Three Passes, Thin Air, and Keeping the Stoke Alive
Rachael Walker trades two wheels for two feet in the high mountains of Nepal.
Words by: Rachael Walker
Photos by: Roo Fowler
Bikes.
I still love them deeply, obsessively even, but that spark needs to be kept bright which sometimes means taking a break from the thing which we love so much. For the three of us (Julia Hobson, Roo Fowler, and myself) that feeling led to a plan which made perfect sense to bike industry brains: fly halfway around the world, go very high into the mountains, and enthusiastically challenge ourselves.
The plan was simple (on paper). We’d travel to the Himalaya and move through the mountains on foot, leaving behind the complex and complicated two wheeled contraptions. Trail run where we could. Hike where we had to. Go high enough that everything was stripped back to basics: breathing, moving, eating, sleeping. The Three Passes route featuring the Kongma La, Cho La, and Renjo La passes links valleys, glaciers, and villages at altitudes that demand deep respect. We thought consistent running would be possible. Altitude, as it turns out, had other ideas.
From the first days, it became clear that “trail running” in the Khumbu is an optimistic phrase, especially for perhaps slightly over confident, under acclimatised westerners!
The climbs are long, incomprehensibly long for many of us from the lowlands of England. Running uphill was only met with regret. The first few steps would work well enough and then all of a sudden it felt like every breath had to be taken through the thinnest of straws and you’d slow back down to a snails pace. So we adapted; we hiked the ups, ran the downs, and accepted that progress would be dictated not by ambition but, lets face it, breathing.
Altitude has a way of quietly and quickly erasing any hint of ego. Tackling a mountain pass when your heart is racing, you’re gasping for air whilst walking at the slowest speed you can physically make your legs go. Every step and breath reminding you of who’s boss, the mountains and the weather always. Exercising in slow motion becomes the norm.
By the time we reached Dingboche at around 4,400 metres, Roo started showing signs of altitude sickness. It wasn’t dramatic at first - a headache, nausea, that general sense of wrongness that’s easy to brush off as fatigue. Altitude has a way of escalating quietly and quickly; after a sleepless night in an unheated -5 bedroom, he was weak and struggling to eat any kind of food. Soon it was clear that gaining elevation for Roo was not wise.
We made the decision to split up for two days then regroup. Julia would continue over Kongma La Pass, sticking to the original plan. I stayed behind with Roo in Dingboche to rest and give his body the chance to remember how oxygen works.
It’s one thing to imagine and chat openly about contingency plans, plan A, B, C and D for different scenarios, it’s another to live them in the middle of the trip of a lifetime in -15 degree conditions. There was disappointment, of course, for all of us not to experience all three passes together, but it was also a big reality check of what moving in the mountains actually looks like.
Those two days were spent desperately encouraging acclimatisation, drinking copious amounts of masala tea and eating the high altitude speciality, apple pie. Those days were also a super interesting lesson in the different faces of altitude…There’s the obvious stuff people talk about - headaches, nausea, breathlessness, and then there’s the less glamorous reality.
Swollen legs that look like overfilled sausages.
A heartbeat so loud and insistent it bangs through the night, thumping you awake just when you start to sleep.
The inability to regulate body temperature: boiling hot one minute, shivering uncontrollably the next.
And then there’s the farting. No one really prepares you for the gastrointestinal chaos of high altitude.
The kind of farting that echoes around teahouse rooms, that continues relentlessly through the night, one after another, until no one sleeps - not out of discomfort, but out of mild laughter and generally despair. Add in random bouts of puking, sensitivity to light so extreme that sunglasses feel mandatory indoors, and moments on glaciers in the shade by the ice where the exertion made me want to rip my clothes off jump in the water, and you get a fuller picture of life above 4,000 metres.
Have I mentioned the cold?
Once the sun sets this high, it feels like it drops 20 degrees in an instant. Everyone retreats inside in the hope the yak dung fuelled stove might be lit soon. The bedrooms are unheated; if you are lucky they stay above freezing, but waking up to ice in your water bottle and frost on the inside of the windows is common. A morning cup of hot instant coffee is unbelievably welcome, but by the second sip it’s already disappointingly cold.
It wasn’t always as rosy as the beautiful pictures portray, but there has to be some trade off for experiencing such an incredible wild environment. And somehow, even in the midst of the breathlessness, there was humour. There always is, when you’re sharing discomfort with people who know you well enough to laugh instead of slipping into your own bubble.
Julia’s solo day over Kongma La was its own kind of effort. Long, exposed and spectacular, she started hours before sunrise, and she finished hours after sunset, in the dark, vomiting from a bout of altitude sickness. When we regrouped two days later, Roo felt stronger, it felt like a small victory, the quiet kind that matters more. We were together again, able to continue, with a deeper respect for the mountains and for each other, we realised our plans were very much just dreams, what’s possible or not is entirely dictated by the mountains.
From there, the rhythm returned. Early starts. Crunching footsteps on frozen trails, seeing over 5000m altitude on our watches became normal. Long traverses across glaciers that looked like something between a dream and a nightmare. Running downhill whenever gravity and lungs allowed, laughing at how ridiculous it felt to “run” at altitude with the assistance of micro spikes, strides short, effort still high. Not to forget the morning ritual of punching through the frozen bucket of water in order to flush the squat toilet with shards of ice.
By the time we crossed the final pass and began descending toward warmer air and thicker oxygen in Namche Bazaar, I realised that this trip had done exactly what we’d hoped. It hadn’t replaced biking. It had refreshed it. Reminded us why we’re drawn to the mountains, to long days that ask something of us and give something back.
Sometimes, to keep the stoke alive, you have to leave the bike at home. To walk, to run, to hike slowly upward into the thin air, surrounded by friends who understand that the real point isn’t how many passes you ticked off - it’s the way you move through it together.
And maybe the farting. Definitely the farting.
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