My day started at 3:30 local partly because jet lag hasn’t gotten me totally on local time yet plus we are leaving for the local airport to fly to Lukla this morning and I need to finish packing my gear in garbage bags inside my duffels. It is entirely possible for the first few days it could be raining and there isn’t much worse then finding your sleeping bag is wet.

I decide to touch home because I will be off the net for the rest of the day. When I get my wife on the phone I find out she has had an accident and is in the emergency room with a concussion. Fortunately her best friend Nancy was there for her. There were immediate decisions for me to make. There have been lots of problems with flights getting into the mountain strip that begins our trek to base camp because of the weather. If I fly this morning and needed to get home I could be stuck there. First decision is I will not fly if they admit her. I can go later and catch up with my team if necessary. I’ll decide on trying to get home once she has been seen by the doctor. The cell phone reception in St. Francis is horrible so I set up a schedule of when I can call Nancy and check in. Every half hour I get updates. Finally twenty minutes before I am to leave for the airport I get good news that she is being released and Nancy will spend the night with her.

Once again I have been reminded how fragile life is and how quickly all or plans can be changed. I am also reminded of what counts when the chips are down. Terri and I have been blessed with great friends, family and a supportive church. That is a great comfort to me half way around the world.

We arrive at the airport which is an absolute zoo. It is chaos in motion. We get checked in and go through three levels of security including a pat down. We now wait, and wait and wait. At 1:00PM our 8:00 AM flight is called. We are loaded onto an open bus – all 10 of us. The first clue this isn’t your average airliner is when the “flight attendant” offers you cotton balls for your ears for the noise and hard candy to help equalize the pressure. We carry our big back packs in our laps. Fortunately it is only a 40 minute flight. You don’t have to worry about losing luggage either because it is in a cart hitched to the back of the bus.

Loaded and ready to go and the copilot leans over (there is nothing separating the cockpit from the cabin) and tells us it is now to windy to go. We unload and go back to the “departure lounge”. Couple of hours later we do it again – although this time we never get of the bus. Finally on the third trip out to the plane we load and in five minutes we are taxing for takeoff.

It is important to note that the Lukla strip is only 1900 feet long. For perspective our shortest runway in Columbus is about twice as long. Of more import to me however is that unlike Columbus where coming up short or rolling to long would probably being pretty expensive and embarrassing it shouldn’t be fatal. Lukla’s incredibly short runway has a cliff at the approach end literally feet from the concrete and a stone wall at the other end. It sits at the end of a very narrow canyon that you wind your way up until the airport comes into view. I have been a pilot for over 30 years and this is some of the most impressive airmanship I have ever seen. It does help that the runway slopes uphill at a grade that would make a bicyclist pant. Take offs are much safer because you never really need to rotate the plane. Just keep flying and the earth falls away all the way back to Kathmandu.

For someone making their first approach, like the German lady with hands over head sitting next to me today, it is pretty scary. A friend told me about flying out of Lukla some years before. There were two lady trekers up front watching out the pilots windshield. When the plane flew off the end of the runway one promptly turned to the aisle and threw up. I had another friend tell me about how impressed he was that the pilots “high fived” after a successfully landing. I didn’t have the heart to tell him they weren’t high fiving – the planes trim controls are on the ceiling. These guys are good and some on them know it. Our pilot had a driving glove on only one hand “ala Michael Jackson” and a WWII bomber jacket. He could have stepped on of “Pilot Today”. We landed safely so he is alright in my book.

Tonight it was too late to go to were we generally go on the first day so we stayed in Lukla. Why should the first night on the trail be any different than the rest of this trip so far.