Next morning we start out on a trail through a slightly elevated, dense beech forest, which rises, during a hike of seven or eight hours, over the tree line and 3, 500-foot-high Mackinnon Pass, then down the other side.
After a short flight from Kathmandu to the mountain hamlet of Lukla, it took me 12 days to reach Base Camp, trekking 160km and climbing 10, 000 feet, hiking through dense forest, over a dozen suspension bridges, above the tree line and, finally, into a frozen landscape of ancient rock and glacial ice.
We hugged three-story-high dirt walls with vines clinging to them, passed dense bamboo forests, fragrant hibiscus bushes and groves of towering rainbow eucalyptus, a rare tree with multicolored bark.