18-Oct-2005 Log Print E-mail
Thursday, 20 October 2005

Date: 2005-10-20 07:20:16
Geo Coord: 27.95365N 86.69382E
Altitude: 15686

Gokyo to Thagnak: We woke up at a the relaxed time of 6:60 am and had breakfast. We were woken up in the traditional fashion
Ngozumpa Glacier
Ngozumpa Glacier
of having two cups of tea passed in the tent door.  We then packed our stuff up and got ready to go.  It was a very cold morning and the tent was covered in frost.  We were next to a lake and the humididy it probable contributed to the cold. The day’s hike was only 4 hours to get to the assault camp for Cho La Pass. We had to cross the Ngozumpa moving Glacier. It was like being on the moon. It was an odd landscape covered in large boulders and beach sand. Our guide told us the terrain changed each year and the old trail markers made the way difficult to navigate.  Often the trail ended in a dead end that dropped 100 feet down into a cold glacier lake.  As we walked we could hear the ice cracking.  It was kind of scary as we walked for an hour across the glacier.  Some points in the trail we had to walk on a narrow path above the cold glacier lake below us.  We would see large chunks of ice across from us fall into the lake like you see in Antarctica Imageexploration movies.  We wondered if what we were walking on would give way into the icy water below. 

Finally we got past the glacier lake and the trail wound back up into the mountains.  We crossed a small hill to see our camp in Thagnak.  Extremely steep mountains indicated what the following day had in store for us.  I started to get Shawna’s cough and was not feeling very good for the rest of the evening.  Shawna decided to wash her hair in the glacier stream coming off the mountain.  She comes back with clean hair however here hands are completely numb from the ice water.  She scurried in the sun-baked tent to get feeling back in her hands.  I ended up playing Simon and Nicolas in chess to pass the evening.  Nicolas is quite the chess player so Simon and I are a better match.  Nicolas normally beets us in a few minutes making a not very enjoyable game.  Nicolas sits and quietly heckles Simon and I as we make terrible move after terrible move.
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