CALEB NICKERSON
NEPAL May 30, 2018
A local teacher and Calumet Island councillor recently returned from a trip to the Himalayas and the base camp of Mt. Everest, with plenty of photos and stories for his students.
Martin Bertrand said that he has been attracted to mountaineering and the outdoors since he was a young boy. He said he’s scaled several mountains, including the volcano Pico de Orizaba in Mexico, the third highest peak in North America, but was thrilled to travel to Nepal in late April of this year to see the world’s tallest.
“I’ve been dreaming of this trip since I was about 15, but we’ve been planning this since last year,” he said.
As an outdoor education teacher at École secondaire Sieur de Coulonge, Bertrand said that he thinks of his trips around the globe as ways to inspire his students to travel and explore the outdoors.
“Hopefully my stories, hopefully my passion will inspire some people to go out of their comfort zone and prepare for something. Set some goals and achieve them,” he said.
His tour, organized through a company in Gatineau, took him to the base camp of Mt. Everest, which sits on the Khumbu Glacier at over 5,000 m above sea level.
First, Bertrand explained that he flew into Nepal’s capital city of Kathmandu, a flight that took around 20 hours.
“Once we were there, I believe it was the 22nd we got there, we took a few days to tour Kathmandu,” he said. “It’s a really interesting place.”
From there, Bertrand’s group took a plane to Lukla, where they landed at the Tenzing–Hillary Airport, widely regarded as one of the most perilous airstrips in the world.
“Just to give you an idea, they only fly when it’s perfect weather,” he said. “We’re flying for 50 minutes, 45 minutes between the mountains, then boom, you’re landing on this little landing strip. It’s pretty crazy.”
The runway is so short, that it sits on an incline to help the planes slow down and the Nepali Aviation Authority only lets highly qualified pilots attempt to land there.
They spent roughly ten days hiking from Lukla to the base camp, taking breaks to get their bodies used to the high alitiude.
“Along the way, I met people from around the world,” he said, adding that they were aided by sherpas (local guides) and porters. “The same thing at the base camp, it was like an Olympic village, there were teams there from numerous countries. The base camp was about a kilometre long and there’s about 1,300 people there.”
Bertrand was in awe of the sherpas’ climbing prowess as well as their numerous stories.
“These guys are amazing. It’s a way of life for them,” he said. “That’s the people you want to get to know.”
Bertrand said that while he didn’t have many mountains in the Pontiac to practice his skills on prior to the trip, he trained for the excursion by hiking and running.
After several days touring the glacier and meeting people at the base camp, he injured his knee and had to cut the trip short by several days.
“There’s a saying, ‘Climbing up is optional, but coming down is mandatory,’” he said. “The biggest thing and why I decided to come back early … I didn’t want to do more damage on my knee.”
His goal is to gain more mountaineering experience that he would need to ascend higher than base camp, and return to Nepal in a few years.
He added that Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania is also on his list.
“There’s something about mountains that just attracts me,” he said.
