Lukla, Nepal

Flight taking off from Lukla Airport in Nepal.

The clouds closed in, thick as a veil, and then, as if with a single exhale, parted to reveal a scar of stone laid against the mountainside. The runway at Lukla—a slanted shelf chiseled from Himalayan granite—emerged like a vision between storm and sky. The plane’s nose dipped, engines howled, and I felt the weight of gravity tilt us forward into inevitability. When the wheels gripped the short strip of tarmac, the cabin erupted in applause, not jubilant but reverent, a collective murmur of relief. We had landed on one of the world’s most improbable runways, a gesture of human persistence set against the scale of mountains that reduce all human work to dust.

Thus began my own pilgrimage toward Everest Base Camp.

The door of the aircraft swung open, and the air was different—thinner, clearer, carrying on its breath the mingled scents of kerosene and juniper. The sun, filtered through receding clouds, struck the prayer flags that lined the airfield, their faded blues, whites, reds, greens, and yellows snapping in the wind like the quickening of hearts. It is said the flags do not pray for the traveler but pray through the traveler, each flutter carrying compassion across the ridges into unseen valleys. To step onto that tarmac was to step into the breath of something vaster than myself.

I walked down from the plane, boots crunching against gravel at the runway’s edge, and found myself staring at the mountains rising like walls in every direction. Here, in this narrow corridor of stone and cloud, the journey into the high Himalaya begins not with a proclamation but with a question. Why do we come here? To test endurance? To chase after a peak seen in photographs? Or is it something else, something that hovers just beyond words, the way the snow leopard hovers beyond sight in Matthiessen’s Dolpo—a presence felt but not seen, the archetype of longing itself.

Among the low houses of Lukla, their walls painted in weather-worn turquoise and white, prayer boulders stood in rows. Boulders etched with mantras painted white sat beneath the hands of porters and monks, children and strangers alike. I paused and set my palm against the cold rock. Om mani padme hum. Jewel in the lotus. In that breath was both the beginning and the reminder: that every step ahead was not conquest but devotion, not possession but release.

Prayer Boulder, Outside Lukla

Travel in these mountains is never casual. The trails are carved from centuries of passage, from traders and pilgrims, monks and herdsmen, climbers and seekers. Each stone step bears the press of thousands of feet, worn smooth where the faithful have carried butter lamps and barley grain, rough where porters stagger beneath the weight of expedition gear. I felt myself added to that lineage, a single figure in the long procession of those who had come before, drawn by peaks that are less places than presences.

Lukla itself was a paradox: at once a staging post for adventure and a place where life continues with or without our ambitions. Children darted through alleyways with battered footballs. Women carried baskets of potatoes up paths steeper than stairwells. Yaks, their horns draped with bells, shuffled patiently as loads were tied to their backs. The sound of commerce mingled with the murmur of chants rising from a small gompa near the square. This was no remote outpost untouched by time, but neither was it diminished by the throngs who came chasing Everest. Instead, it felt like a threshold—one that invited me to leave behind whatever belonged to the plains below.

In The Snow Leopard, Matthiessen writes of the ambiguity of pilgrimage: that we set out not only toward a distant peak or monastery but also toward a recognition that is already within us. To walk north from Lukla was to walk into that ambiguity, into the questions that cannot be resolved by maps or itineraries.

The clouds shifted again, revealing for an instant the higher ridges, sharp with snow, before drawing back into mist. In that brief unveiling, I felt the pull of the mountains like a tide. Each glimpse was both promise and reminder of impermanence. Just as quickly as the summits appeared, they vanished. Just as surely as the wheel turned, it came back to stillness.

The first steps out of Lukla carried me along a path lined with mani stones—slabs of rock carved with prayers and painted in bright pigments that faded under the long weather of altitude. Pilgrims and porters passed on the left, for to pass on the right is to dishonor the sanctity of the words. I felt the rhythm of my boots begin to match the cadence of the prayer wheels, as though each footfall were itself a syllable in the mantra.

There is something in the Himalayan air that sharpens attention, not toward novelty but toward presence. A dog lay curled in the dust near a doorway, its ribs rising and falling in shallow sleep. A woman rinsed clothes in a basin, the water spilling in silver arcs that caught the morning sun. Children laughed from a rooftop, their voices echoing in the narrow lanes. None of these were extraordinary, yet each shimmered with the clarity of thin air, as if stripped of the distractions that blur our vision elsewhere.

I thought of Matthiessen at Pokhara, watching clouds conceal and reveal Machhapuchare, the “fish-tail” peak that glowed like a kingdom beyond sight. I thought of his wondering if the journey was real at all, or merely some dream conjured between the rains. In Lukla, I felt the same question: where did I imagine I was going, where and why?

A Destination: Machhapuchhare Mountain

Yet there was no turning back. Ahead lay the Dudh Kosi valley, its waters white with glacial silt, its bridges swaying with the weight of yaks and men. Ahead lay Namche Bazaar, the Sherpa capital, and beyond it Tengboche, Pangboche, Dingboche—each a syllable in the long chant toward Base Camp. Ahead lay not only the high passes but also the thinning of the self, the surrender that comes when the body is tested by altitude and the mind by emptiness.

The applause on landing had been a collective sigh, an acknowledgment of survival. But in the silence after, as I walked among the prayer wheels and felt the mountain air course through me, I realized survival was not the point. The point was something closer to surrender, to stepping into the path with the humility of one who knows he will be undone and remade by what lies ahead.

As the sun broke through, scattering the mist across the valley, I lifted the camera once more. The X-T10, modest beside the weight of the peaks, framed the lines of prayer flags strung above the village, their colors radiant against the pale sky. I pressed the shutter, hearing the faint click that seemed absurdly small beside the boom of avalanches echoing in the distance. Yet even in its smallness, the image felt like a vow, a marker of the beginning.

This was the start of the walk to Everest Base Camp, yes—but more than that, it was the first step into a landscape where the external and the internal are inseparable. To walk here is to walk through both stone and spirit, through snow and silence, through the ceaseless turning of wheels and the impermanence they proclaim.

And so I began.