I’d mapped this one out months ago and thought it would be a cool adventure to try for together for me and Chris. As far as I knew, no one had ever done this as one big push from Lukla all the way to Mera Peak Summit (and back) in one single push. It was about 80km, 7000m+/- round trip, so I figured we should be able to bang it out in 24 hours. Turns out we definitely underestimated the route.
This was one of the few FKTs I’ve gone for where I knew almost none of the route ahead of time. I’d run up the start of the trail towards the first high pass in the spring, but only maybe 1 hour of what would end up being 16 hours one-way, so almost all of this was new.
The plan was to leave at 8pm, which we thought would put us on the summit sometime between 6am and noon the next morning. We had only second hand info about the route on the mountain itself, but had heard / seen that quite a few people had gone up/down since the big snow-storm, so we were optimistic.
We left just a few minutes late a tick after 8pm and had a really nice time together for the first few hours. The first climb out of Lukla is very long, 2000m+ / 10km or so, and but we both felt quite good and spirits were high and we had some great conversations and banter. Notably, we both wore the “Sambob” hoodies and they were WAY too hot, even with the extra zipper I’d added on the front to let it vent more. After an hour or so, we were both hiking shirtless even in the middle of the night at 4000m+, which was kind of crazy.
Topped out around 4600m after some false-summit section with some up and down (~3h00) and then began the very long and technical descent through a dense forest down into the valley on the other side at about 3400m. We separated a bit here and I put on an audiobook for the way down, before regrouping at the bottom to fill up water bottles at a big waterfall crossing.
Chris was not feeling that great at this point, I could tell, and so I took the lead and kept the pace honest for the long gradual uphill through this valley in the wee-hours of the morning. We hiked quickly (vs. jogging) almost all of this, but a bit more energy and this could be jogged no problem. Some navigational struggles where there were some big rock fields or rivers to cross, but otherwise, just headlamp circle, heads down for a few hours until first light.
Really, really beautiful pre-dawn and dawn light as we got higher up in the valley, but also got extremely cold. We stopped at a little single-house that I thought was the last town (Khare), but was really about 1M short of that. We opened a door and saw about half of a slaughtered yak carcass hanging from the ceiling, so we dubbed this building “the meat shack”.
Chris was very tired at this point and asked to take a 15 min nap, so we stopped and he laid down on a bench and dozed for 15 and I got us some cokes and snacks and then we continued on up to Khare, another 30 min or so, at 4900m or so, after about 10.5 hours since leaving Lukla (~06:30am).
We didn’t stop there, but just hiked up out of town on the obvious trail onto the glacier. We put crampons on after another 30 min or so where it started to get a bit icy and steeper and from there the going was very slow. Turns out Chris had eaten very little over the last 6 hours or so and was bonking hardcore. I tried to get some calories in him, but his stomach was not cooperating.
So, this last stretch on the glacier was VERY slow. I thought it might take us 3ish hours from Khare to the summit and it ended up taking almost double that ~5.5 hours.
We had multiple stops where Chris had to literally lie down in the snow and asked me to wake him up after like 7 minutes. Poor bub.
We had several conversations about turning around, how much longer it was going to take, etc. This was a day where he was very clearly suffering a lot more than me, so I was quite confident I could make it (though I was also very, very tired), but also didn’t want to leave my partner in such rough shape. At some point, I said “let’s give it 20 minutes and see if we can go up 100m” and we did that, actually quite a bit quicker, so that was kind of the go-ahead for both of us to keep going.
I think we were split up for that last stretch of the ascent, which ended up taking me 73’ to go only 450m+. As I said, I was very tired as well. Mostly, the terrain was easy walking on snow, but the very last piece, maybe 30-50 vertical meters onto the central summit, was a very exposed ridgeline, without many steps to follow. It was also after 11:30am by then, so the snow was quite snow and soft and the fall factor on the climber’s left was exceptional, at least 1000m straight down, so a slip would not have ended well.
Still, I made it up there in 15h52 and spent only 4 minutes on the summit, as I could see Chris coming up and wanted to get back down off the summit ridge before he started going up so we didn’t have to go around each other. FWIW, it was one of the most beautiful summits I’ve ever been on. Views of Makalu, Everest, Lhotse, Cho Oyu, and even Kanchenjunga way to the east, probably the most 8000ers I’ve ever seen at once.
Walked extremely carefully back down to the saddle and met Chris there and waited for him to summit and come back down before we walked down together.
Descent went quickly for the first stretch back to high camp, but then was quite slow-going after that, as the footsteps were super uneven and the snow was garbage. Not my favorite section. And we were both very tired by then.
Got back to Khare and then had a long conversation about whether we wanted to continue onward that afternoon/night or stay in Khare for the night and go in the morning; we even discussed just resting for a few hours and heading back around midnight.
In the end, once we’d taken our shoes off and eaten an entire pizza, neither of us felt like going anywhere that afternoon, so we decided to spend the night and continue in the morning.
A massive, mega day.
Total 17h25 (18h36 total time), 49.8km, 5642m+.