It’s quite an expedition to the top of Mera Peak at Asian Window

Nepal’s complex fee structure calls climbing this mountain a ‘trek’. Don’t be fooled by the terminology, says Stephen Goodwin in The Independent:

Frostbitten toes, swollen and purple, are a sobering sight when you’re bound for the same cold, high place where the damage was done. The young man was sitting in a hut doorway in the hamlet of Tangnag in Nepal’s lovely Hinku valley, massaging his deep frozen digits. He’d reached the summit of Mera Peak a few days earlier, but at a cost. Now his group was heading down valley while our group was hiking up, a little chastened.

As it turned out, the lad was fortunate and got away with just “frost nip”. Feeling would return, though probably with a painful phase, and there would be no amputations. Others in the Hinku during October were less fortunate. Almost every morning during our 10-day trek up the valley we saw helicopters heading for the base of Mera to chopper out frostbitten and/or exhausted trekkers. It certainly made us think. “Are my boots warm enough? Am I really up to this?”