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.
The Wrong Turn#
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.
The Video Game Solution#
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.
The Shot#
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 an emergency blanket, trying to stay warm. 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.
The Results#
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.
The speed run doesn’t stop.