KIWIS CROSSING THE KHUMBU

We had nowhere to go. As darkness began to descend and the high altitude freeze tightened its grip, our trekking group surveyed the Gokyo Glacier before us.

We were somewhere between Renjo La and Cho La, two mountain passes in the Khumbu Valley, Nepal, somewhere west of Everest Base Camp. We had crossed 90 per cent of the glacier, but large bodies of freezing water and impassable walls of ice blocked the final leg to the other side.

We trudged far and wide, searching for a way through, always returning to the same spot. We were getting desperate. A member of our quartet, perhaps delirious with fatigue, made the laughable suggestion that we throw huge boulders into one of the lakes to allow us to step-stone across.

"Damn you, global warming!" cried Andy, a trail-runner from Colorado, lamenting the glacier-melt and the impenetrable, watery obstacles at every turn.

With darkness approaching, we conceded defeat and trudged two hours back to the Namaste Lodge in the small mountain hamlet of Gokyo. Inside the