NB: Calculating the total time here as the start time of 20:04pm on Oct 5 (https://www.strava.com/activities/12597488654) and finishing at 15:52:02 on Oct 7 = 43 hours, 48 minutes, 02 seconds or 1 day, 19 hours, 48 minutes, 02 seconds.
(See Lukla-Mera section for the outbound report)
The long return trip! Woof, this was a big freaking two days. I barely slept at all last night, so this really felt more like two all-nighters back to back. I want to say we woke up at like 05:00am and then had some food before getting ready for it to warm up a bit and leave. Somehow, our bill at the hotel (for food et al) ended up being like 9,750 and we only had 10,000 NPR with us, so we literally had to return a bottle of coke to give us a few more rupees in case we needed to buy anymore snacks on the way back. We figured it’d take us about 8 hours and I left w/ like 1 bottle of maurten 320 and a snickers and a gel. It was going to be a long day.
Luckily, the friendly folks at the meat shack were kind enough to give us the coke that I’d bought and left there the day before (even though she at first seemed to not remember us and maybe thought we were full of it).
Realized just a few minutes after that that I’d left my tiny powerbank and charging cables back at the hotel in Khare, so I told Chris to keep going slowly and take my backpack and I jogged all the way back up and down and met him, which added an extra 20-30 min to an already very long day.
Felt decent jogging downhill after that and made good time and caught up to him before the next little town. We then jogged (very slowly) with a few breaks after that together all the way down through the valley to the base of the big climb back over the pass. I thought this would be the hardest part of the day and I wasn’t wrong. Though, maybe it was one of those expectations vs. reality where I thought it was going to be so awful that it ended up being just pretty awful and so was not as bad as I’d thought.
The climb did end up being quite a bit longer than I thought, though. I thought I was done after the first VK or so and was sitting around waiting for Chris for a few minutes, but then realized we actually still had quite a bit to go. I thought it would be 20 min or so but ended up being over an hour until we got to the actual pass and started the long descent back into Lukla.
It had gotten chilly up there and a bit wet on the way down, so the descent was very slow. I also had some fairly concerning knee pain on the left side in the upper patella that seemed exacerbated by running downhill, so Chris was waiting around for me on this stretch.
We stopped to get water at the last little town and they were very nice and congratulated us on what we’d just done (we’d seen them at like 10pm on our way up).
Not much else to report after that. It was a long, slow descent. We finally saw Jim a few km from town on the other side of one of the little river crossings and we jogged it in very slowly together. Nice to hit that last mile or so which is much easier and flatter trail and we also picked up Erin there who ran in with us.
Finished back at the arch and we were both pretty toasted. This was one of the most exhausting, if not “hardest”, big days of my whole life. I don’t think I’ve ever done that many hours out in the mountains on that little rest/sleep. Body and mind were tremendously fried.
Total 34.4km, 8h26 total 7h56 moving time, 1926m+.
Total stats for the ~44 hr push: 86.7km, 7568m+, 25h21 (moving time),