Everything is white dotted with black; there is very little color at all. When I leave my tent to brush my teeth, the fog is parted as it was yesterday so I get another brief glimpse back down the valley to the Five Sisters. Just as quickly, the mountains are obscured once more. We are leaving this campsite this morning and heading to a camp that sits at the base of our first pass, Gyazi La, so I pack all my gear being careful to fold things tightly so everything can fit within a plastic bag. I brought about ten baggies which can fit smaller items and Carol gave me a giant 14x14" baggie that can fit all my tops and a couple pairs of pants. I wonder where such big baggies are sold. Gallon freezer bags are about as big as they get at Ralph's. They must have them next to the GIGANTIC cereal and laundry detergent boxes at Costco. Bart gave me a large trash bag that I insert all the smaller packages into including my sleeping bag so I am fairly confident that my belongings will stay dry today. After some tea and completing my toilette, such as it is, I make my way over to the breakfast tent for peanut butter toast and green tea. Strangely, this is something of a treat for me. I never eat toast at home.
We are ready to leave by 8:30 am but our staff has only made a small dent in the packing of the kitchen and other gear. For this reason, we decide to kill a little time by walking back down the valley that we walked through the day before yesterday in the snow. We stay on our side of the river and wander along it for about 30 minutes. The terrain is very rocky but without the snow, I can see where I need to place my feet to avoid loose rocks, mud holes and large bodies of water that have formed as a result of the weather.
About half way out, we can see across the river to the yak herder tents which hosted us the day before yesterday. A couple of them are outside going about their business. They wave to us and call out a friendly Tashe Dale (Hello!)! 
By the time we turn around and meet back up with our staff, they have made a lot of progress in packing the horses so we are confident that we can move forward on our path knowing that the team will not be far behind us.
The walk today begins with a very steep climb up the mountain at whose base we have been camped for the last two nights. I am walking a lot faster than my group this morning, so I stop to watch them at several intervals just to be certain that everyone is progressing. 
A fair amount of the valley I am leaving is increasingly visible as I ascend, though still white and dotted with yaks. It looks like the weather could be turning but I don't dare to hope!About half way up the roughtly 1,400 foot climb, I meet a group of three young herb hunters. This is a little off-putting to me only because I am truly in the middle of nowhere, looking down at my feet as I make my way along the rocky path and believing myself to be completely alone when I look up, and they are standing right in front of me. Thank God I wasn't picking my nose, although I doubt this gang would care. When you live in nature as they do, bodily functions and bad habits are meaningless. I take a look at all three herbers and realize that not one of them could be older than 14. I think there are two boys and one girl, but I am not entirely sure because their "look" is fairly androgenous and all of them wear earrings. One of them wears a single earring in his left ear, a long feather. It reminds me of a gold "feather" earring I used to wear in the second piercing of my right ear just about every day in my early 20s. Most people would wear a tiny stud so I thought the dangle was a little different, like it gave me an edge.
Eventually, someone asked me if I knew that a second piercing in the right ear was an accepted indication of homosexuality. They told me that the left ear denotes heterosexuality. There are signs? Is there a handshake too? Just two years ago, my neighbor in San Francisco told me he had assumed I was a lesbian because I drove an SUV. Huh? I have dogs! Since when did an earring or a car mean you are gay? Somewhere around age 24, I removed the third earring when I decided that maybe it wasn't so hip after all. Unless you are a 14 year old Tibetan herber, that is, who could care less what anyone makes of it. He does look pretty cool.All three of the herbers are clearly fascinated with my gear, as well they should be given that they are scurrying up the mountain in a sweater and shoes that look like Keds. They have bags at their waists to stash whatever they find today and no tools of any kind. Each of them touches the altimeter that is hanging on my pack at my shoulder. I have it here so I can read it easily without having to do anything more than turn my head. I take it off the pack and stop to show the herbers how it works and what information it provides. They are rapt and put their hands out to stroke it as though it is a gem or an auspicious prize. After I clip it back on, they begin touching my straw hat, which I brought to shield me from the sun and haven't actually used yet. They touch pretty much everything on me from my water bottles to my camera to my sunglasses to my peace sign that is pinned to the back of my pack. This is getting ridiculous! I feel like I have to give them something so I take off the pack and offer them my gorp. They are very pleased with this and each take a handful before we start walking again. For some reason they want to walk behind me, as though they are shepherding me, but I am not comfortable with three unknown people in my butt so I indicate for them to walk beside me. Two of them walk ahead and the feather boy walks to my left, at the very edge of the path which is now about a 1000 feet above the valley. He has snot running out of his nose and occasionally tries to sniff it up. I do the same and we laugh. It is our only shared language, similar to the language you might share with a toddler when you fake sneeze after he sneezes. Babies think that's pretty funny, too. After this "conversation", the feather boy takes my hand. Now he wants to lead me up the mountain, which at this point is a fairly obvious path. I let him hold my hand for a moment and then thank him before reclaiming it.
As we approach the top of our ascent, the three herbers grow tired of our non-communication and move on ahead of me. It is remarkable how quickly they move at more than 13,000 feet. Within a couple of minutes, I am completely alone again. Just me and the yaks. There are a lot of baby yaks in the valley I am now walking through. I wonder if this will make the mother yaks more defensive so I decide to make every effort to cut them a wide berth. The yaks in Tibet are a lot calmer than in Bhutan but you still don't want to push it. This is their world I am in. I take a picture of a little black baby yak
and continue on. A minute passes and I hear a scamper of footsteps behind me so I turn around and see that the baby is following right behind me, kind of like a dog might do when you pass their house. I try to shoo it and tell it to go back to its mother, but it just stares and blinks at me. So I start walking back toward her mother myself, expecting the baby to follow. But the baby just stands there, staring at me. She does not follow so I walk back toward her to start this process all over again. Apparently now she gets my message and sort of romps around me and back to her mother, 
as though this was all just a game. I feel the same way I have felt after finding a lost dog and successfully returning it to its home.With everything in order, I continue through the valley for another hour.
It begins to snow again so there is very little visibility. But still, I can see how immense the valley is with walls of mountains on either side. The river is running along the left side of me, white noise on white. There are herds of yaks dotting the mountains, black against the white. I come upon a large grouping of herber tents about 1000 feet up the mountain. They come running out of their tents to wave to me as I pass by. I wave back like the celebrity I am in these parts. Tashe Dale! I start to feel as though I am too far ahead of my group. I look around to make sure that I am on the right path. I must be, I think, but I decide to stop and give others a chance to catch up. I sit on a rock and listen to the quiet. After about 10 minutes, I see Bart pop up over the hill down the valley. And then the others follow. He says that the horses are coming so I decide to wait some more so they can pass. Here they come:
And there they go
Look how much faster they are than us!
We all walk together for the rest of the valley, which takes us another hour or so. At this point, it is about 3pm. I can see our tents going up in the distance atop a field of snow
that sits in a bowl of more snow that sits before Gyazi La pass, although I can't see it. The horses are fanned out across the camp, digging away at the snow to uncover the soil and look for food. When we reach the camp, we sit on our packs and wait as the tents are all pitched. I have to keep my snow pants on in this camp, even after a path is shoveled to the toilet. There is a lot of snow.
At dinner, we discuss the continuing snow which is coming down heavily now. We worry that it could affect our ability to make it over the pass. Dorji insists we will be okay. The horses can make it. Bart is concerned about our tents. They are not all weather tents and we have consistently had problems with condensation. They are not designed to withstand a big snowfall and because they are not A frame, the snow sticks to them and accumulates until they fall in. We decide that we need to clear the tents roughly ever 30-60 minutes at the rate it is snowing. Bart says he will sleep with a timer and get up and do this for us but our tents are in a cluster so we all hear the alarm every time it goes off. We wake at even intervals through out the night to clear our tents of the fast accumulating snow.
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