Day 6: Deboche to Pangboche.
We did the Everest Lodge-to-Lodge hike in the spring of 2025. (Well, technically, we were on the Everest Private Journey, but the itinerary is basically the same) Wilderness Travel did a great job of organizing it!
A good time was had by all!
May 3: Deboche–Pangboche
Today was a short walk, so Bala told us to report to breakfast at 8:30. We spent a leisurely morning drinking tea and reading before eating our masala omelettes.
The standard Everest Lodge-to-Lodge itinerary puts guests in Pangboche for one night, after which they head on to Phortse. Pangboche is the jumping-off point for the hike to Ama Dablam base camp, so tour operators offer this as an optional addition to the day’s hike. But. It’s a long way!
Doing Ama Dablam that day means combining the walk from Deboche to Pangboche (up to two hours, if you take it slow) with the hike to and from Ama Dablam base camp (5-7 hours with tons of climbing–“base camp” does not mean “base of mountain”). Which is a seriously long day of hiking. Bala starts his groups at 4 a.m., and they arrive in Pangboche around dinnertime.
Or they just walk to Pangboche and miss Ama Dablam. Which might be a pity if you actually wanted to do Ama Dablam and simply didn’t have the time or energy.
We wanted to do Ama Dablam but we didn’t want to have to do a forced march followed by another day of hard walking to Phortse. And we didn’t want to have to skip Ama Dablam base camp due to fatigue. I asked Wilderness Travel to book us two nights in Pangboche to give us time to both enjoy the scenery (well worth enjoying!) and do our mountain trek. This was a good plan.
It was another sunny morning, which is clearly not a given in these parts.
The walk from Deboche to Pangboche is another “Nepali flat” trail, though it trends uphill. We had astounding views of Ama Dablam the whole way.
We reached the Everest Summit Lodge in Pangboche by 11. This was great; we had time to chill in the room and I managed a Clinical Somatics practice before lunch. (I highly recommend Clinical Somatics for anyone with back pain or other musculoskeletal issues, including bad posture. It takes a completely different approach to releasing muscle tension, and I credit it with my being entirely pain-free on this trek despite an annoying snapping hip that made walking difficult just four months earlier.)
After an early lunch, Bala took us up the hill above Pangboche on the trail that leads to Everest Base Camp. This walk was beautiful and well worth lingering over. Though I had no wish to stay in bare-bones lodges, the trail upriver called to me; I wished we could see at least a little further up the valley. Maybe next year….
Pangboche’s main claim to fame is a monastery that houses a yeti hand. The story goes that the yeti was devoted to a lama and helped him build the monastery. After the yeti died, he donated both his hand and his scalp (or bit of skull?) to the lama, who installed them in the monastery as holy relics. We couldn’t photograph the hand, but it is very large and resembles the hand of an orang utan. Bala assured us that, while the yeti skull in Khunde is most likely antelope and not yeti at all, the relics here are genuine yeti parts.
The showers at Everest Summit Lodge are gas-powered, which meant that the water was truly hot. What a delicious feeling!
Chris spent the early evening sitting outside the lodge watching the sun set on the three biggies, Nuptse, Everest, and Lhotse.
The stoves in the dining room, on the other hand, were powered by yak dung. There’s no wood available higher in the mountains, but there’s yak dung aplenty. Mila dai, our porter, reportedly supplemented his income on his days off by collecting yak dung in the hills. (He spent the next day, when we didn’t move, carting a load all the way to Namche and another one back to Pangboche.)
The Everest Summit Lodge has two levels of accommodation, basic and “comfort.” We saw other tourists who were clearly staying there, but they didn’t appear in our dining room because they weren’t on the comfort package. We had the place to ourselves.