Trekking to Everest Base Camp is an essential portion of the path for each Everest summit attempt. The Everest Base Camp Trek mostly begins with a flight into Lukla airport at an elevation of 2860 meters. Each of those trekking routes provides an eye-catching view and a rewarding way to attack the rise in altitude of 2500 meters to Everest Base Camp on the Nepal side, located at 5360 meters in elevation. Significantly, these Everest treks incorporate rest days to supply trekkers and mountaineers with a chance to get used to the thinner air while enjoying the scenery on the route.
For mountaineers, the trek to Everest Base Camp is just the start of their adventure. When they reach the head of the Khumbu Valley, they establish their Everest Base Camp on the Khumbu glacier since they launch into the last stages of their training and acclimatization that comes before any summit attempt. It is a slow process that can take weeks and often decades of planning and preparation.
For the famous television survival expert, Bear Grylls, his 1998 trip to Everest's summit took three weeks to finish. At that moment, he had been the youngest Briton to safely get to the peak.
But nine years later, Bear Grylls returned to the Everest trekking region and made a much more audacious and dangerous venture. He later attempted to fly a paraglider to an altitude exceeding the summit of Mount Everest. Bear would fly in a supercharged car designed by his friend Giles "Gilo" Cardozo, attempting to exceed the current elevation record for paragliding of 20,017 feet (6101 meters).
In May 2007, the group set up their "Mission Everest" Base Camp having trekked using their heavy equipment to an altitude of 4400 meters in Nepal. On the day of the flight, with three hours' worth of good weather, fuel, and oxygen, Bear and Gilo introduced themselves in the atmosphere strapped to what looked for a little more than a chair with an engine and parachute attached.
Soon they were spiraling up to a height further than that capable by the camera helicopter that was after their progress. However, the cameras onboard the paraglide showed a spectacular sight of a ribbon of blue sky mixing into the blackness of space above, which at the heights they attained they could see even though it was daylight.
After seventy-two minutes of flying upward, when he was sure he had succeeded, Bear turned off his engine and glided down through the stunning mountain landscape which makes Everest trekking so special. The strategy was to corroborate their elevation using a global positioning system and altimeters; unfortunately, they found in the thin air and sub-zero temperatures, their instruments froze when they were about four miles over the Mission Everest Base Camp.
Although the reading the tools took before they froze showed that Bear, at 7621 meters, had surpassed the existing paragliding document by 1524 meters and was climbing, the record cannot be official with no valid reading in the altimeter. Nonetheless, is clear what Bear had achieved in Gilo's machine. The pictures from the onboard cameras showed Bear had cleared the height of Mount Everest, and the team estimated he'd reached about 150 meters higher. This took him above 3640 meters higher than the Everest Base Camp (that's over two miles) and nearly five miles over sea level.
Whilst you set out on your own Everest Base Camp Trek, spare a thought to the complex preparations, actions, and adventures that could be going on ahead of you at the top end of the road.
