It is just 10km from Lukla — the airport that was part of Sir Edmund Hillary’s thank you to the people of Nepal — to the main Sherpa town of Namche Bazaar.
However, it’s a solid two days’ walk, with the last few kilometers a steep climb up mountains to Namche, which lies at 3,440m.
I am part of an expedition led by the Mountain Institute, a US-based organization that works to preserve mountain environments from the Andes to the Appalachians and beyond. The team, made up of international scientists and other experts from the US, Latin America, Europe and Asia, aims to take a first-hand look at climate change in the region, and to try to come up with remedies for local people.
The journey has already driven home one of the great injustices of climate change, namely that the countries least responsible for the problem are the ones likely to suffer the most.
Nepal consistently ranks among the poorest countries in the world. Even here, in the Everest region which is reputed to be relatively better off because of tourism revenue, living standards are low. Porters for these trekking trips earn about US$15 a day.
In Nepal’s case, the sheer remoteness of the Himalayas makes it even harder to monitor glacier loss, or devise strategies to protect future generations from the worst effects of climate change.
Lukla is almost completely surrounded by mountains and is only accessible to small aircraft. We flew in on a Twin Otter. The airport shuts down when there is cloud cover.
That makes it hard to schedule research trips and to fund them. It is hard to calculate costs for donors if you don’t know how long you will be waiting around for a plane.
Namche Bazaar does have a helicopter pad, but for the most part the only way in, for scientists as for other travelers, is on foot from Lukla. The only way for those scientists to bring in necessary equipment is to carry it themselves, or hire human porters, and yak or horse caravans.
Moreover, these are just gateway towns, after all. The glaciers and glacier lakes, which are already showing the imprint of climate change, are even more remote.
Consider the experience of Teiji Watanabe, an expert on glacier lakes from Hokkaido University who is on the expedition.
Watanabe has done considerable research on Imja Lake — the focus of this expedition. The lake, which did not exist half a century ago, is the fastest-growing glacier lake in Nepal.
Though the lake seems stable for now, local people and the authorities are worried that it could one day burst its banks, engulfing villages and destroying hard-won infrastructure.
On one of his last trips, Watanabe brought in a boat so he could get depth readings from the lake. The boat, an inflatable rubber dinghy weighing about 50kg, had to be carried in by porter. Watanabe would have liked to bring in an engine as well to power the boat, but was told that would be too heavy and expensive to bring all the way up to Imja, which is at about 5,000m. Watanabe ended up rowing the boat around the lake.
Pravin Raj Maskey who has joined the expedition from Nepal’s Ministry of Irrigation, had better luck on one of his last trips to Imja.
He managed to get a boat and an engine all the way up to Imja only to find out that the engine could not run at that altitude, because there was not enough oxygen.
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