hand — built a THRONE out of stacked red sandstone slabs and dead juniper branches. A full seat with a backrest. Carved “THOR” into it with a lightning bolt. Right there on the trail, overlooking the canyon.

A stone throne. On a thunderbird trail. Named after the god of thunder.

This was made for me.

I’m not saying I’m Thor. I’m saying I’m a thunderbird spirit bear who found a throne with his name’s energy on it in the middle of the Utah desert, and if that’s not a sign, I don’t know what is.

We speed-ran the whole thing in about an hour, got back before the sun got serious, and I got to sit on a stone throne in the desert. Not a bad morning.

Pokin was right to send us back. She usually is. Don’t tell her I said that.

My bud has been on a training kick lately. Something about a big trek coming up that apparently requires him to haul a massive camera bag up mountains every weekend. I don’t ask too many questions. I just ride along.

Today’s plan was Griffith Peak at Mt. Charleston. Good elevation, decent trail, should’ve been a solid workout. Emphasis on should’ve been.

We got to the trailhead and the trail was closed. Just… closed. No explanation, no alternative, just a sign that basically said “nope.” So we pivoted to Lower Bristlecone instead. Fine. Flexible. Adaptable. That’s what training is about, right?

Except then about a mile in, Pokin’s stomach decided it also didn’t want to be on this hike. So we turned around.

Not exactly the epic mountain conquest we had in mind.

BUT — and this is the part Nicholas actually cared about — the gear test was a success. He’s lugging around 25 pounds of camera equipment in that Shimoda bag, and today was about seeing how it all felt on the trail. The bag itself is comfortable. The camera clips on and off the shoulder strap fast. The tripod stays put. The whole setup works.

The bear on top of the backpack? Also stays put. Not that anyone asked about my comfort.

He’s got the camera, the tripod, clips, poles, and somehow still found room for water. I’m tucked in between all of it like cargo. Which I suppose I am, technically. Premium cargo.

Short hike. Good intel. We’ll be back for the real thing next week at Brian Head for some altitude work. Assuming no one’s stomach vetoes the plan.

Onwards.

Nicholas’s mom was in town, and someone decided the best use of a perfectly good gaming Saturday was to drive two hours into the hottest place on Earth to look at flowers.

It’s February. It should not be hot. It was hot.

But fine. Death Valley is having a superbloom, and apparently that’s a big deal. When the desert gets enough rain — which happens maybe once every few years — the seeds that have been sitting dormant in the dirt suddenly decide to all wake up at once and turn the valley floor into something that looks like someone spilled a paint store. The last time it happened like this was… actually, the last time we went to see a superbloom. So I guess this is becoming a thing.

Nicholas’s mom was going on about the flower colors — the yellows are desert gold sunflowers, the purples are phacelia, and there are little white and pink ones mixed in that I didn’t catch the names of because I was being carried in a backpack and had limited interest in botany. The gist is: different minerals in the soil produce different colored flowers in different areas. Science.

Oh, and this trip had a special guest.

Chestnut. The horse. From Hong Kong. He would not stop talking about how amazing everything was. “The flowers are so beautiful!” “The mountains are so grand!” “What a wonderful day to be alive!”

Yes, Chestnut. It’s dirt and flowers. Calm down.

I’ll admit it though — the purple ones were something. Clusters of phacelia growing straight out of black volcanic rock, like the flowers didn’t get the memo that nothing is supposed to live here. The contrast was ridiculous. Dark hillside, bright purple, golden yellow. Looked fake.

We stopped at Artist’s Palette, which has nothing to do with flowers but everything to do with looking like a screensaver. The hills are painted in layers of green, pink, rust, and lavender from different mineral deposits. Nicholas’s mom loved it. I sat on a sign.

Then: Badwater Basin. The lowest point in North America. 282 feet below sea level. I have now been to the lowest point on the continent, which I feel should come with some kind of certificate or medal. It did not.

Also, both Nicholas AND Pokin forgot their park passes. So they had to buy yet another one. I think this is their third or fourth in less than a year. At least it’s supporting the parks. That’s what I told them. They did not seem comforted.

The salt flats had water in them, which almost never happens. The same rain that triggered the superbloom left shallow pools across the basin that turned into perfect mirrors.

We stuck around for sunset because of course we did. Pokin doesn’t let anyone leave a scenic location before golden hour. But this time I’ll give her credit — the light was doing something.

The reflections on the water turned the whole basin into a mirror. Lenticular clouds stacked up over the mountains like someone was showing off. Snow on the peaks. The whole thing.

Hot, dusty, too many flowers, not enough cocoa, and someone’s horse wouldn’t stop saying how great everything was.

But I guess it didn’t totally stink.