22 days in the Himalayas, a pair of $20 boots, and absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into.
I was 25, living out of a backpack, and beginning to suspect that I should probably get my life together.
I’d spent most of my early twenties moving around the world. Thailand, Southeast Asia, Australia. Teaching English, knocking on doors selling gas and electricity, working construction, and generally taking whatever job would fund the next stretch of travel.
It was a good life. A really good one, actually. But somewhere along the way, I started getting that familiar itch that comes from watching everyone around you move into a different chapter.
Friends were building careers. People were getting promotions, buying furniture they intended to keep, and generally making decisions that suggested they knew where they’d be living six months from now.
I was still figuring out which country I’d be in next Tuesday.
And while I wouldn’t trade those years for anything, I was starting to wonder whether I was falling behind.
I wanted to build something professionally. I had ambition, even if I hadn’t quite figured out what to do with it yet. But I also knew myself well enough to recognize that if I went home too soon, I’d probably spend the next several years wondering where else I could have gone.
So I devised a plan to get travel out of my system once and for all.
A couple of months backpacking through India, followed by an enormous trek through the Himalayas. Something long, difficult, and sufficiently exhausting that I’d return home, happily unpack my bags, and embrace the comforts of a more conventional existence.
A perfectly reasonable strategy, provided you don’t think about it for more than thirty seconds.
My Previous Relationship With Mountains Wasn’t Particularly Promising
I’d actually spent time trekking before, when I was 19 and backpacking through Bolivia and Peru.
Those trips weren’t exactly a glowing introduction to the outdoors.
In Bolivia, I managed to get both typhoid and giardia. I carried an absurd amount of weight, had no real understanding of how to prepare for a trek, and spent a considerable amount of time questioning my decisions.
Despite being born in the mountains, I came away thinking that perhaps I was better suited to exploring the world at a slightly lower elevation.
For years afterward, mountains weren’t something I particularly thought about. I was far more interested in the people, cultures, and wonderfully unpredictable situations that came with traveling through unfamiliar countries.
But when I started thinking about one final adventure before heading home, the Himalayas kept coming to mind.
I’d never been to Nepal. I’d heard of Everest Base Camp. And the idea of disappearing into the mountains for a few weeks sounded like a fitting way to close out this chapter of my life.
I didn’t know much beyond that.
As it turns out, that was something of a recurring theme.
Kathmandu, a Taxi Driver, and a $20 Pair of Boots
I arrived in Kathmandu with a 30-day visa, very little money, and no real plan.
I remember getting into a taxi and having the driver ask what I wanted to do while I was in Nepal. I told him I had about a month and wanted to go hiking. Somewhere in the Himalayas, preferably toward Everest Base Camp.
He knew a guy.
Of course he knew a guy.
That guy turned out to be a 19-year-old local who would become my guide for the next three weeks.
We decided to take the long way to Everest Base Camp, starting in Shivalaya rather than flying into Lukla, where most trekkers begin. It would mean roughly an additional week of walking through the lower Himalayas before we even reached the main Everest trail.
Twenty-two days on foot, give or take.
At this point, I should probably mention that I didn’t own hiking boots.
Or much of anything else that would have been useful in the Himalayas.
I wandered through the markets of Kathmandu and bought a pair of boots for around $20. I had a small backpack, a brownish-gray long-sleeve shirt, and one pair of socks.
One.
I distinctly remember asking my guide whether I should bring gloves or a hat.
He must have looked at me and wondered what he’d gotten himself into.
I certainly had no idea.
The Long Way Around
There’s something about traveling on foot that changes your relationship with a place.
You can’t skip the less convenient parts. You don’t get to jump from one beautiful viewpoint to the next. You have to walk through everything in between, and often those in-between places turn out to be the most memorable.
Starting from Shivalaya meant we entered the Himalayas gradually, through a world that looked nothing like the snow-covered mountains I’d imagined.
The lower valleys were green and lush, with terraced farmland carved into hillsides, forests stretching across the mountains, and little villages connected by trails that had been used for generations.
We climbed over ridges, descended into valleys, crossed rivers, and then climbed all the way back up again. I quickly learned that trekking in Nepal involves a tremendous amount of going uphill just to earn the privilege of going downhill.
There were days of rain, mornings when clouds swallowed the valleys, and stretches where we’d walk beneath prayer flags fluttering in the wind.
Along the way, we’d pass locals transporting supplies into the mountains, often carrying loads that made my little backpack look rather embarrassing.
This was a couple of years after the devastating 2015 earthquake, and the effects were still visible in some of the communities we passed through. Yet what I remember most was the resilience of the people living there. Families carrying on with their lives, rebuilding, farming, and making their way through terrain that I was struggling to navigate with nothing more pressing on my schedule than reaching the next teahouse.
I was fascinated by it all.
My guide spoke very little English, so conversation was fairly limited. We communicated when we needed to, shared the occasional laugh, and otherwise spent most of our days walking in silence.
It was an unusual experience for someone who’d spent years bouncing between hostels, cities, and groups of travelers.
For the better part of three weeks, I had very little company beyond my own thoughts.
And I found that I rather enjoyed it.
There was no particular rush to be anywhere. No phone demanding my attention. No real decisions to make beyond what to eat, where to sleep, and how much farther we had to walk.
The days were physically demanding, but wonderfully uncomplicated.
Somewhere Between the Villages and the Clouds
As we moved farther into the mountains, the scenery began to change.
The forests gradually thinned, the valleys opened up, and these enormous snow-covered peaks started appearing above everything else.
I’d seen beautiful places before. Plenty of them. But the Himalayas were operating on an entirely different scale.
I remember the skies being this impossibly deep blue. The kind of blue that makes photographs look edited even when they aren’t. Mountains rising thousands of meters above us, prayer flags stretched across the trail, little settlements sitting beneath peaks that seemed far too large to belong to the same planet.
I kept looking around thinking, This is an actual movie.
And somewhere along the way, I started noticing something else.
I was enjoying the walking.
Not just the scenery or the cultural experience, although those were extraordinary. I was enjoying the physical effort of getting there. The long days, the climbs, the feeling of being completely exhausted at night and waking up ready to do it again.
This was a fairly significant development for someone whose previous mountain experience had involved contracting two tropical diseases and swearing off the whole activity.
I’d always been drawn to places that felt unfamiliar. Somewhere that made me curious, challenged my assumptions, or reminded me how much of the world I hadn’t seen.
The mountains offered all of that, with the added complication that you had to work pretty hard to get anywhere.
And I liked that.
I liked having something difficult in front of me that couldn’t be negotiated with. The mountain didn’t particularly care whether I was tired, whether I’d slept well, or whether I’d made questionable footwear decisions.
There was something refreshing about that.
A Few Problems With My Brilliant Plan
Naturally, the Himalayas eventually collected their payment.
About halfway through the trek, the sole of one of my $20 boots started falling off.
In fairness to the boots, they’d probably already exceeded the manufacturer’s wildest expectations.
I also managed to get food poisoning, struggled with altitude sickness, and generally discovered that spending three weeks walking through mountains is considerably harder when you’ve done almost nothing to prepare.
There were some truly miserable stretches.
I remember one day on the way down when I was completely exhausted. We’d been covering enormous distances, my body was beaten up, and I had reached the point where even the spectacular scenery wasn’t doing much for morale.
I didn’t want another mountain view. I wanted to sit down and not move for a considerable period of time.
But we still had hours of walking ahead.
So we walked.
I don’t want to romanticize being unprepared. Looking back, there were things I should have taken far more seriously, particularly the altitude sickness. The mountains are not a place where ignorance should be confused with courage, and I’ve learned an enormous amount about preparation and safety since then.
But those difficult days did give me a different understanding of myself.
Not because I discovered some extraordinary ability to suffer. Plenty of people can suffer, and there’s nothing inherently noble about doing it unnecessarily.
It was more that I realized I genuinely enjoyed challenging myself in this environment.
Even on the bad days, I wanted to be there.
That surprised me.
A Small Compliment I Still Remember
After roughly 22 days, we finally finished.
I was exhausted. My body hurt. My equipment had seen better days. And I was probably in desperate need of a proper shower.
But I was proud of myself.
I remember my guide, who’d spent the previous three weeks watching me stumble my way through the Himalayas, patting me on the back.
He told me I was strong.
That’s it. Nothing particularly profound. Just a small compliment from a 19-year-old Nepali guy who probably had no idea how much it meant to me.
But I remember it all these years later.
Maybe because I’d spent so much of that trip discovering things about myself I hadn’t really considered before. I’d arrived with almost no experience, very little confidence in my abilities as a trekker, and memories of South America that hadn’t exactly encouraged me to return to the mountains.
Now I’d walked for three weeks through the Himalayas.
And rather than being relieved it was over, I was already thinking about doing something like it again.
His comment gave me a little confidence. The experience itself gave me something considerably more valuable.
A new curiosity.
The Funny Thing About Trying to Get Something Out of Your System
I’ve thought about that trip quite a bit over the years, particularly as the mountains have become a bigger part of my life.
Since Nepal, I’ve climbed Kilimanjaro, Aconcagua, Denali, and Mount Rainier. I’ve returned to the Himalayas for the Three Passes Trek and spent weeks in Pakistan’s Karakoram mountains, trekking to K2 Base Camp and crossing Gondogoro La.
Now I’m preparing for Himlung Himal, a 7,126-meter mountain in Nepal, which will be the highest I’ve ever attempted.
It’s a strange progression when I think about where it started.
I wasn’t some aspiring mountaineer arriving in Kathmandu with a lifelong dream of climbing the world’s great peaks. I was a backpacker with a questionable pair of boots, a 30-day visa, and a vague plan to tire myself out enough that returning home would finally seem appealing.
I didn’t know what an ice axe was for. I didn’t know how altitude affected the body. I certainly didn’t know that mountains would eventually become one of the things I cared most about.
And I think that’s what I appreciate about the experience now.
So much of what ends up shaping our lives begins without any grand intention behind it.
We go somewhere because we’re curious. We meet someone by accident. We try something we previously thought wasn’t for us. And occasionally, without realizing it at the time, we stumble into a part of ourselves that might otherwise have gone undiscovered.
I still remember those green valleys, the prayer flags, the blue skies, and the quiet days walking alongside a 19-year-old guide who barely spoke English.
I remember the feeling of looking up at those enormous mountains and wanting to know what it would be like to go farther.
And I remember arriving back at the end, exhausted but somehow wanting more.
I’d gone to Nepal hoping to get travel out of my system so I could get on with the rest of my life.
Instead, I came home with another reason to keep a backpack packed.
