Returning home feels better than ever! (Except that maybe it always feels this good.) It’s a joy and a relief–a smooth season with no emergencies and a return to the sweet sanctuary of home. I buy blueberries and strawberries, cook quinoa and kale, reunite with friends, feel excited for new work. The distance and perspective and weeks in the mountains have been generously healing.

Coming from a more central latitude, I also return to luxuriously long summer days: still light near 9pm! (The sun sets in Nepal before 7pm, if not earlier due to the mountains.) I was out biking all over San Francisco on my first day back–to run errands, buy groceries, get a haircut, and then dance with friends at an outdoor party in Golden Gate Park. Easy pleasures of city life.

At some point biking back across town, I thought, “Wow, I’m surprised I’m not more tired from all this biking.” Then it dawned on me: I’m still acclimatized for high altitude. A surplus of red blood cells means I’m swallowing down great sweeping lungfuls of oxygen to feed my exertion. It’s rare that I return home quite so quickly after a double trip to Everest Base Camp, so I don’t normally have such a pronounced effect by the time I’m back home. As I realized what was happening, I immediately wanted to go for a run and see what happened. The next day, tired, jet-lagged, it didn’t matter: I ran uphill, hardly out of breath and looked out at the city before me, delighted to be home, to be strong, to be–in body and soul–better than ever!

After a few days R&R in Kathmandu, it’s time to turn around and do it all over again…the stiff climbs, the steep descents, the landscape turning from lush to stark, the stars extra crisp in the sky with less intervening atmosphere. We meet Lama Geshe, play baseball with our sherpas, reach the peak of Kala Patar and the wind-whipped tents of Everest Base Camp before heading down, down, down, over 10,000 feet to the narrow airstrip in Lukla and on to Kathmandu.

When I visited the family in Phakding who had originally taken Maya in, I learned that Maya’s father had heard she’d been placed in a foreign-run orphanage in Kathmandu. He had come to demand some money (now that rich foreigners were involved). The strong wife of the family laughed at him and said no way. She had a signed paper stating that he’d given Maya away and didn’t want her. If he wanted a refund, she would give him his child back. He wasn’t interested in that.

Maya’s father is still a drunk, and I hear he beats his new wife. All the Sherpa families say how lucky Maya is, and I have to agree. Her life is completely changed by the interest and support of our trekking groups. I know there are thousands of children like her in the world, but it feels pretty powerful to have changed the course of even one. I’m so grateful for everyone’s support!

Having a 6-year-old is exhausting but fun. It has caused me to learn 6 months of parenting lessons, fears, and joys in about 3 days:

–No clothes will ever be clean for a second day of wear. Ever again.
–Tying your own shoes is supremely important, even if they come unlaced in 10 minutes.
–Beef jerky, bananas, and rice crackers are much easier snacks than say, japanese tempura.
–The best color is PINK. The more, the better.
–Actually, bananas are a mess, too.
–Children should take baths instead of showers so they don’t slip and kill themselves while washing their hair and dancing.
–Your food is whatever they don’t eat.
–Waking up to a cracker on the pillow next to you should not surprise you, even if you never saw the crackers.
–A sick child will generate a whole new breed of worry.
–Children are amazingly resilient and bounce back like I wish I could.
–Other people will feed your child sugar at every opportunity.
–The cutest clothing accessory may be 5-inch shoes placed neatly in the corner when you weren’t looking…unless it’s a scarf tossed jauntily over a tiny shoulder.
–It takes 6 years or less to form strong opinions.
–Holding hands is fun.
–Careful: Someone is watching you. All the time.

I just want to say to every parent I know: I have renewed respect and admiration for each and every one of you. Oh yes I do.

Here’s the video. Need I say more?

Maya is not a morning person. Like a friend with a hangover, she ignores the sun pouring in as the curtains are drawn back, and when she finally rises with the back of her arm shielding her eyes, she acts like getting out of bed is the greatest of effort and inconvenience. She will not bother to speak a word to you until she’s brushed her teeth and is standing in the warm shower.

By mid-morning through the rest of the day, she is a chatterbox: We will go look for the ducks before breakfast, okay? I want to see the fish. Tomorrow I will shower by myself. Will you teach me how? That’s Sharuk Khan (film star)–I like him. I need a tiger and a lion and puppies and baby chickens. Are we going to Kathmandu? We’re IN Kathmandu? Where is your house? Where are my colored pencils? Butterfly, butterfly (singing), such a pretty butterfly….

Even at 9pm, she has her sassy little walk, tossing her pink scarf over her shoulder, and marching down the hall of the hotel, key in hand, in charge of opening the door and everything else.

Back in Kathmandu, the once medieval city now offers us every amenity: soft beds, hot showers, pizza & salads, shopping, drinking… We roam and relax and enjoy some wine and a delicious meal before everyone flies home! Over 17 days in Nepal, it feels like a small lifetime has passed–but in the blink of an eye. Dreams fulfilled!

The intensity and depth of the experience often takes a few months to absorb. Hard though it can be at times, it’s an incredible experience—one that we carry within us for a lifetime! I really have an awesome job.

Days 10 & 11 see us losing altitude rapidly. What took us 5 days to ascend takes us 2 to descend. It’s a relief to be down below 14,000 feet, where our lungs suddenly feel FULL with air, where trees grow, villages dot the landscape, our bodies feel better, and the earth is less barren. The high glacial landscape is truly stunning, but I don’t want to live for two months on the ice like the climbers do. Everyone is pleased to come down to showers, beer, internet, and the blooming rhododendrons.

Days 12 & 13 are long hiking days back to the short airstrip of Lukla. Before we fly out to Kathmandu, we celebrate all together 16 staff (not including our yak crossbreeds), 11 clients, and me. Our whole team made it to Base Camp and back–and we couldn’t have done it without our amazing Nepali staff. I think we have some of the best staff on the mountain, from our cook to our Sherpas to our kitchen servers delivering morning tea. We share a traditional Nepali meal, tips & gifts, and singing and dancing–spirits run high with a sense of success! (And we’re all wiped out from the hike and the dancing!)

Day 8 the world turns to a moonscape. We cross the Tsang-ri glacier up and down and up and down over the rocks into Gorak Shep (place of the dead crow). Aptly named, there’s not much to sustain life up here. It’s an extreme world of rock and ice–and trekking teahouses, solar powered mobile communications, snickers bars, and a stream of yaks and porters supplying the Everest Expeditions at Base Camp. We humans are pretty amazing at traversing the earth.

The best weather of our trip hits with perfect timing. We scale Kala Pattar, breathing heavily and wondering how the climbers can possibly go 10,000 feet higher to the Everest summit! Avalanches slide down nearby mountainsides in the warming sun, and the 360-degree mountain views are spectacular–not only for the looming black peak of Everest!

Day 9 brings us to the apex of our journey: Everest Base Camp. Yellow, blue, and green tents spotting the monochromatic glacier, just steps from the infamous Khumbu Icefall. We get a tour from Dave Hahn of an Expedition setup and communications tent. We check out the Everest ER medical tent and meet the volunteer doctors who will spend the season treating everything from Khumbu cough to frostbite to GI distress to cerebral edema. Most amazing though is simply living on the glacier, spending the night in tents on the ice, listening to the crack and pop of the glacier beneath us, avalanches in the night, and the Sherpas singing and laughing in a kitchen nearby.

On Day 6, the sun returns, and it elicits easy smiles despite the heavy breathing on our acclimatization hike. We string prayer flags over Dingboche and climb to 15,800 feet just for the views (and the oxygen adjustment).

Day 7 pushes us higher to Lobuche, where the mountains abound and surround and stagger the imagination. We’re high in the Himalayas, and the jagged young peaks have ripped up the earth all around us. This is where agriculture ceases, no more villages or permanent settlements–just yaks grazing in the summer on the high fields.