Thyangboche, Mount Everest, 1983 The monastery at Thyanboche comes at the place on the trek to the Everest basecamp when I felt that we were in the mountains. We had been crossing over and into lush rain drenched river valleys for many days. The trail finally made its way into the uplands that were the foothills of the Himalaya. The monastery sat over the drainage of the Dudh Kosi River and twenty thousand foot peaks took the place in the landscape of terraced rice fields. The weather also turned mountain like with cooler temperatures. We were camped in the pastures at the monastery. I walked up and into the rhododendron forest above camp in late afternoon and naturally turned around to look back toward the monastery and camp. I stopped dead in my tracks as a soft and eerie light filtered through clouds behind the unnamed peaks. I made 3 exposures at the same time and the light was gone quickly. This is a very difficult photo to print. The shadows are very dark and the colors are full of cross over. No matter, the picture for me speaks of an ephemeral moment and an ephemeral time. The monastery burned the next year as electricity was installed and Katmandu became a polluted city strapped down by martial law. My life was still a carefree existence of climbing and skiing but this was also an ephemeral moment in my life's journey.