Boots (or shoes) on the Ground: Practicalities.

Not gonna lie, getting to, into, and through the Khumbu valley is mui complicado. Here are some of the key things we had to think about on this trip.

Getting into Nepal

Nepal requires all visitors to purchase a visa upon arrival. They sell them in 15-day and 30-day versions. Though our family members who came for the wedding after our trek managed with 15-day visas, Chris and I had to get the 30-day ones because we were in Nepal nearly a month.

You buy the visas at the airport, which adds a line to stand in the very moment you arrive in Nepal after an extremely long journey. It’s best to arrive with exact cash in American dollars.

There are computer terminals where people can fill out visa forms before joining the lines. I hear that they don’t always work, but our kids had no trouble. It’s also possible to fill out the visa form online ahead of time.

We sent our visa applications and photos to Wilderness Travel as part of the arrival service they offer. That meant that when we arrived, our local contact Pankaj had our visa forms in hand. All we had to do was hand him our fees. He went straight to the counter and got our visas in under a minute. To my mind, that was money well spent–you hear of tourists standing in line for two hours or more on particularly bad days.

Gear

Here’s what we carried:

1. daypack (Osprey Tempest 20 for Amy,
2. Nalgene (fake, bought in Thamel) bottles
3. water blivets (2 liters; Chris had a 3-liter one)
4. sunglasses
5. Chris always carries random extra stuff: batteries, headlamps, knives, emergency blanket, Leatherman, para-chord, duct-tape, sporks, &c. None of this was necessary, but he’s not going into the wild (even the civilized “wild” like the Khumbu, without enough stuff to survive a night outdoors).

Clothes and Shoes

First, shoes, which are the most important! Both of us wore Altra Lone Peaks throughout the trek. Trail runners!

How did this go, you ask? Didn’t we miss the ankle support and protection of hiking boots?

No, we did not miss any aspect of hiking boots. We don’t miss the stiff soles and the tight toes and the need to break the things in, and we certainly don’t miss the weight.

We’ve worn Altras exclusively on all our multi-day treks in the Alps, Greece, the Blue Ridge…. Since 2016, neither of us has worn anything else.

Altra’s shoes are shaped like feet. They let our toes spread, which is vital for balance and for general comfort. They’re zero drop, so they don’t tip our bodies off balance with elevated heels. They are shoes, not boots, which allow our ankles to rotate freely. (This is a good thing–ankle joints are there to allow little adjustments. Neither of us has ever sprained an ankle.) They’re lightweight, which makes it easy to move quickly and to drag our feet up steps and steep slopes.

Amy used to wear Altra Superiors, which have the lightest cushioning of all Altras, but those don’t work anymore. (Altra has a habit of tweaking their perfect designs and rendering them useless.) Chris has always loved Lone Peaks. Lone Peaks do seem to be the sweet spot of enough cushion to avoid pain from walking on rocks without losing groundfeel and hence proprioception.

Altra does sell some waterproof designs, but we don’t generally use those. Do our feet get wet? Sometimes. It’s not a big deal.

Amy

1. Hoodies in cooling fabrics (Patagonia capilene cool, Salt Life)
2. Baseball cap
3. Sunglasses
4. 2 light leggings (1 lululemon, 1 Crz Yoga)
5. 2 fleece leggings (Crz Yoga makes reasonably priced ones)
6. 1 pair loose pants
7. 1 pair shorts (to wear over leggings)
8. Mountain Hardwear Ghost Whisperer (superlightweight down jacket; also super packable.)
9. Marmot Polartec Alpha jacket from several years ago (active insulation)
10. Arcteryx Delta Light jacket (best lightweight fleece, also from several years ago)
11. Lululemon define jacket
12. Mountain Hardwear stretch ozonic raincoat
13. 2 Uniqlo heattech shirts (lightweight longsleeves for insulation)
14. 2 Uniqlo airism bra camis (as bra/undershirts for every day)
15. Coolmax toe socks (4 pairs?)
16. 1 pair thin Uniqlo heattech socks to wear on top of toe socks on Ama Dablam

Staying clean

Though we didn’t expect to have a modern, urban level of hygiene, no one wants to stink or wear dirty clothes. Many guesthouses in the region have single showers in the hall, shared by all guests, and perhaps charge for their use. We chose our itinerary partly for the promise of en suite bathrooms nearly everywhere.

The showers in most places were serviceable. Temperatures ranged from genuinely hot (the gas-powered shower at Everest Summit Lodge in Pangboche, at least when the knobs were set right) to genuinely cold (Mountain Lodges of Nepal Namche on a day when the electricity had been out since the previous night and the day had been mostly cloudy.)

There were a couple of days we simply chose not to shower. Baby wipes are a reasonable alternative. My attempts to use dry shampoo weren’t terribly satisfying, though some people like the stuff.

One night we were promised two buckets of warm water in our room. Those failed to materialize, which was just as well because the room was so cold I doubt we’d have been able to make good use of them.

We’d worried about putting in contact lenses, but sinks and mirrors were never a problem. This might be more difficult further up the trail and certainly would be a consideration while camping, but that didn’t come up for us.

We both regularly wash out clothes and hang them to dry while traveling. That’s not entirely practical in the Khumbu, where room temperatures can be in the 40s. It takes stuff forever to dry. The technique of washing stuff at night and putting it back on still damp the next morning (I’ve done this throughout the Alps) is less pleasant when breakfast rooms are near freezing, though it can be done.

The one time we had the hotel in Namche do our laundry, it took two days to get it back due to a power outage. It did return very clean, though, and the price for the service was quite reasonable.

Staying warm

It’s cold up there! Vlogs and blogs always feature people in puffers shivering uncomfortably, but bloggers are bad about sharing the dates of their treks. I figured many of these must have taken place in March or October, which should be cold. May, on the other hand, is spring! Surely it wouldn’t be cold then?

Well, early May is cold. We got snowed on TWICE.

Staying warm outside is a matter of gear, covered above. But what about staying warm inside?

Bedrooms are freezing. We usually had electric bed warmers, but those didn’t work the nights that Namche lost power. The beds have thick blankets, so if you get into them warm, they’ll stay that way. But the rooms themselves are COLD–a good motivation to dress quickly in the morning.

The public rooms are heated by stoves, which are not always lit. We spent lots of time at meals wearing down jackets over fleece. Several light layers work well, especially because once the stoves get going, the room can get uncomfortably hot.

I struggle to keep my feet warm. I brought down leg warmers, which I wore almost all the time, including on the trail; down booties, which I wore in bed; and sheepskin boots, which I wore instead of the provided slippers in the lodges.

The cold never left us. I’d intended to leave most of my warm stuff with Bala in Namche Bazaar on our way back to Lukla but ended up keeping it til the very end simply because I needed it.

Is it scary?

Before booking our trek, the first thing I asked Hunter at Wilderness Travel was whether the EBC trail has much scary exposure. She assured me that it doesn’t. She’d just hiked our route and it wasn’t scary at all!

I didn’t entirely believe her. People who aren’t scared of heights can’t identify the bits that will frighten those of us who are. There’s a whole range of acrophobia, much of which can be very situational and idiosyncratic.

I booked the trip anyway. Chris had always wanted to see Everest. I figured I’d spend a certain amount of time terrified and would somehow muscle through. The fact my skeleton isn’t still stuck on top of the Sefinafurga in Switzerland is testament to the fact that I CAN get through high passes without psychically combusting.

But it’s no fun to spend much of a vacation scared out of your wits. My doom-scrolling through blogs describing scary trails didn’t increase my confidence. I envisioned getting paralyzed halfway between Pangboche and Phortse, unable to move forward. I imagined having to revise our entire itinerary to stick to the trails I was capable of walking.

That was all a waste of time.

The truth is, I was never scared of heights in Nepal. It wasn’t nearly as scary as many sections of the Haute Route or the Via Alpina in Switzerland, and certainly not as scary as the most exposed trails in Crete.

Part of this was down to width. Like many people who fear exposure, I struggle most with narrowness, which forces one to walk on an edge from which it would be easy to imagine plunging. But if a trail is wide enough, that edge feeling goes away. The trails in the Khumbu are the region’s highway system, built for trains of pack animals and people who use them for their weekly commutes. They are almost always wide enough for two people to walk abreast.

The trails are also of high quality. Another thing that terrifies me is walking on narrow, dusty trails that are slanted downhill. This isn’t completely irrational; it’s very easy for a foot to slide on dust and loose gravel. But the trails in the Khumbu are well maintained, often paved with large stones. We didn’t walk on very much that was both steep and slippery.

Then there was Bala Bai, our guide. I told him up front that I don’t like exposed heights. He assured me that this wouldn’t be a problem. This was in part clever guest management; he did keep one announcement of an upcoming scary bit back until the last possible moment, though it turned out that even that section of trail had just been rebuilt. But there’s also the possibility that I was so focused on not embarrassing myself by not inconveniencing Bala that I failed to register anything that might have scared me if we’d been hiking alone. I don’t think so, but this can’t be ruled out.

In any case, for anyone worried about acrophobia, I at least never noticed edges.

Suspension bridges are another issue. I didn’t expect to be scared of them and I wasn’t. Many people, however, do struggle with these things, and they are unavoidable. YMMV.

Is it hard?

Yes. The Everest Base Camp trail is hard. It’s about Tour de Mont Blanc or Via Alpina difficulty–the shorter daily distances are canceled out by the thinner air.

You have to climb. All the time. Everything is uphill, it seems. Just walking around Namche Bazaar is strenuous exercise.

The trails are good and well-maintained, but they are rough and rugged too. You have to watch every step.

But mainly, it’s very hard to walk for long hours and to climb thousands of meters a day at low oxygen levels. We trained as much as we could, but we had no realistic way to prepare for thinner air. (It’s possible to train for altitude, as our xenon Everest summiters demonstrated, but that requires a serious commitment to sleeping in a hypoxia tent for months and otherwise using gear to restrict oxygen.)

Fatigue can build up. By the time we got to Pangboche and Phortse, I craved rest and tried to lie down and/or sleep whenever I could. Even on our “luxury” trip, we got worn out.

Water

We drank a lot of water. A LOT of water!

It’s a tenet of high-altitude travel that dehydration increases the risk of altitude sickness. Whether this really means people need to drink ten liters of water a day, or that just makes everyone need to pee, I don’t know, but we weren’t taking any chances. Bala certainly wasn’t.

The water out of the taps isn’t safe to drink, so all the lodges provide jugs of hot water in the rooms. We drank hot water with meals–it’s considered beneficial for the health.

Every morning, I mixed a packet of LMNT chili lime electrolyte powder in a one-liter Nalgene bottle and drank it with my creatine pills before leaving the room. (The creatine was meant to enhance performance on the trail. It might have been responsible for our severely chapped lips that developed late in the trek, so I’m not sure it’s the best idea.)

At breakfast, we drank several cups of tea and/or coffee, along with the ubiquitous hot water. Bala would fill our blivets and Nalgenes before we left, and he made sure we drank regularly along the trail.

We didn’t get altitude sickness, so I guess it worked. But the subject of hydration leads me to another, related topic.

Toilets, town and trail

TLDR: Bring packs of tissues and wipes.

Toilets. Yes.

So, the mountain lodges have fine western toilets in the lobbies and in the rooms. They aren’t meant to take toilet paper, so the proper behavior is to throw paper in the trash can. It’s only gross at first; you get used to it pretty quickly. (Greece is like that too.) Also, “flushable” wipes should never be flushed anyway.

We have no pictures for this section.

Restaurants and more basic lodges typically have squatty potties. Some of these are primitive indeed; occasionally you find one with a pile of pine needles next to a hole in a wooden platform, meant to cover droppings that can then be used as fertilizer. Others have a barrel of water with a pitcher in them, which you use to flush by hand.

On the trail itself, toilets were sometimes a challenge. Much of the trail is very populated, and Bala could get us permission to use the toilets at various teahouses. There are some public toilets; sometimes there’s one you have to pay to use, and a more primitive (or filthy) free one. The wipes are especially handy for cleaning one’s hands after these places.

In less-developed areas, we looked for convenient trees or rocks. These trails are very busy, so it was sometimes hard to find a place with the requisite privacy.

We drank so much, sometimes it seemed that we were like dogs or cats, marking our territory all the way up and down Ama Dablam.

Money

On the trek, most of our expenses were pre-paid, but we had to pay for any extras like drinks, laundry, snacks, and wifi in some places.

Some lodges will take credit cards, but card readers don’t work without electricity.

We ran out of Nepali money buying expensive Sherpa-brand t-shirts and gifts in Namche Bazaar (using cash because the power was out), and we couldn’t get more before leaving Namche (because the power was out). We got by with a combination of credit cards when possible and American cash. Using dollars isn’t a problem.

There really isn’t that much to spend money on, and we didn’t want to add to either our own loads or to our porter’s.

Connectivity

Connectivity was almost never a problem. We had good signal nearly everywhere, and since we weren’t downloading movies or whatever people are doing now, we didn’t spend a fortune on it.

Everyone in the Khumbu has a phone and is in constant contact with their people.

The lodges had wifi, but wifi only works when the electricity is on. The mountain lodges provide free wifi. Other places will sell a wifi card; those systems provide varying degrees of actual connection. We paid for a card in Pangboche that we probably needn’t have, because signal worked just as well.

Power

TLDR: Bring some batteries. Not too many.

For the most part, charging our phones and ipads wasn’t a problem. (Laptops stayed in Kathmandu. Really, no porter should have to carry a laptop, and a trekker shouldn’t take on the extra weight either.)

We could even plug in our chargers straight into the outlets. They fit US plugs. We’d brought adapters with us, but they were unnecessary in Nepal.

The problem was… the power went out for three days in the Namche region. This sort of thing is unpredictable but maybe also inevitable. So it was a good thing Chris had packed several batteries, including some solar-powered ones. (Solar-powered battery technology might not be all there yet; they just took too long to charge to be worth carrying. Bala has those now.)

But we didn’t need all the batteries he brought to Nepal. The night before we left Kathmandu, we concluded that the biggest and heaviest ones just wouldn’t fit in the luggage (15 kg weight limits for ALL luggage, including daypacks), so they stayed behind to keep the laptops company.

Overview & Stats

You can see, above, that I’ve added the Table Rock, SC, trail. You can see that it is around 2x the distance and 2x the ascent of an average day on the Khumbu trail. This served us will. We live at ~800 feet above sea level. We cannot easily train for ~12,000 feet. But we can train with a hike twice as far and twice as climby. Seemed to work.

Below, we will do day-by-day accounts of our walk. Thanks for reading!

Peripatos: Travels with Amy and Chris Blackwell © 2025 by Amy G. Hackney Blackwell & Christopher W. Blackwell is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.