Everlasting Everest

(Zara) This morning we headed out of our hotel to catch a helicopter ride to Mt. Everest! When we got to the helicopter, dad was so excited that he fell out of the car after getting his foot stuck and landed right on his back. I remember turning around and seeing him lay right on the ground and jumping up quickly thinking no one noticed. It was hilarious! Anyway, the helicopter that we were going on was the only one in the world to fly close to the top of Everest which is incredible considering only a third of the regular amount of air is up there.

Terraced farms

Along the ride we passed over dense forests with some occasional pink and white trees that grow naturally. These are Nepal’s national flower called the rhododendron. When we weren’t flying over forest we passed by terraced farms that are commonly used to provide flat, usable farming land in the mountains. They look like steep steps in the ground and almost all families have them. In Nepal, the thousands of families who exist on the mountains need a source of food knowing that they can’t make regular trips to a grocery store so they have to grow everything they might need. In addition to growing crops people will have cows for milk, goats for meat, and chickens for eggs. The most interesting part of the flight though was seeing snow covered mountains in all directions and right around every cloud another mountain would just magically pop up.

Our first stop on this adventure was landing in a small village where instead of a road they had an airplane runway. Here we had to get rid of some of our extra gasoline so that we wouldn’t be to heavy to go high up in the mountains. Next we made our way to a hotel where we would be having breakfast with a view of Everest and the mountains (highest hotel in the world). During the flight it seemed like a bird had accompanied us because feathers were flying around the helicopter, coming from mom’s jacket. She has had a hole in it since Antarctica and refuses to sew it up complaining she hasn’t had enough time in the last three months. Instead she put a band aid on which not only makes it look worse but feathers still pour out.

Everest Base Camp, photo by Zara

Again since we were flying at such a high elevation we needed to split into two different helicopters so my dad and I went in another one. We flew past the most magnificent mountains and it was so clear that it looked fake, hence the thousands of pictures taken that morning. After a few minutes straight ahead was the famous Mt. Everest. It didn’t have as much snow as I expected and frankly I thought the mountains on either side of Everest were more impressive and looked just as tall! We also flew over base camp that had hundreds of yellow, blue, red, and green tents of all sizes scattered in between two mountains. At this time of the year, climbers would be just starting to do hikes to camp one and two to get their lungs and bodies acclimatized to the minimal amount of oxygen. Somehow supposedly only the helicopter I was in saw base camp so it was good I had lots of pictures to show the others later!

When we landed in front of Everest we had just enough time to take our pictures and take in all the beautiful mountains around it. After a few minutes, altitude sickness started to set in and I started to feel dizzy and it was certainly cold, so we took off back to the hotel and enjoyed a delicious breakfast. Even though we could only spend a few minutes near Everest the memories will last forever. Here is a video that Maya and I made.

Everest from Salem Explorers on Vimeo.