Marc Jerrard
Everest Base Camp Trekker
From a Pub to Everest: The Challenge That Became Much More Than a Trek
It started, as quite a few of my adventures seem to, in a pub.
In March 2019, I went along to an Action Challenge Everest Base Camp open evening on London’s South Bank. I’d already begun pushing myself further with long-distance walking, but Everest was something else entirely.
Sitting there listening to stories of the Khumbu, mountain villages, teahouses and the long trail towards Base Camp, I had one of those moments where something that had always seemed impossibly distant suddenly felt… possible.
So I signed up.
At the time, I thought I was booking a trek.
I had no idea it would take more than three years to finally get there. I had no idea that some of us would decide to push beyond the traditional Everest Base Camp route towards Cho La Pass and Gokyo Lakes. And I certainly had no idea that, four years later, I’d still be telling the story.
In fact, I eventually wrote a whole book about it.
But the story had really started a little earlier.
Saying Yes to Everest
Everest hadn’t come completely out of nowhere.
The previous summer, I’d attempted the National 3 Peaks Challenge with my old friend Richard. It hadn’t exactly gone to plan. I made it through Ben Nevis, but halfway up Scafell Pike my challenge came to an abrupt end. Richard, meanwhile, carried on and completed all three.
It bothered me more than I expected.
On New Year’s Day 2019, still irritated by that failure, I found myself searching online for a new challenge. That search led me to Action Challenge and a world of challenge events I barely knew existed.
A few days later I was back on the Action Challenge website, where I discovered their international challenges.
That was when Everest appeared.
And that was what led me to the Action Challenge open evening on London’s South Bank that March.
I’d gone along to find out more. By the end of the evening, I was asking myself two very different questions.
“What on earth am I doing here?”
And:
“Why not me?”
The second one won.
So I signed up on the spot.
And then I had to tell my wife.
Marissa’s initial reaction wasn’t exactly one of shock. By then she’d become accustomed to me announcing grand ideas, many of which had a habit of disappearing again almost as quickly as they’d arrived.
This one didn’t.
I started training properly. Gym sessions became longer, walks became further and the distances I’d once considered ridiculous gradually became achievable. Eventually I completed my first 100km ultra challenge — more than 27 hours on my feet, without sleep.
By early 2020, I was ready.
My departure date for Nepal was 4 April 2020.
You can probably see where this is going.
Covid arrived. The world shut down. Everest would have to wait.
But strangely, the delay didn’t diminish the ambition. If anything, it made it bigger.
During lockdown I kept training — at one point walking 50 kilometres in circles around the garden simply to keep the miles going. And somewhere during those long months, another idea took hold.
If I was eventually going all the way to Everest Base Camp, why stop there?
A group of us opted for the extended route to Gokyo Lakes, taking us beyond Base Camp and across the 5,420-metre Cho La Pass.
The challenge I’d signed up for in a London pub was getting bigger.
Now I just needed Nepal to reopen.
Finally Nepal
By September 2022, after more than three years of waiting, the day had finally arrived.
I was actually going to Nepal.
There was something slightly surreal about meeting the rest of the group at Heathrow. Some faces were already familiar from the open evening and other Action Challenge events; others were complete strangers who were about to become a very big part of the next three weeks of my life.
There were 24 of us in total. We would all follow the classic Everest Base Camp route together before eventually splitting into two groups: twelve heading back after Base Camp and twelve of us continuing towards Cho La and Gokyo Lakes.
After all those years of preparation, I think we imagined that simply getting to Nepal meant the waiting was finally over.
We were wrong.
Kathmandu had other ideas.
Bad weather meant our flight to Lukla — the tiny mountain airport that provides the traditional gateway to the Everest region — was cancelled. Suddenly, the carefully planned itinerary we’d waited years to begin was already slipping
Our Action Challenge expedition leaders, medics and Sherpa team started working through the alternatives. One possibility was abandoning Everest altogether and switching to another trek. The other was trying to charter helicopters.
For me, there wasn’t much of a decision to make.
I’d waited three and a half years for Everest. I wasn’t giving it up that easily.
So helicopters it was.
Except even that didn’t quite go according to plan.
What followed was the sort of day that deserves a story of its own: unexpected landings, changing plans and eventually the realisation that we weren’t going to reach our intended destination.
Instead, our Everest trek began in the dark.
Headtorches on, packs shouldered, we set off on foot towards Chaurikharka for an unplanned night hike through the Himalayas.
It was chaotic, exhausting and nothing like the start I’d imagined during all those years of waiting.
And I loved it.
Because after Covid, postponements, cancelled flights and helicopters that couldn’t quite get us where we were supposed to be, we were finally doing it.
We were on the trail to Everest.
More Than Just A Group
Once we were properly on the trail, the rhythm of trekking life took over surprisingly quickly.
Wake up. Pack the duffel bag. Breakfast. Boots on. Walk. Eat. Walk some more. Find the next teahouse. Repeat.
But what I remember most vividly now isn’t simply the trail or even the mountains. It’s the people I shared it with.
Twenty-four people had arrived in Nepal with their own reasons for being there. Different ages, backgrounds and personalities, thrown together for one enormous challenge. Add our Action Challenge expedition leaders and medics, along with the incredible Sherpa guides and porters looking after us on the mountain, and we became our own slightly dysfunctional travelling family.
You get to know people remarkably quickly when you’re trekking together day after day. There’s nowhere much to hide. You see each other tired, cold, exhilarated, nervous and occasionally wondering why on earth you thought any of this was a good idea.
And you look after each other.
That became increasingly important as we climbed higher.
The scenery, of course, was extraordinary. Suspension bridges strung high above the river. Namche Bazaar appearing in the mountainside. Monasteries, prayer wheels and strings of prayer flags. And eventually those enormous Himalayan peaks that had existed in photographs for so long suddenly towering above us.
But altitude has a way of reminding you that you haven’t simply come for the view.
Every day took us higher. Breathing became harder. Sleep became more difficult. The cold intensified and the comforts became fewer. There were headaches, exhaustion and inevitable moments of doubt.
There were also an awful lot of laughs.
And perhaps that’s the bit I hadn’t anticipated before going to Nepal. I’d spent years thinking about whether I was physically capable of reaching Everest Base Camp. I hadn’t given nearly as much thought to the people I’d be doing it with.
Yet they were becoming every bit as important to the experience as the mountains themselves.
By the time we reached Gorak Shep, the final settlement before Everest Base Camp, the destination I’d first heard about in a London pub more than three years earlier was finally within reach.
Everest Base Camp was just a few hours away.
Reaching Everest Base Camp
On 3 October 2022, more than three years after signing up, I finally walked into Everest Base Camp.
There isn’t a dramatic finish line. No grand entrance. No summit moment with Everest towering neatly behind you. In fact, from Base Camp itself you can’t even see the summit of Everest.
Instead, there’s a jumble of rock and ice on the Khumbu Glacier, surrounded by some of the most extraordinary mountains on Earth — and the famous stone covered in prayer flags that tells you that you’ve made it.
Everest Base Camp. 5,364 metres.
For years it had been a name on an itinerary. Something I’d trained for, talked about, postponed, trained for again and occasionally wondered whether I would ever actually reach.
Now I was standing there.
And perhaps surprisingly, it wasn’t really a moment of “Look what I’ve achieved.”
It felt much more like “Look what we’ve achieved.”
We’d got there together.
The same people who had been strangers at Heathrow were now the people I’d walked beside day after day. We’d shared the tiredness, altitude, cold, ridiculous conversations, teahouses and all the little moments that never make it onto an itinerary but ultimately become the things you remember.
There were hugs, photographs and plenty of emotion.
I also thought about Marissa and the family back home. For them, Everest had meant watching me disappear halfway around the world for three weeks, often with little more than an occasional message to reassure them that everything was okay.
Standing at Base Camp, all those years of waiting suddenly felt worth it.
But for twelve of us, there was a slight complication.
We weren’t finished.
The traditional Everest Base Camp trek would now begin its journey back down the valley. Our little band of twelve was heading the other way.
Ahead of us was Cho La — a 5,420-metre mountain pass linking us with the Gokyo Valley.
And although Everest Base Camp had been the challenge I originally signed up for, I was about to discover that some of the most memorable moments of the entire journey were still ahead of me.
Beyond Base Camp
Leaving Everest Base Camp behind felt strange.
For more than three years, it had been the destination. Everything had been about getting there. Yet the following morning, twelve of us turned away from the traditional route home and headed deeper into the mountains.
Our destination was Gokyo, but getting there meant crossing Cho La Pass at 5,420 metres.
I’d known it would be tough.
I’m not sure I’d fully appreciated quite how tough.
Cho La would become one of the hardest days I’ve ever experienced on a mountain — physically and mentally — and one of the days from the entire trek that I remember most vividly.
There are stories from that crossing that are probably best saved for elsewhere. Suffice to say, it involved a very long day, a lot of ice and rock, some fairly questionable decision-making and several moments when the sensible option would probably have been to ask myself why Everest Base Camp hadn’t been enough.
But eventually we made it across.
And on the other side was Gokyo.
If Everest Base Camp had been the goal, Gokyo felt like the reward.
The landscape changed. The crowds thinned. Brilliant turquoise lakes appeared against a backdrop of enormous Himalayan peaks, and after everything it had taken to get there, there was finally time to absorb where we actually were.
I’d travelled to Nepal believing Everest Base Camp would be the moment that defined the trip.
It wasn’t.
Nor, looking back, was Cho La or Gokyo.
Because somewhere between the destination I’d spent years trying to reach and the journey that took us beyond it, I’d started to understand that the real value of the challenge wasn’t going to be measured simply by the places I could say I’d reached.
I wouldn’t fully appreciate that until I came home.
What I Brought Home
Eventually, of course, the mountains had to be left behind.
I came home with thousands of photographs, a mountain of dirty kit and enough stories to bore friends and family for years.
But I’d brought something else back too.
The trek had changed the way I thought about challenge.
Before Everest, a challenge was largely about the finish line. Pick something difficult, train for it, complete it, collect the medal and then start wondering what ridiculous thing to do next.
Everest was different.
Yes, reaching Base Camp mattered. Crossing Cho La mattered. Getting to Gokyo mattered. But when I thought about the trip afterwards, those weren’t necessarily the things I thought about first.
I thought about the people.
The friendships forged on the trail didn’t simply disappear when we flew home. Our group chat carried on — and, remarkably, is still going four years later. People I’d met because we happened to sign up for the same Action Challenge trip had become genuine friends. Some have even returned to Nepal together for more adventures.
That probably says more about what those three weeks meant to me than any photograph from Base Camp ever could.
And the experience changed me in other ways.
I kept walking. I kept taking on challenges. Longer distances followed, including more 50km and 100km events. Somewhere along the way, my enthusiasm for walking, exploring and occasionally getting myself into situations that seemed like a good idea at the time grew into Walking in Circles — initially a place to share my walks and experiences, and eventually something much bigger.
But Everest kept pulling me back.
I’d find myself looking through the photographs. Talking about the people. Remembering moments I’d almost forgotten. Someone would ask me about Nepal and twenty minutes later probably regret having asked.
And gradually I realised something.
I didn’t just want to remember the story.
I wanted to tell it.
That was the beginning of another challenge entirely.
Writing a book.
From Trek to Book
Writing a book had never been part of the plan.
When I walked into that pub in 2019, I certainly wasn’t thinking that one day I’d be sitting at a laptop trying to turn the whole experience into something other people might actually want to read.
But the more time passed, the more I realised how many stories there were.
Not just the obvious ones about Everest Base Camp, Cho La or Gokyo, but the smaller moments. The chaos, the friendships, the laughter, the difficult days and the people who had turned what could have been simply a trek through the Himalayas into something much more personal.
So I started writing.
What began as an attempt to capture some memories gradually grew into Everest Base Camp & Gokyo Lakes: A Midlife Journey to the World’s Greatest Trek.
I wanted it to be an honest account of what taking on a challenge like this is actually like for an ordinary person. I’m not a mountaineer or an elite athlete. I’m someone who discovered relatively late in life that I rather liked walking a very long way and occasionally making things unnecessarily difficult for myself.
There are plenty of books written by extraordinary adventurers doing extraordinary things.
This one was about what can happen when an ordinary person decides to say yes to something that feels extraordinary.
And perhaps that’s what I value most about the journey now.
Action Challenge gave me the opportunity to take on something that, sitting in that pub back in 2019, felt almost beyond me. The experience pushed me, introduced me to people who remain friends today, took me to a part of the world I’d dreamed about seeing and ultimately gave me a story I wanted to preserve.
The book was published in June 2026, almost four years after the trek.
But in a way, it still doesn’t feel like the end of the story.
Because every so often I think back to that bloke sitting in the pub, pint in hand, listening to someone talk about Everest and wondering:
Could I actually do that?
Turns out I could.
And if I ever find myself back at an Action Challenge Everest Base Camp open evening, perhaps this time telling my story rather than sitting in the audience, I know exactly what I’d say to the person at the back of the room quietly asking themselves the same question.
Why not you?
About Marc
Marc Jerrard is the founder of Walking in Circles, a UK hiking and walking website sharing walking challenges, hiking guides and stories from the trail.
His first book, Everest Base Camp & Gokyo Lakes: A Midlife Journey to the World’s Greatest Trek, tells the full story of the 2022 Action Challenge trek that inspired this article — from the chaotic journey into the mountains to Everest Base Camp, Cho La Pass and Gokyo Lakes, and all the friendships, mishaps and questionable decisions along the way.
Published in June 2026, the book is available in Kindle and paperback editions on Amazon.
