I'm Going to Everest Base Camp—And I'm Bringing a Dinosaur

I have been waiting for this one for a long time.

This year, during my fourth year of medical school, I'm heading to Nepal with Wild Med Adventures to trek to Everest Base Camp and visit the Everest ER—one of the most remote and well-known emergency medical facilities in the world. I'll be joining a team of physicians for a trek that combines real wilderness medicine training with one of the most iconic routes on the planet.

If you know me, you know this trip has been written on the wall for a while.

I've spent the last few years as president of our wilderness medicine club at Noorda, and one of the things I'm most proud of is helping build an Advanced Wilderness Life Support course that was actually affordable and accessible for our students.

Wilderness medicine has always felt like the perfect intersection of everything I love—the outdoors, clinical problem-solving, and the reality that medicine doesn't always happen in a hospital. Sometimes it happens on a mountain. Sometimes it happens where the nearest help is hours away and the decisions you make in the next five minutes are the only ones that matter.

That's exactly what this trip is built around. Along the trek, our team will be doing lectures and hands-on training focused on delivering care in outdoor and remote settings—the kind of education you simply can't get in a classroom. And capping it off at the Everest ER, a place that has treated some of the most extreme high-altitude medical cases in history, is something I've honestly dreamed about since I first got serious about wilderness medicine.

But the medical training is only part of the story.

I'll also be carrying Charlie's Dinosaur—a small stuffed dinosaur that represents something much bigger than it looks. Charlie's Dinosaur is part of an outreach program through the Susan Cox Powell Foundation, which provides backpacks filled with essential items for children who are suddenly placed into emergency foster care. These are kids who leave their homes with nothing, and these backpacks—filled with bedding, clothing, toiletries, school supplies, and a toy—are waiting for them when they arrive.

I'll be documenting Charlie's journey through Nepal the whole way, sharing photos from the trail as we climb toward Base Camp. Every share, every donation, every person who learns this program exists because of this trek—that's the whole point.

I started climbing mountains as a teenager with a dream and a cause. This is that same idea, taken as far as it's ever gone.

Nepal, here we come.