All you really need in life is oxygen, water and some chapstick with a high SPF

"The lust for comfort murders the passions of the soul." --Khalil Gibran

After my face cracked, peeled and bled at 18,000 feet from blowing my nose too much and being exposed to the elements, it's finally healing. I keep examining my skin in the mirror and I'm pretty sure its never looked better. Or felt softer. Is it because I'm back in the land of moisture content? Or does it feel that way because its been hidden under layers of clothing for weeks and I just have forgotten what skin feels like? Either way, I'm fascinated. Getting up for work today, the house was set at a balmy 64 degrees. It felt like an Alabama summer afternoon in the bedroom. As I waited for the shower to heat up (!), I realized that I was about to get in and I wasn't even shivering. This is how a shower at 16,000 feet (highest elevation that I took a shower) goes: Dangle your soap and camp towel from a rusty hook, take off all of your fleece, leave on your flip flops, ready, go! The warm water trickles out from a small tube attached to a barrel on the roof. You race to scrub every inch of yourself as fast as you can so you can get a once over of a rinse before your teeth start to chatter. You try not to look down at the "shower floor" because its so disgusting. And oh my God, you're wearing the same flip flops you trudge to the squat toilet in every night, the same toilet that people routinely "miss", ahem... You try to get re-dressed while standing on one leg so as not to get your "clean" pants wet from touching the ground. In the end you don't care because you've "cleaned" the top layer of grime away. There are no mirrors anywhere to see yourself anyway. Your beauty regimen consists of slathering the face and ears with SPF 50. Or REI GLUE as some called it. No need to pluck the eyebrows or even check them...nothing grows at this altitude anyway. It's funny that during the trip I once wore my winter hat for 3 days straight, even to sleep. When I took it off, my hair was a matted rats nest, so I just put the hat back on again. When we finally got back to the Yak and Yeti in Kathmandu I think many of us were shocked at our reflection in the mirror. All of the guys on the trip had full beards by the time we returned. We'd all lost a ton of weight. When we finally came down to dinner, it was like seeing a whole new group of people. The women all had makeup on and blow dried hair. The men had all shaved. We all had a previoiusly unseen set of clean clothes on! Thank God for the small things in life.