I'm not really all that scared of Mount Everest. Until I look at it or stand on it, that is. Which is possibly why this Nepal Base Camp living is slightly easier than the north side version over there in Tibet. Here in Nepal, you don't look up at Everest exactly. What you see is a whole lot of big-darn-mountain, including the west shoulder of Everest, but you don't actually see Everest itself, the mountain defined by its all-important summit.

By contrast, from the Tibetan Base Camp, one sees one's future directly off in the southern sky, and one can easily get the willies by looking too long at too much future. Everest is often that, "too much future." Gazing at it is like looking into a crystal ball full of mayonnaise. Possibly not, if one is just looking for pretty shapes on the horizon. But a climber looking at Everest just can't make the future out too clearly, which is why we sometimes go toward it with our bills paid up and our promises vague.

I have to say that the four times I headed to climb Everest from the Tibetan Plateau, I was excited to see it in the distance — but mildly terrorized, as well. Partly, the process of getting up on that plateau into viewing range tends to liquify my innards anyway. So maybe I'm associating that first look with the all too common need to bolt from the truck or jeep and lose weight fast. Beyond that abdominal reaction though, there is the vivid memory of seeing, from the road just before Tingri, the mountain in miniature and still realizing that it is just too big. The other mountains behave themselves just fine, but of course Everest would have a big ragged, white plume tearing off for about thirty or forty miles of sky.

And sure enough, the experienced and chicken eyed can pick out objectionable features like the Second Step, the North Ridge, the Yellow Band and other torture devices, from ridiculous distances. Each screams out its own little reason to be afraid. Each scratches up memories that would have healed just fine anywhere else in the world (given the rest of a lifetime). Memories of thin air, bleeding throat, summitting angst, not summitting angst, headaches and cold aches. And yes, memories of stress and death. All that said, you may be wondering why a guy would go there four times, or back to the same mountain for this fifth try. Keep wondering; that isn't the subject of this particular rambling. I'm more interested right now in why this fifth time is so vastly different from the other four.

It is so different to me now that I feel completely honest in telling the "why askers" that it is a different mountain entirely down here in Nepal and therefore worthy of my ambitions. I found the walk in from Lukla to be entirely to my liking. It seemed like a wonderful way to approach a mountain from a number of different standpoints. Let's face it, preparing for these trips can be stressful and working to get them started can be even more stressful. Flying into Lukla in a dive-bombing Twin Otter can be a touch stressful, as well.

But walking through beautiful mountains on fine trails day after day and smiling back at everyone you meet and giving them a big "Namaste" whenever possible is pretty far from stressful. In fact, those long, comfy nights in sleeping bags – and the three great and easy meals a day – of a first rate trek go a long way toward ridding one's little world of stress. The concerns and worries drop away, replaced by normal and good human business like staying warm and fit.

Similarly, I found the simple exercise of walking easy trails at progressively higher altitude to be the perfect physical activity to go between all that time spent in airplanes and automobiles and hotels and all the time that will be spent cranking hard on biceps and quadriceps to get up those icefall ladders. Trekking is the ultimate luxury for a climber. Carry a pack just for the exercise, stop in each tea house for a Coke and a candy bar and one more precious "Namaste."

By contrast, "trucking" as we do up in Tibet to get over the border and into the mountains is not nearly so relaxing. Your legs get all bent up in those vehicles, your driver smokes, his music isn't very soothing, his driving doesn't involve a lot of brake use and his roads are lumpy at best. Going that route, you are expressly forbidden to camp before you reach Base Camp, and so you find yourself in a collection of towns that can most charitably be described as "frontier." And your "hotels" have rarely gotten anything approaching stars in the guidebooks. You don't get a lot of control in these situations over who is preparing your food and how.

Coming over that plateau in March, you are driving to seventeen and eighteen thousand feet. It can be cold, windy, dusty and maddening, as you have to wait several days in some of the worst spots to give your body a fair shot at acclimating. Then you roll into what will be Rongbuk Base Camp, mesmerized by that big meat-grinder of a mountain staring back at you, and you hop out into blowing dirt and start lugging rocks and boxes around to build a camp that won't tumble way across the gravel pit. If you are lucky up there, you won't have a chest-cracking, throat-tearing cough until sometime that first evening at north side Base Camp.

The first Everest views during this southern trek were framed between gently waving pine trees. There were many smiling, happy people about, marveling at the goddess on the horizon. It didn't bring any fear or stress into my fragile existence. Perhaps it would have if I had some crazy history with the Southwest Face that we were seeing all stony in the distance. That isn't the case though.

I couldn't have known more about this place ahead of time, it has been so well documented. Yet I was still surprised and amazed at everything I saw on the way in. I eventually pulled into an already well-constructed Base Camp in near perfect weather. My only problem was the crick in my neck I kept getting from looking up at so many steep and beautiful mountains. The truth is that there is a lot less hard work for a guy like me to do on this side. The Sherpa teams are more fully staffed (since there aren't the costs associated with bringing each man over the border and onto a Chinese permit) and they have the job dialed in perfectly here in their own backyard. That carries over into food preparation as well, Pemba (world's greatest chef anyway) has more helpers and more access to fresh food here at the head of the Khumbu. So we eat better. Life is good.

But of course, there is that little matter of the Khumbu Icefall grinding and crashing... and threatening us to pick just the right time to slip on through. I imagine that climbing through there will be about as relaxing as teaching a teenager to drive. Seems like a crazy way to start a climb, for sure: going from this most comfortable of Base Camps into the most bizzare route choice in history. Greg Wilson pointed that out to me when we first came into viewing range, and I have to agree, if I came up this valley looking to go climbing, I wouldn't spend more than a second or two dismissing the Khumbu as an option.

No doubt, I'm going to develop some real fear for that crazy stretch of freshly squeezed glacier...but I'll find a way to deal with it. That is certainly a different scenario than one is faced with on the north side. There, despite the odd rock tumbling your way on the hike to Advanced Base Camp, you really aren't threatened with much random violence. The Northeast Ridge climb starts out easy and gets a little harder as you go up, which is a kind of natural order that one expects of big mountains.

One more thing I'm not so crazy about down here in the southlands is the great numbers of climbers amassing. It isn't that the north side Base Camps are not well populated, but there is a lot of mountain for those crowds to work through and get whittled down by before they reach the tight little one-at-a-time obstacles of the Northeast Ridge at 28,000 feet. Here on the south side, the choke-points come early and often in the Icefall, I'm sure. There are plenty of nice people in this "crowd" of course, and I think we'll figure out some workable relations with everybody. I also need to remember that I've been worried at the outset of other trips about crowding and then later been surprised, pleasantly and otherwise, to find myself very much alone when it counted.

On balance, so far, I'm sure finding this Nepal-approach to my liking. That said, I'm positive that I'll be back in the blowing dirt of Tibet, excited for some future projects. Luckily, I like contrasts and this part of the world has a number of them. Everest is a mountain on a border. Two countries, two cultures, two drastically different climbs, two histories. I'm excited at the opportunity to see a familiar world from a new perspective.

— Dave Hahn, MountainZone.com Columnist