Our feet are the way we touch the earth. Our feet, of all the parts of us, have spent the most time in contact with the ground. Our feet understand soil in a way the rest of us doesn’t. Our feet, which are soft at first but hardened by experience, are the primary way in which we level ourselves with our surroundings.

It makes sense, then, that they would know the earth in a way the rest of us don’t. They have a feel for it in the way our hands or our ears never could. Our feet know how to keep us upright, balanced, safe. We ask this of them without realizing the request’s complexity especially when we’re on natural surfaces. Like, say, on a hiking trail.

There’s a learned laziness when walking a sidewalk or the tile floor of the bathroom that comes wholly undone when no two steps are the same. Our brains have to be allowed extra capacity to attend to the unfamiliar, inconsistent, and uneven and then pass that information along so the feet can do with it what they will. And what they will is to conduct the dozens of bones, joints, ligaments, tendons, and muscles into a symphony of balance.

Nowhere is this music more lyrical than on a technical mountain trail. On a recent trip to Nepal, the trails leading to and within the Khumbu Valley tested all the knowledge stored in my feet and then some extra. I walked for days in a row and gained a whole new level of appreciation for how my feet related (or didn’t) to their containers and to the ground.  

The trail we walked to Everest Base Camp frequently passed through villages where the path was made of hand-laid stone in order to be able to sustain the traffic. The Himalayas being a place of massive continental collision, you can imagine the characteristics of these stones – irregular, jagged, and misshapen. No matter how hard those that laid the path had tried, it was anything but smooth stepping

Then there were the stairs. The mountain range that produced Everest has ‘hills’ are larger than the entire ski mountain out my back window in Utah. We walked up and down parts of these foothills throughout the trek – descending to cross rivers, ascending to cross passes, and doing it over again. Because monsoons are frequent in summertime, erosion would eliminate the entire network of paths in one season if it weren’t shored up by something as hardy as rock. 

Thus, are thousands of stairs in order to keep the trails in any semblance of usefulness because trekkers and aspiring mountaineers are only a small fraction of the users of the trails. This part of Nepal has no roads so the only transportation options are by foot, by yak, or by helicopter. All the goods – the rice for dinners, the Snickers for alpine starts, the rugs that cover the benches in the teahouse dining rooms – are brought in by one of these methods. As you can imagine, helicopter space is precious so as many things as possible are strapped to the side of a yak or the back of a Nepalese porter.

The loads carried by the porters are inconceivably heavy. Particularly down low (‘low’ in this case being above 10,000 feet but less than 15,000) the cargo reaches above their heads and beyond the sides of their bodies; sometimes they walked sideways on the suspension bridges at river crossings in order to fit.  

Pound for pound, Nepalese porters are probably the strongest humans on earth. Certainly that I’ve ever witnessed. They are carry just under to far over their own body weight, and here’s where feet come into the picture again.

Because the trail was so rough, I spent a lot of time looking at the ground (this didn’t prevent me from rolling my ankle, but that’s another story). The trail was very well traveled during October because it’s the best chance of good weather, so I saw a lot of feet and a lot of footwear. And I noticed that the porters were walking these rough trails with insane loads day after day wearing flip flops. Or sometimes slides, the Adidas kind you’d see in a youth sports locker room. And if not those, then worn-down sneakers that didn’t fit quite right.

It was remarkable to see them ascending flights of rocky stairs, smoking cigarettes, talking on their phones, carrying crushing loads, wearing minimal footwear, and not even breathing very hard. Yes, they are more accustomed to the altitude than me, but that’s only one advantage out of five or six.

The knowledge held in their feet was so remarkable; they had been walking these paths long enough that their feet had hardened and adapted. They knew, their bodies knew what to do. This was familiar earth they tread and it was as if with each footfall the ground was saying hello. There you are. Here you are.

The dirt was embedded in their skin in a way that would never leave. They would encounter one another again and again. They shaped each other – the footprints left in the dirt and the imprints of the dirt on the feet.

Given how slow we were walking, my feet had far more quality time with the ground in Nepal than anywhere else I’ve hiked. We had to be slow in order to give our bodies the best possible chance of making it at unknown altitude, but it meant something else too. It meant that we touched that beautiful earth for so long. Not as long as the Nepalese Sherpas or the porters – their knowledge goes all the way through their flesh, to their bones and, if the respect and reverence for the land and the landscape was  any indicator, through their souls too.

How lucky I was to witness a relationship that close, ground and feet. Of my own and of those who tread that land every day. Maybe a little of their knowledge rubbed off on me too. Even if I wasn’t wearing the right shoes.  

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