Hypothermia or embarrassment

I’m standing on a frozen lake at 5,400 metres, halfway across the Cho La pass. My heart is hammering—not just from the altitude, but because each step sounds hollow and brittle, like something might give out.

Ahead, Pasang turns and grins. “We’re good,” he says, casually, like we’re strolling to lunch, not traversing a sub-zero lake on a remote pass.

12 hours ago, my alarm went off at 4am.

My clothes and water are wrapped around me in my sleeping bag to keep the clothes warm and to stop the water from freezing.

Opening the sleeping bag to let in the sub-zero temperatures is extremely unpleasant. Worse still is trying to use the squat toilet, which is essentially a hole with two foot grips on either side. Except it’s so cold that the foot grips are covered in a thin sheet of ice. So you die from hypothermia or embarrassment.

Pasang—our guide—is already making rounds. He’s short, irrepressibly cheerful, and full of terrible jokes. It’s a common tradition among Tibetans and Sherpa families to be named after the day you were born; Pasang means Friday.

We eat something warmish and head out into the dark. Everyone is fatigued and the altitude sickness is raging. I have a headache. Others are struggling to sleep. I’ll take the headache any day.

We’ve been hiking for ten days, and Cho La has been veiled in rumour. No one’s sure if it’s crossable. If not, we detour into the Everest Base Camp highway—a trek I deliberately avoided for its crowds and clichés.

A couple of hours in, a woman in our group starts panicking and cries. She thinks she has frostbite. Against advice, she takes off her boot. After the trek leaders confer, one of the teenage Sherpas—barely more than a boy—leads her back to where we woke up.

We keep climbing.

The sun comes up as we reach Cho La Pass. The landscape is lunar: white, jagged, and indifferent. There’s murmuring among the Sherpas, fast and low in a language I can’t understand. What’s happening?

Pasang turns, smiles, and says: “We’re good to go.”

The cross is slow and we descend it one person at a time. It feels sketchy but I trust our guide.

After that, we need to cross the frozen lake. The sherpas walk first, and we follow gingerly behind.

And then I’m standing here, on the other side. Alive, shaking and exhilarated that we made it across.

We eat lunch in silence. The view is endless Himalayan mountains, with snow and sun in every direction.

Then I see the teenage Sherpa. He’s already here, waiting for us. Somehow, he delivered the woman and then beat us across the pass, carrying nearly 30kg the whole way.

I glance at Pasang. He looks relieved. The jokes have paused.

“That was my first time covering the pass in those conditions,” he says.

I look at him, surprised. I’m appreciating my well-being a little more.

He shrugs. “But my Dad taught me what to do when it’s bad”

I thought we’d made it because of Pasang’s calm and confidence. But it wasn’t just him. It was his father. And probably his father’s father. Knowledge passed on, invisible threads supporting us as we climbed towards Everest.