Namaste Everyone,

We woke up this morning to sunshine and beautifully clear skies. From our dining room window, we had views of Everest, Lhotse, and Ama Dablam. We’ve settled into our daily routine of getting up, packing our duffel bags and heading to breakfast where we have all found an affinity for Tibetan bread with honey - it’s delicious warm fried bread (think funnel cake) and we have made it our mission to review every Tibetan bread in the valley. We’ll let you know which one we think is best!

After breakfast, we head outside, determine which layers to wear for the day, put on sunscreen and our buffs over our mouth and nose to protect us from that cold, dry air. Once on the trail, we do our best to maintain a nice, steady pace, with stops every hour or so to stay hydrated and take in the insane views. There haven’t been too many other hikers on the trail but we are constantly navigating yak trains moving up and down.

Our mantra of today as we moved to nearly 14,000 feet was “I’m strong like a yak”.  We hiked for a little over five hours to get to our tea house in Pheriche and everyone did great. We’re looking forward to spending two nights here as we let our bodies acclimate before moving higher.

RMI Guides Jess, Sam and the base camp crew