The more you know: Sagarmatha edition

1.     Yaks, of which I am a huge fan.

*  Female yaks are called naaks.  

* Naak cheese and milk is the only dairy available in the Everest region.  It does not cooperate with many western digestive tracts.  I was a vegan the whole time I was up there.

*  Yaks can’t survive at altitudes below 10000 feet; they get a kind of reverse-altitude sickness and die.

*  Sherpa people cross-breed yaks and cattle for farmwork/transport at lower altitudes (that is, above 8000ft but below yak elevations).  The cross-breeds are adorable and less furry than full yaks (though the males are sterile, like mules) and are called dzo or dzokla.  

2. The Sherpa people

*  Sherpas are a branch of Tibetan Buddhists who moved south across the Himalayas about five centuries ago. Their language is derived from Tibetan (not Nepali), and between Sherpa, Tibetan, Nepali, English, and regional tongues, most Sherpa speak at least 4 or 5 languages.

*  One of the most sacred and significant spiritual sites for the Sherpa lies along the track to the Khumbu, in Tyangboche. The monks living at this monastery bless the climbing season each year, and welcome trekkers for meditation and prayers and chanting.  Spending an afternoon cross-legged in the company of novice monks chanting and playing drums and dung chen (giant horn) and metallic percussion beside a brightly painted model of the universe was maybe my favorite human thing in the whole of the region.

* The Sherpa inscribe prayers into stone tablets and rock faces along the length of the region’s paths, for a safe and reverent passage.  It was for me a great comfort to touch these prayers as I hiked mile after mile, and also to spin the prayer wheels that sped me along my way.

* Having spent time learning from the perspective of Sherpa guides and villagers, I am happy to discard my longstanding romantic adventurer’s idea that climbing Everest would be so awesome.  I now consider the whole enterprise to be a solipsistic folly; setting aside the well-documented environmental impacts of the summiting season on the region, the industry is also massively exploitive of Sherpas, who do pretty much all the work for those vaunting tourist-conquerors and take a disproportionate burden of the risk (but very little of the credit), and get paid a pittance.  Knowing what I know now about the climbing-industrial complex, I do not think it’s possible to climb Everest ethically.  Much better to spend some time walking around in these mountains, bringing needed money into the local economy without putting anyone’s wellbeing in peril.  

[Addendum to this very last point:  It is possible, to be sure, to do one of the big treks of the Sagarmatha region on your own, but for a raft of reasons, including economics, I do not recommend it.  I’m happy to talk more fully privately about it and share ideas about finding a good guide if anyone’s interested in planning their own adventure, but as an example in miniature: the relevant airports often shut down, sometimes for days at a time, creating a sweaty and frustrated backlog of trapped hikers.  If you are one of those trapped hikers, you want to be with someone who can speak Nepali to airline officials and who knows from long experience creative workarounds for getting you in and out.]