John

Sometime during the 90's, while on a visit to England, my wife and I stayed at a B&B in the countryside of Cornwall. On the walls of our room, there had been pinned maps and photographs of the owner's travels in the Himalaya. At that moment my love affair with that incredible region was born.

For almost the entire next two decades, the High Himal has been, for me, the place in all the world where resides my chakra, my chi, my mojo. It is where I gather my energy, and where my spirit is restored. Consequently, I look forward to our upcoming departure for Nepal with great pleasure and immense anticipation. No matter how many times I visit them, I always approach these mountains with the same sense of wonder and awe as I felt when I first set my eyes upon them.

This will be, I think, my seventh journey to the Himalaya, and my fourth to the Solu-Khumbu, the home of our objective: Chomolungma, or "Goddess Mother of the World" to the Tibetans; Sagarmatha, the "Peak of Heaven" to the people of Nepal, and merely the prosaic Mt. Everest to we western travelers.

The geo-political region where that magnificent mountain resides is known as the Solu-Khumbu. It is, with its myriad of majestic, terrifying snow-covered peaks rising like stair steps into the sky from above the colorful trading settlement of Namche Bazaar, one of the most intense alpine environments, and perhaps the most overwhelmingly mountainous experience to be seen anywhere in the world. Nepal is home to eight of the world's 14 tallest mountains, the so-called "Eight Thousand Meter Peaks," and four of them can be viewed from this region, towering over scores of lesser peaks reaching only to a mere 6 or 7 thousand meters. It cannot be imagined; it must be encountered; it must be absorbed; it must be felt.

Always in the past I have traveled to this region for my own personal gratification, and to further my own mountaineering experiences. This time is different. This time it will be to assist a small army of dedicated and determined soldiers in their war against blood cancers, warriors bent on eradicating the threat, and to some, the reality, of multiple myeloma. To have even a small role in that fight, and to, in some slight way, help those fighters achieve their goals and realize their dreams, adds for me an entirely new level of satisfaction and enjoyment to the prospect of once again visiting these loftiest peaks in the world.

So, it is with a feeling of humble gratitude that I am allowed to once again voice what, to me, are perhaps the most exciting and exotic words in my lexicon: "I'll meet you in Kathmandu!"