The meeting went very well. And I noticed the engineers enjoying my AutoCAD drawings of the proposed design. After I was done presenting, the Assistant Director showed two presentations on the recent work done by BSP above 2000m.  We learned about two alternative digester shapes they’ve been investigating. One of which has a smaller exit for the effluent; this would be great for our project.

Many good things will come from this meeting. The Assistant director and I will stay in close contact to share information and collaborate on the future design. Also the Executive director requested that the group in Seattle submit a grant to the Nepalese government for the project. It will certainly help to have this submitted by the Executive of BSP, which is functionally a government agency.

After the month of work accomplished during this visit, there is now so much more work to be done. But I am confident that the connections made during this last minute meeting will bring this biogas project forward by leaps and bounds.

The more exciting thing I’ve done lately, is to see my friends from Pumori engineering firm again. I haven’t seen them since we parted ways in Deboche. Since that time they have started making a great map of the Nuns’ Gompa. I was impressed by the number of trees they had included. The preliminary map that we looked over does not yet have contour lines. But they are still processing the more than 900 reference points gathered in two days. I think these guys are quite good at what they do and I’m excited to see the Gompa get some renovation once this work is done.

Of course, things are not as straight forward as one might think. The meeting’s discussion turned toward how the property boundary and ownership might be found. This nunnery has been around for centuries, plus there is a different style to keeping records in Nepal. In the end, it seems there may be three places where the Gompa’s land may be recorded. But these record houses will not necessarily know who holds ownership as well. Add to this the slow process of applying for permits with Sagarmatha National Park, and half a year can easily pass before things can go forward. Despite all that, I think the renovation of the Gompa will happen, and the site survey done by Pumori Engineering been a huge help.

The office for BSP is closed on weekends and their people are booked in day-long meetings through Thursday.  An American would say, “Well that’s fine, just have the meeting on Friday”. However, yesterday the government announced that the month long process to rebuild the rain god’s chariot was completed!  This means that Friday will be a national holiday. From what I understand, two days warning before the city shuts down, is better than usual. I am no longer surprised by such things here. Hopefully Murari will be able to arrange some informal meeting this weekend.  We will see.

My other project has been to investigate the construction supplies available in Kathmandu. With this information I can start to develop a realistic construction budget. As Murari drove me to the area of town where such things are sold, the streets were filled with more than a foot of flowing water. A sudden downpour had made a small river of the street, that even the rain god’s chariot might have troubles with. Then again the Nepali motorcycle riders seemed to feel safe with just their raincoats on.

I was pleased to find two different options of electrical water heaters for sale in Kathmandu. Now that we have some real information about this key element of our design, we can figure out how many of what size we will need. The business owner also told me that these could be fabricated to the size we desire (maximum 1m though). Once again, I’ve found that 15 minutes in Nepal is worth five days, trying to research in Seattle.

I am staying in the same room I was in before my trek began. Looking in the mirror there, I can see how much weight I’ve lost. This is unfortunate, as I was only ~165 lb before I left.  I have the chance to give myself a rest now, but some things just aren’t the same yet. My body had decided I am a vegetarian, which is an interesting. And I can never seem to feel hydrated. All in all, I think my health is good and my spirits are very high.

I spent my day completing the presentation I will give to our affiliate NGOs here in Kathmandu. I spent a lot of time with this before I left the states, but now I have more information and loads of helpful pictures to add. As soon as Mingma returns from the Khumbu valley there will be a lot of work to do. I still need to visit all the local suppliers of construction materials for our project. And there are so many people to talk to about the progress of the design.

My time here gets ever shorter. I am excited to get back to the left coast, but there are quite a few tasks to complete before I fly.

I hectically through all my gear into bags and did my best impression of a manic porter. I got over to the domestic departures area in Lukla airport where the owner of the Tea-House I’ve been at, Kami, told me to wait.  I did that for three hours, never being given a ticket or being told anything more than, “Wait…”.  Most folks I spoke with, in the limbo of Lukla airport, had been awaiting thier flight for 11+ hrs that day. So really, I got off easy. When the weather is good in Lukla, the place is a madhouse with a few hundred people trying to leave on half a dozen flights.

In the end though, I did get on a plane and we even returned safely to the capitol. In Kathmandu, Deha explained to me that they had to pull favors to have a seat opened for me. I don’t know what that entails, but I owe Deha and Murari from Summit trek big thanks. Not to mention their friends and benefactors in Lukla. Back in the city, Dan and Murari explained to me, that I might have been stuck in a cloud up in Lukla until after my flight to Seattle had left. The weather in the Khumbu has no obligations to humans and if you can fly out of lukla, you’d best do it.

I returned to a muggier Kathmandu than I had left and was so pleased to see my cheap hotel room again. They give you toilet paper and soap for free here. This is crazy!  Far too nice for the likes of me…  I enjoyed a shave and a shower, squatting beneath a faucet 1m up the bathroom wall. I hadn’t washed my hair in 24 days and I looked like the Wildman I’d become.

Once I looked and smelled presentable, Dan, Murari & Deha invited me out to dinner. I got to meet the successful climbers who had just returned from climbing to the top of the world; lovely company and good food.  I feel very lucky to be safely back in Kathmandu to finish my work.

Once I’d eaten my porridge and milk-tea, I gathered some things and set off to find the village of Muse. The map Murari gave me back in the Kathmandu office had some vague trails shown in dotted lines to this place. I made my way and got conflicting directions from a young boy once I had left the main road. I relied on my intuition and eventually found some houses on the hillside.

I put it to the luck of the Irish that the first house I came to had a fluent English speaker. He told me that I had indeed wandered my way into Muse. I explained my reason for coming to his village, and gave him the jist of the biogas project at Gorak Shep. He was pleased to hear of the work our team is doing and offered to introduce me to his neighbor with the biogas digester. After the mandatory cup of milk-tea, we walked down to a house where no one spoke English. There is no way I would have figured out where this digester was without my new guides help.

My benefactor Nga Gyal Jen, introduced me and we were invited into a splendid house by Kaji Sherpa, the youngest son of the family. I stood by while my hosts spoke together in Sherpa, then Kaji put a burner on top of the wood fired stove and showed me the blue flame of biogas.

We walked through the lush garden in the backyard to a stone shed. The digester’s house was 4.7m by 4.2m on the outside. Inside, the small room was warmer then the house we had just left. I was impressed that a roof made of blue tarp supported by chicken wire was holding so much heat on an overcast day like this.  I saw the mixing station, built to the BSP specs that I’ve looked at so many times. There was also a temperature gauge at the start of the gas hose. It was reading ~0°C, but who knows how this thing was calibrated (if ever) and I am skeptical it was still working more than 12 years after being installed.

We went outside and met one of the older brothers. Puchetar Sherpa helped me pull the tape measure across the pit for the digester’s outflow. Then Nga Gyal Jen explained that they use pine needles to compost the effluent before use in the garden. I have seen this method done throughout the Khumbu with straight up human night-soil. So this technique is above health code standards for the region. Their garden was gorgeous, a testament to biogas effluent fertilizer. I know many a hippie in the states who would lust after the farm these folks have set up.

We went back inside where I was introduced to the patriarch, a man of 91 years. I was never given his name, he was just the father. We sat and had Sherpa tea. Melted butter, diluted with warm milk, cut with more than a hint of salt. After half my cup I decided I could handle it, which was good because they immediately refilled my mug.  As we sat in the kitchen I learned that BSP had built the digester in 2006, it has been in operation since, without incident.

The success of this digester at Muse is no guarantee that one at Gorak Shep will function. In this village, around 2500m up, the weather is much more clement and there is plenty of cattle and garden waste to feed the digester. I was most interested in the construction techniques used and the social dynamic that caused this project to excel. The digester is owned by one, large and clearly cohesive family. They have their own cattle and all the feed stock that might be wanted. This is a far cry from the scenario we have seen at Gorak Shep. But the people there are united by their desire to solve the massive waste issue they face and their love of the mountains. I think that with thoughtful planning and group involvement, our biogas project will see the same longevity I’ve observed in Muse.

The main thing I noticed during the afternoon’s hike, was how much more dangerous all the waters had become. Every bridge we crossed exposed us to the tremendous noise of the river being pulled between boulders as it raced itself to fall lower. I noticed waterfalls that I hadn’t seen on the walk up. And every cascade & tributary I had seen before, had become a swollen rapid. But the walk down today was safe, and we were only followed by intermittent drizzle rather than constant downpour.

Once we got to the Tea-House I’ll be staying at, we found Dan Mazur. Today was his second day trying to fly back to Kathmandu. The flying business here seems more like a game of chance than a service you can book. The hot topics around the dining room were leads on what passenger flights won’t turn into cargo shipments, the latest weather forecasts and if anyone knows someone whose brother flies helicopters up here. Tomorrow I will try to contact Mingma again and get some sort of ticket situation figured out. After that, I will walk to the town of Muse and ask random strangers to show me where the working biogas digester is. We’ll see how well that goes…

My time in Nepal is beginning to dwindle and I am sad to lose my friend and traveling companion Pasang. He wants to get back to the upper Khumbu, but he promised to say good bye before he leaves tomorrow. I have met a lot of good people here. Hopefully I will come and visit them again, next time to start building at Gorak Shep.

The work for the day was quickly done after our visit with Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee. The regional office is located here in Namche and we just walked in, waiting a few minutes while the director finished a couple tasks. I sat by while Mingma spoke in Nepali, but after a point he asked me to explain the basic technical design. I used a couple images, taken from the AutoCAD drawing I’d made back home, and tried to use my simplest English. I am not confident I fully conveyed the concept though, and I need to earnestly pursue Nepali language before I return here again.

Despite my language barrier, the director was pleased to see the progress that our team has made. I reemphasized the importance of having a local Khumbu organization like SPCC take the reins, once the digester is in operation. These folks already manage the scheduling and payment of the blue barrel porters, as well as the contractual obligation of expeditions to remove their waste from the mountain. They are the perfect group to oversee the biogas committee Mingma will help organize at Gorak Shep. They are also in a position to more gracefully navigate the paperwork involved with building inside a national park that is a world heritage site.

As the meeting concluded, the director expressed his faith and confidence in this waste solution becoming a reality and the goodwill of SPCC to help maintain the organization of its operation. He informed me that Mingma & I will present the design and the progress of this trip to SPCC’s president, once we have returned to Kathmandu.  I am very pleased with how things have gone. Hopefully the meeting with the president will result in our signing a letter of intent.

But before all that goes down, we need to get ourselves out of these monsoon soaked mountains. Judging by the way things are moving now, I highly doubt this will involve flying machines.

Seven AM today marked the start of the Base Camp to Namche marathon. So I was passed by hyperventilating people in spandex for most of the hike down from Pangboche. The first runner we saw was the incumbent winner of the last three years. At 17 minutes to 10AM he sprinted past us in Deboche, taking one breathe for every three strides. I could hear his deep steady breaths and counted his strides. That man is a different kind of athlete. It was 45 minutes before another runner (Nepali) was on his trail. I don’t know what the deal is, because when I eat dahl bot daily, my innards liquefy. No super-human ability there.

Anyway, my path today took me through Khumjung, so that Mingma could show me a biogas digester that had never panned out. This digester was built by Biogas Support Program Nepal. This is the Nepali branch of an international NGO that builds subsidized digesters in developing countries. They have done a lot of good work, especially in the warmer lowlands of Nepal, where folks raise cattle. The digester at Kumjung was sort of an experiment for them; their first chance to bring the technology to the higher, colder areas.

I didn’t get to see the actual digester, as the hotel it was built behind is now closed, during the summer lull of the tourist season. What I did see was a large stone building with locked doors surrounded by cow fields. The digester’s house was about 15m long by 4 or 5m wide. Mingma pointed out a contiguous room for storing the animal waste. This chamber also served for the digester’s mixing & feeding station. The larger part of the building encased the digester itself. I even spied what seemed to be the gas line out of the structure.

As we continued on our way, I questioned Mingma about what had happened there. The story, as he understood it, was based around the Hotel requesting the digester to supply their kitchen with biogas. BSP is need blind, and as mentioned earlier, they wanted to test their digesters at higher elevations. The digester was built, on private property, but the proposed substrate for it was intended to be the animal waste collected from the adjacent farms. The less affluent neighbors didn’t really see a benefit to doing extra work to help a prosperous hotel reduce their operating cost.

The farmers had nothing to gain and the hotel owners didn’t have much to lose. In the end BSP lost the chance to have a pilot biogas plant at 3780m and the hotel has a big useless structure behind their kitchen. For me, the locked doors of the digester held the same symbolic meaning as the gate to the hotel.  When humans create barriers between themselves, cooperation breaks down. This is an old story, and has been the end of many a well intentioned endeavor.

The failure of the biogas project at Khumjung was not the result of an engineering error. It was created by an oversight of the social dynamic, central to the intended operation of the digester. From what Mingma tells me, there was never even enough organic waste in the digester to start an active culture. I’d like to think that the lesson left locked behind those doors, is one the world has already forced me to learn. But every situation is different. And the assumption that humans behave rationally has been the downfall of many a scientific undertaking.

On my way out of the Khumbu, Mingma will show me a BSP digester that has been functioning without snags at Lukla (2840m) for some years now. I think back to his careful interviews with all the community members of Gorak Shep, the waste porters, the tea-house owners and even his discussions with the trekking sherpas who guide tourists to that remote place. The people there agree that a sustainable solution to the waste problem must be found. But more importantly, they want to cooperate to make that happen. I don’t think this project would be where it is now, and I’d doubt its ability to succeed, if Mingma were not working so hard to bring it forward. Not to take anything away from the years of work put in by all our project members, in America & Nepal  But without a native Sherpa speaker, helping to organize a local committee to take ownership, this project might end up a frigid hole in the ground.  If it ever even got that far.

I am not pessimistic about our project though. And it is good to be reminded, that the delicate web of human interaction requires careful attention. The Mt. Everest Biogas Project is not a club of technocrats, blindly investigating a story problem. We are a diverse group, listening to the needs and concerns of the Nepali people; sharing our skills and a common goal. Through direct involvement and organization of the local community, we hope to benefit the mountain and the people who call her home.

Just as I had given up on having a view of Sagarmatha from Gorak Shep, Mingma pointed her out to me before we started the hike down. I have no desire to risk putting my body on top of that place, I need it for some other things yet.

Anyway, on the hike down we found the current waste pit. It is quite wider than the older ones I’ve seen and located a few hundred meters from the terminus of a glacier. It was clear to see from the swath of cobble proceeding towards the Khumbu glacier below, that any leach from this pit will trickle down the basin and mingle with the valley’s waters. Once this pit is full, they will probably just make another here until in a decade or so they have to find another spot further down. Climbing on Mt. Everest isn’t about to stop anytime soon, and shallow burial is not a sufficient solution to the human waste problem here.

Of course I had to get next to the pit and take a few glamour shots, up close and personal. And when I did, I got stoked! There were multiple places where kitchen waste had clearly been thrown into the poop pit. This does make sense. If you didn’t have enough yaks to feed, and such stuff won’t burn well or compost at this temp & altitude; your best option is to put it somewhere you won’t have to smell it (much). Out of sight, out of mind.

The reason I got stoked was this clearly shows kitchen waste is available for our biogas digester. Coedigestion of human waste with food scrap improves biogas yield a good deal. Additionally, this means our project can help alleviate two solid waste issues faced at Gorak Shep.  There is a lot of work to be done on the design-side, as well as the community organization side. But by forming a local biogas committee, coedigesting organic waste at Gorak Shep will be possible. This site survey has shed light on the severity of the waste problem here and the escalating risk to the glacial waters of the sacred Himalayan mountains. But this issue can be surmounted, and we are on track to do so.

I am writing this now in Pangboche, more than 1000m below where I woke this morning. Mingma set a pace I was not about to fall short of, and we got here in about 5.5 hrs, even with stopping for two lunches. The same distance took me three days of walking last week, wow. Now on my descent through the Khumbu, I know this project is desired and supported by the locals, feasible despite the harsh conditions and completely necessary to mitigate the damage that has already been inflicted upon this magic place. The work of this trip is not over and I look forward to meeting with Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee soon.