It was one of those magical, sparkling mornings when the light painted every rock, lichen, yak and peak in surreally vivid relief. A flock of birds burst upward from an adjoining field like a scatter of buckshot against the blue-violet of the morning sky. We had emerged shivering from our rooms that mid-October morning in our tiny lodge in Lungden,…
In a place where superlatives ring hollow for overuse, Gokyo finds a way to make an impression. Out the back door of our well-kept lodge in the lakeside town of Gokyo in the northern Khumbu of Nepal, groups of brightly dressed porters stood talking around their cooking fires, smoke curling upward with its now familiar sweet-bitter yak dung fragrance. The…
