A friend of mine reached out to me today to ask me how the air at the top of Everest smelled. I’ll be honest–I didn’t have the time, skill, or the financial resource to scale Everest. The permit for the ATTEMPT to summit her numbered in the tens of thousands of USD.
HOWEVER.
I am handily equipped with imagination and vocabulary to describe the subtle nuances in the sensory impressions surrounding the journey to witness her majesty to and from Base Camp.
I was in awe of the unbelievably expansive stillness. If you stilled your feet from the hike or stumble, you realized yours was the only sound on the mountain. The breaking of that dawn combined with the abrupt, sharp, low rumble in the crack of the ice gave one a sense of the unfathomable, infinite. I never knew that kind of phenomenon could occur so quickly, the echoes so low-pitched. When I think of sounds that happen that rapidly, that violently, they usually resonate at a screeching timbre. At least in my mind’s ear.
The original question was to describe the smell of Everest’s air. Stomping through mud and snow to the mountain herself held many assaults on my olfactories. Yak piss was particularly pungent; eyes watered if a safe distance wasn’t respected. The sharp tang of trail sweat and excrement pervaded every close space and excuse for a toilet from start to finish. The flour-dusted, oven-crusted, freshly-baked rolls and loaves in bakery and cafe along the way were a welcome respite from the biology’s insistence.
But after having reached our goal, the genesis of the ascent, the crowded cacophony of odors quieted to a hum, ever-so-subtly perceptible by those who rely on their noses as they do eyes and ears to process opinions and conclusions.
To wit: imagine having a chest freezer, purchased new, homesteading on Granny’s back porch. Then, for the first year, you stored only coarsely-ground coffee and baking soda in it, making a crumbly, powdery covering for its slick plastic floor. Perched upon that grainy base, a sizable Ziploc of zipper peas picked, shelled, and frozen for a month of Sunday dinners. The mountain had a mixed smell of flesh of the earth, of ice and cold, accompanied by the merest suggestion of green. Better to inhale her fragrance your mouth open, because there were too many frosty aromas too delicate to discern with nose alone. Best to embrace her bouquet through both.
It’s a nebulous blend of multiple sensations when only smell was requested, but the experience was SO much more than that, nigh unto impossible to sequester a single sense in order to communicate it. But I’m grateful for the challenge and hope this gives the reader a hint of the sights, sounds, and smells of smiling up at Everest from her blessed foot.
