Word: khumbu
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Still, there were many challenges I couldn't confront until I went to the mountain, such as the Khumbu Icefall: 609 meters of jumbled-up ice boulders?some the size of baseballs, others as big as buildings?constantly collapsing and exploding as the ice expanded and contracted. As I weaved through the labyrinth, I could hear huge ice columns groaning and cracking overhead. My first trip took a miserable 13 hours through a frozen maze, a blind person's worst nightmare. No two steps were alike as I zigzagged over thin snow bridges and leapt over deep cracks onto shifting...
...accomplishments served as a bridge from the communities' isolated, subsistence past to the "relative affluence and sophistication that they enjoy today," writes Tenzing. A Sherpa, working as a high-altitude climber, can make four times the average annual wage of a Nepali. Namche Bazaar, the trading capital of the Khumbu Valley, once comprising a few dozen mud houses, now features neon lights, sophisticated communications systems and blaring rock music. The Khumbu is dotted with medical clinics and schools. But the climbing and trekking industry has brought with it the erosion of the traditional trading and farming life and the ills...
...Khumbu Icefall, the trail through the Himalayan glacier is patternless, a diabolically cruel obstacle course for a blind person. It changes every year as the river of ice shifts, but it's always made up of treacherously crumbly stretches of ice, ladders roped together over wide crevasses, slightly narrower crevasses that must be jumped, huge seracs, avalanches and?most frustrating for a blind person, who naturally seeks to identify patterns in his terrain?a totally random icescape...
...without being a fully integrated and useful member of the team. "I wasn't going to be carried to the top and spiked like a football," he says. The next day he forced himself to head back down through the icefall. He would eventually make 10 passes through the Khumbu, cutting his time to five hours...
...Everybody gets sick on Everest. It's called the Khumbu Krud, brought on by a combination of high altitude, dirty food, fetid water, intestinal parasites and an utterly alien ecosystem. On Erik's team, at any given moment, half the climbers were running fevers, the others were nauseated, and they all suffered from one form or another of dysentery, an awkward ailment when there's a driving snowstorm and it's 30 below outside the tent. You relieve yourself however you can, in the vestibule of your tent or in a plastic bag. "It can be a little bit gross...