Whether you know it or not, hiking is always a form of pilgrimage. ⛰️
Hiking is a solitary activity. I discover this on a group trek to the base of Mount Everest. As pine trees fade into rocks and altitude begins its relentless work on my body, making it harder to breathe and my legs feel like dead weight, I’m left with myself amidst the mountains.
Whether you know it or not, hiking is always a form of pilgrimage. You leave yourself behind in the bustling heat of wherever it is that you’re hiking from – in my case, Kathmandu – and you begin a walk towards a different, unknown self.
If you’re lucky, what you discover along the way enlightens and expands your existence. The depth of vast valleys, the grandiose size of the towering mountains, and the soul-stirring landscapes that unfold around you are all conducive to internal shifts too. It’s as if nature’s inexplicable powers force you to retreat from the extremes of the external and to examine life from within.
That’s not to say that hiking can only be done solo. You can go with others, of course. We often do; I did. We need the proximity of others’ struggle and victory to measure ours alongside, so that when the steep climbs seem insurmountable, you are pushed on by those who have faced the very same challenges. We are predictable like that, and naive enough to think that there is strength in numbers. Or perhaps wise enough to know so.
En route to Everest Base Camp, our main guide is always last in the moving line of eight. Two guides, six guidees – I’m one of them. He drops back, idle, taking each step with casual nonchalance, offering to take packs when the weight becomes too much to bear and the oxygen too thin to keep our blood pumping.
Not for him. He was born in the shadows of these mountains; his biological makeup allows him to ascend without the limitations placed on most tourists and travelers. He’s last in line to help us battle – not the mountain, but ourselves. I’m slow and breathless, and so the rest of the group disappears ahead each day, leaving the two of us to work our way through the beautifully unforgiving terrain.
I try to revel in the experience, to claim this time and place as my own and to turn it into some sort of internal advantage that’s mirrored in the scenes that follow us, but I find it difficult. I don’t realise that this is a pilgrimage, after all. Mostly it just feels like hard work, burning muscle, and shallow breaths.
To make time go faster and to distract myself, Dinesh and I discuss our very different lives. He tells me about his wife and son, awaiting him in Kathmandu. About the many trips he’s done to Base Camp, his other mountaineering achievements. He says he’d love to visit Australia one day, and we talk about this as if it might happen – where he will go, what he will see. But mostly, we conquer the elevation in silence. I need every breath for air, but it’s comforting to know that someone is there to fall back on.
On our fourth day, we meet a woman in the common area of our teahouse. Tengboche is situated in a sparse but immense landscape: a small outcrop surrounded by mighty peaks, made bleak by the mid-afternoon fog that follows us upwards with each day. Its valley-like position surrounded by mountains gives us the perfect view of Mount Everest – taunting, promising. We can see the sun set over its mighty peak from the window of our bone-chillingly cold room. It’s beautiful, impossible – we are here and we are doing it. However slow, we are doing it.
By the end of day four, we are all starting to feel the weight of the trek set in – after dinner card games are getting shorter and shorter. So when we strike up a conversation with Anne, she presents a welcome relief from our own personal struggles. She looks like most other people we encounter along the trek: kitted out and confident in a way only tourists visiting the same place twice can be.
In her sixties, Anne is doing the tour alone with a personal porter, hired to guide her all the way to Base Camp, free from the many compromises a group tour presents. She wants to be sure.
The first time, she didn’t make it. It was the altitude that got to her, her own body submitting itself to defeat, even when Anne wanted to push on. That was 15 years ago. Now she is back, to conquer something that has nagged at her for over a decade, leaving no part of it to chance. If it takes longer, it’ll take longer. Our own experiences are put into sharp perspective by Anne’s refusal to take no for an answer. As we wish her good luck, I think about the days that lie ahead, and how I would feel should I not make it.
The Himalayas have a paradoxical quality, one of vast space and unimaginable proportions against the agonising smallness of individuals. Its effects on me are quite the opposite to what you expect from nature – I become restless, anxious, irritated; I wish for internal changes to occur already so I can get on with the rest of it with more enjoyment, but the Zen moment never seems to come. I’ve had months to prepare, physically and mentally, yet following the winding path up and down, over and around stupas, stray dogs, and back-bent, hard-working locals doesn’t feel real in any constructive way. If there is any part that does feel real, it’s the possibility of not making it to the top – but that’s not exactly what I want to focus on.
We run into Anne again some days later. She looks pale and sickly as she sips her tea by the fire. It’s altitude sickness, again; her guide has advised her not to go on. We try to make small talk, unable to offer comfort, and I think about doing this alone, not in the sort of internal aloneness that I have felt during the trek, but real aloneness, with a guide and a language barrier as your only companion, and a rotating cast of exhausted faces marching past each day.
We say our tentative goodnights, but I can’t stop thinking about her. I try to imagine whether I would come back in 15 years’ time if I failed to make it; whether I’d go through the same physical and mental preparations, knowing that it could all be for nothing – again.
The landscapes change with every step, offering a raw insight to what life must be like for those living here. To haul supplies, food, tourists’ bags up and down these trodden paths all your life. To live so far from the conveniences of technology, from opportunity, from civilization. To wake up and step outside and be greeted by the mountains, so God-like in their immensity, every single day. Walking among them offers a lot of headspace, yet I still cannot get my thoughts to follow a coherent order. Maybe it’s the altitude, maybe not. Perhaps it’s the person you become when you’re overcoming such extremes, adapting to a world that’s quite literally not meant for you.
We make it to Everest Base Camp in a somewhat anticlimactic fashion. It’s a lot of hard days and hard work, emotions and fears, and not enough oxygen for your brain to properly function, so when I round a mound of rocks and see a small clearing below me, the moment happens before it has time to catch up with me. It’s the only windy day we’ve had, cold and biting, and the sense of personal achievement I hoped would await me isn’t wholeheartedly there.
Hiking is a lesson in humility too, and that lesson seeps in slowly over time rather than hitting you on the head upon completion. The big wide world isn’t out there waiting around for me to conquer it and claim my stake in the form of flags or possessives or social media bragging rights. Although, of course this is not what I think at the time.
We are taking our obligatory pictures when I see Anne cresting over an outcrop of rocks just above us. We lock eyes for a second as she’s taking it all in, and she looks wobbly in a sort of crazy way. She is touching her face as if to make sure she’s real – that all of it is real – and suddenly we’re all cheering her on, and there are tears and congratulations and a shared feeling of elation. As if, this whole time, we’ve all been in it together, and my sense of achievement is returned to me by a woman I’ve spoken to twice, whose story I have barely scratched and who will disappear from my life as quickly as she entered it.
I find myself feeling proud and relieved, but it’s not for myself, it’s mostly for Anne. She walks up to the boulder bearing the name and elevation of where we are, and reaches for it with a religious delirium. Her own personal pilgrimage is complete, and it only took 15 years.
As we head back to Gorak Shep for our final, celebratory night at such high altitude before we begin our descent the next day, I have the first foreshadowing of the story this’ll make, of the words coming from my mouth, of an achievement to tell that’s not mine. My own pilgrimage won’t feel as such until later on, once I’m back in Kathmandu in the shadow of the mountain, but for now, Anne’s fulfillment transforms my own understanding of the past week. I take it and mould our group’s progress around it, and my memories gain a brilliant sheen that’s only possible in hindsight.
After all, hiking might be a solitary activity – but reaching the summit is undoubtedly best shared.
Cover by Michael Clarke
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