A beautiful day for a shorter jaunt up Nangkartshang peak! I stayed at Altitude Cafe in Pheriche last night and used the ~2km from Pheriche to Dingboche as a bit of a warmup. Did some light drills and had some caffeine before heading up.
Note: I started where there is an obvious trail split in the flat trail that goes just above town and then a gentle uphill trail towards Nangkatshang. It’s a very obvious starting place and it is about 1’ below where Robelin started, according to his strava.
This first piece was extremely runnable and I felt great getting up there in 3’09 (exactly 1KSch, so a good initial pace). From there, it got much steeper and I went from run/jog to jog/hike for the 1’/1’ pieces. It was very, very crowded, but the trail has a ton of cut-throughs and off-shoots, so it was never really an issue. This push was honestly a lot of fun as I knew quite early that I would be under the pace, so I was able to focus on just maintaining the effort and enjoying myself. Good mix of Type 1 and Type 2 fun!
Hit the short scrambly piece maybe around 34’ and then moved well these last few meters and stopped my watch as I tagged the big rock with all the prayer flags. Time was 36’26, which I was very please about. Nice also to have this be significantly lower altitude than pretty much anything I’ve done in the last few weeks (only 5060m).
Spent maybe 30 minutes up top taking some photos and chatting and then jogged down nice and easy, all the way back to Pheriche. Fantastic morning.