Month: January 2019

This eloquent title belongs to a poem in Walt Whitman´s Leaves of Grass. It begins: Darest thou now, O Soul,Walk out with me toward the unknown region,Where neither ground is for the feet, nor any path to follow? The epithet ´unknown region´resonates, challenges. This is how we may feel at the end of the trail…

We have to accept ups and downs, so nicely captured in the Spanish word altibajos. But it is difficult not to resent losing the height one has gained. A particular example occurs up from Namche. After patiently climbing to the pass at Mong, the path descends all the way down to the river, yes the…

Should we embrace a teleological view of the trek, that it only has meaning based on its purpose to complete its objective and arrive at the final point, or should we follow that impressive advice of Robert Louis Stevenson, ¨to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive¨? Dear reader, you will probably feel…

Sometimes the contrast between the real and painful effort made during the trek and the imaginative mental projection of finally crossing the highest pass, and the way we compensate in planning how to present this ´triumph´to others, makes one think that one purpose of trekking is to bleach out all pretence and vainglory, vanity and…

Beginnings Exactly ten years ago, during the January school break in Nepal, when I was working in Kathmandu University High School, we planned to do the Everest Base Camp trek. I was intrigued to discover that the trails would be snow free, for the most part, and provided you could stand the cold, they would…