• About The Patch Expedition
• Climbing in Aid of Unicef
• Meet The Team
  • The Patch Team
• Corporate Sponsors
  • Become a Corporate Sponsor
• Training for Everest
  • Technical
  • Physical
  • Mental
  • Nutrition
• Climb Your Own Everest
• Climbing Everest
  • Everest Facts
  • The Gear
  • The History of Everest
  • The Route
  • Altitude and Illness
    • Our Bodies and Oxygen
    • Altitude and Oxygen
    • Acclimatisation
    • The Death Zone
    • Supplemental Oxygen
    • Sickness on the Big Hill
• FAQ's

FAQ's

If you haven't found the answer anywhere else on the site, hopefully you will find it here. If not please get in contact with us and we will try our best to answer all of your questions as soon as we can.

Well at base camp there are some fairly private toilet set ups. When you begin to climb any higher it does become a little more difficult! However, you are so busy trying to breathe and to walk that you stop worrying too much about maintaining your dignity when having to go! At the end of the day, who is actually going to want to watch you going to the toilet?! Guaranteed the urge to go is going to strike in the middle of the night during a snowstorm rather than just before breakfast on a sunny morning. Learning how to hold it until the last possible moment and wearing clothing with compatible openings seems to be our best option! Then it's a matter of discarding it out of view into the nearest crevasse!

Most of the time you don’t! It's definitely a luxury experienced at Base Camp only. The odd shower every couple of weeks is the norm. This will involve filling up a plastic shower bag with some hot water and having a very quick scrub before putting your dirty clothes back on! Hug anyone?!

Eating becomes a real chore when on Everest. You spend months of preparation carefully planning the nutritional value of each of your meals and then you arrive at Everest and it all goes out the window! At altitude your appetite tends to diminish and many people find it difficult to digest most foods. At Base Camp the Sherpa’s will prepare all the food allowing the climbers time to rest and recover. Meals tend to consist of locally available foods such as rice, potatoes, eggs, cabbage, soups and more rice!

Once you get higher on the mountain eating becomes a lot more difficult both in terms of preparation and physically in terms of actually eating. Breakfast will usually consist of some oatcakes and a hot chocolate. Lunch consists of whatever you can stuff in your suit pocket, such as biscuits and sweets. Dinner consists of whatever can be boiled in a bag with the water being used for a further hot chocolate. Many people become so weary it’s a major effort simply to boil some water to remain hydrated. On Everest you can burn up to 12,000 calories on a tough day and therefore we are likely to lose serious amounts of weight and the danger is our bodies will start to eat up its own muscles. So after all that training, we will probably return home in a worst state than before we even contemplated the idea of climbing Everest!

It takes about two and a half months from home, round trip. Acclimatisation takes time and requires a lot of patience. It takes about five days to trek from Kathmandu to Base Camp which is about 5,300 metres, 17,500 feet above sea level. If you go too fast you may become seriously ill. This principle has to be applied all the way up Everest. Therefore, you need to spend a few days at Base Camp before you feel well enough to climb a bit higher where you'll feel really rotten. You come down, rest and recover, then go up again and this time hopefully you'll feel slightly less rotten and ready to climb slightly higher again to feel really rotten once more. This process is repeated a number of times to encourage your body to acclimatise which usually takes about a month. If you don't take the time to do this you could suffer from a whole host of unpleasant altitude related illnesses.

Simply because they are too heavy to carry down. It takes a huge team effort to move an injured person and at high altitude it is almost impossible and places everyone at risk. In addition, helicopters cannot function at high altitudes so there is no possibility of being air lifted off the mountain. When climbing Everest it is something each climber needs to be prepared for and bodies are always treated with respect.

For all you pessimists out there who realise that not all dreams come true and who want to know what will happen if we don’t make it, let us reassure you that in the event that we are unable to summit due to illness, poor weather or insufficient funds, we will endeavour to ask another member of the climbing team to take the flag to the summit with them. Together we will still have raised significant funds in aid of UNICEF and the children of Nepal will still benefit from your sponsorship. In addition, we believe that it is the journey itself which is most important rather than the final destination and that by supporting us you will have been inspired to make changes in your life and to know that whatever happens you tried your best and no-one can ask anymore from you than that!