Hello all! Thank you for your continued interest, love, and support!
I have received a few questions about the donations and the challenge my dad has put out there for everyone and I wanted to make sure questions are getting answered and everything is clear. If you are looking to donate a specific amount per foot that he takes, then wait until he is finished to donate. There is no option to put that in anywhere right now on either of the donation pages. At the end, we will put a post out there with how many feet he did make it up the mountain and you will donate that lump sum to whichever organization you choose. Again, thank you all so much for the donations that have already been made, it truly means the world! If you have any additional questions, you can send a message under the contact tab or email at brickmanoneverest@gmail.com. Let’s continue on my dad’s journey, enjoy! –Kendall
Journal Entry 4/5/21
I am now on day five of the trek; we left Namche and trekked to Phortse today. So far, this was probably the most difficult day climbing up and down the mountains to get to the city. As we get closer to Everest, the views in the mountains are striking. The treks are clearly long and difficult and I’m pretty wiped out by the end of each day; we normally start at 7:00AM and end around 4:00PM.
The food in the teahouses is clearly unpredictable. The menu items are quite interesting. Overall, it’s pretty decent; primarily vegetarian, but sometimes it can be pretty weak. In the teahouses you’re cold all the time. The rooms are tiny and very cold; in fact, there’s virtually no way to escape the cold. In the dining rooms, for example, we are so cold we wear our jackets to eat. Again, tonight we have one bathroom for the entire floor and there’s only one shower for the entire building, so I’m skipping it tonight. Quite frankly, it’s not even worth it to try to take a shower because you’ll freeze by the time you get back to your room. Tomorrow is supposed to be a short day, only a three-hour trek. Talk soon!
Journal Entry 4/6/21
We just finished with day six of the trek to EBC. We ended up in a little town called Pangboche. This afternoon we went to get a blessing from the local Lama (like a Bishop in Catholic Church for Buddhists). This was pretty interesting!
Today was not a bad trekking day. We were up and down the mountain a lot to get to this village. Andy and I had to do breakfast in our room this morning. I am currently experiencing some congestion and it seems like it is continuing to get a little worse as time goes on, so started antibiotics today. Fortunately, the G.I. issues I was experiencing previously have subsided and have (hopefully) gone away for good. It’s been three days since I had my last shower, so probably going to try to do one tonight.
Observations:
1. There is really no way to get away from the cold; it’s cold in your rooms and in the dining area. In fact, the warmest I have been is when we are hiking outside. Anytime you’re done hiking you’re basically freezing in one of the teahouses. It makes it really hard to get any work done when you’re so cold all the time.
2. Surprisingly, the Wi-Fi is working pretty well today, probably because I bought the century link package that I’ll use at EBC. The incredibly slow Wi-Fi (when it was available up to this point) was virtually impossible to use. When you would try to pull up an email, it would time out because it took too long pick up signal. We often would have to go find another place if we were in a town that would have better Wi-Fi, so we can actually get messages out and read emails.
3. The mountains are amazing and beautiful, but they’re all starting to look the same.
4. No one wears masks around here.
5. The Sherpas are absolutely incredible! It is totally amazing how these guys, half my size, can easily carry twice the weight I ever could think of carrying, for miles on their backs, up and down mountains no less! I was just thinking if I could take a few of them back and teach them how to wrestle (primarily the younger kids) they would crush everybody! The only problem is there’s no way to get them angry and you can’t teach them to be aggressive.
6. There are literally hundreds of dogs roaming around everywhere. I am pretty sure every single one of them are multi-breeds because I have no way to really describe what type of dogs they are.
7. I can’t imagine there are many people that possibly work any harder to live than the Nepalese. They live in the harshest weather climate on earth, they farm their land, they all take care of their animals, they educate their families, and they all do incredibly hard work all the time…but, they do wake up to a beautiful view every morning.
So far, I have spent most of the time trying to really focus on my climbing/hiking/walking/trekking (really, whatever you want to call it call it) technique. If this is going to work, I have to be more efficient so that I can walk better without getting out of breath at this altitude. Getting sick clearly isn’t helping, but Andy has been great about working with me on pacing myself for the trek. Tomorrow we plan to climb to Periche.
Talk soon,
Kris
Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you’re climbing it. – Andy Rooney
Kris Brickman 