Day 11: thorung la pass

I think this day was one of the most physically, emotionally and psychologically draining days of my life.

We awoke at 3am for a few chipatis and a coffee before starting our hike in the dark just before 4. We used head torches to climb steeply up from thorung Phedi to high base camp. This took about an hour. This  was a welcome break from the cold and dark. We had hot coffee and tried to defrost. 

It then got super tough. We began our climb up, it was absolutely freezing. Despite my north face ski gloves I just could not get my hands warm. The hike continued up in thick snow, I slipped and almost fell down the mountain, only saved by my sticks, but this really shook me up. 

I little way on I could not feel my hands at all, our guide took my gloves off to reveal the first stages of frost bite, then tried to warm them up by rubbing them with one of those hand warmers. After several attempts like this, stephen kindly let me his ski gloves and kept his inners on.

We continued upwards and I started to feel quite breathless and coughing. The higher we went the worse I felt. I felt like I was drowning. I could stop coughing and If was pink and frothy. Not far from the top I realised this could be high altitude pulmonary oedema. I explained to Stephen what I thought was going on. Luckerly we came across someone who had all the drugs for altitude sickness. I downed them, we quickly got to the top, one photo then headed straight down the mountain. My cough started to improve but I was then hit with exhaustion. It was snowy and there was tons of black ice we just kept slipping on the way down. It took forever. 

After hours we made it to the tea house for lunch, around 2:45. By this point we were both really dehydrated. We downed a bottle of water and then just got back down. 

We arrived at muktinath around 4pm. The concrete jungle was a bit of a shock. We then arrived at the hotel for the night. It was ‘character building’.  We’ll show you the photos later. We collapsed. Are a quick dinner then slept.

It was all in all the toughest day I’ve ever had a push me to every limit.