Day 8: Pangboche–Phortse
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 5: Hiking to Phortse
This was the day that I fretted the most about in my pre-departure obsessive reading on all things Everest. Why? Blogs like this one, that describe four hours of walking along a steep drop-off. Or this one, with its comment, “The trail was a little hairy in places, particularly towards the end….”
Bala assured me that this trail was in fact one of the most beautiful on the route, and that scary tales were surely describing the old, lower trail, one that locals still use because it’s shorter but that is now disparaged among trekkers. He promised that the new trail was wide, well-maintained, and never exposed.
I didn’t entirely trust him.
My fear was that this would be even scarier than the day Chris and I walked from Grüben to St. Niklaus on the Haute Route in Switzerland, where we encountered a washed-out gulley that STILL gives me nightmares. I wondered what would happen if I reached a bit of trail I simply couldn’t bring myself to traverse. That day in Switzerland, I briefly considered the possibility of walking back to Grüben, even though we’d be walking six hours by that point–and had already crossed the pass of the day. I supposed I could always return to Pangboche and we’d figure it out from there.
This day was a good lesson in why it’s dumb to fret about stuff before you actually see it. This trail was one of the most beautiful, show-stopping experiences of the entire trip, and it never got scary.
We were up early as always. We were both getting tired, our “leisurely” adjustments to the itinerary notwithstanding. It’s just hard to walk in the mountains every day, to be cold all the time, and to never have any real downtime. We still struggled to catch our breath when we went above 14,000 feet.
The trail between Pangboche and Phortse contours around the south-facing mountainsides north of the Dudh Khosi. It parallels the trail we’d walked two days earlier from Tengboche to Pangboche, but higher up and on the other side of the river.
It was definitely the trail that appeared in the Stairway to Heaven blog that I linked to above, so ymmv. Maybe I’m just less scared when Bala is around, or have less oxygen to waste on pointless emotions. But a big part of it is that this trail is simply wider. That makes such a big difference in comfort.
Just before we reached Phortse, Bala grabbed me and said that the next section would indeed be a little scary, but it was short and I could manage it. This, you see, is good guide-craft. He got me through 95% of the walk believing that I wasn’t going to freak about anything full well KNOWING that there would be some stuff that would be hair-raising. We were so close at that point, I figured I’d manage.
And… I didn’t have to! We rounded the bend to discover that the trail had been completely redone and modernized with concrete and metal railings. It looked like a western tourist establishment, and there was absolutely nothing to fear there.
Phortse (pronounced FOR-che) is a Sherpa settlement on a sunny shelf, the type of terrain that lends itself to terraced potato fields. Phortse is often held up as an off-the-beaten-track town, or a good alternate route to and from EBC that skips the crowds going the usual way through Tengboche. While the trail we’d just walked was far from deserted–we saw tourists and porters moving in both directions–it wasn’t nearly as busy as the trail between Tengboche and Pangboche.
We were the only guests in the Sherpa lodge where we stayed that night. This was another no-shower place (we might have been able to pay for them? I never figured that out and didn’t care because I’d taken advantage of our gas-powered shower that morning in Pangboche.) The toilets were down the hall; Bala put a Wilderness Travel sticker on the door of the “western” toilet so we wouldn’t accidentally be dismayed by the Asian one. There were no outlets in our room, but we could charge our devices in the dining hall.
After lunch, we lay down for a couple of hours. I found myself wanting to squeeze rest into as many moments as possible.
That afternoon, Bala took us on a little tour of the town to see the Khumbu Climbing Center, where we shook hands with Conrad Ankar himself, and then out to the forest to look for birds. On the way back to our lodge, we stopped at his friend’s house for tea.
Mila Dai joined us at dinner that evening. The Sherpa girls made us dahl baht, the traditional Nepali dish of lentils and rice. That was the only day on the trek that we had this classic dish, though I read that it’s typical daily fare for most trekkers.
Someone from the Khumbu Climbing Center called to invite us to come watch a documentary that evening, which was very sweet, but we were so very tired, the KCC seemed so very far away (and the paths through town so very dark and muddy), and the movie would start at 9. That was a good half hour after our bedtime.
One thing Chris had looked forward to on this trip was the chance to do dark night photography, and a remote Sherpa village seemed like it would be the ideal spot. It was not to be. Phortse, like every other place we stayed, had ample night-time light in the form of street lights, and we were never awake much after dark anyway.