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Duke employee shares how Everest base camp trek tested her limits
Monika Anand, who reached the base camp on April 30, recently shared her journey with the Duke community.
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Pranavi Sharma - Thu, 31, Jul 2025
- 03:06 EDT
- 61
Monika Anand / Duke University
Monika Anand, a 56-year-old Assistant Research Practice Manager at Duke, reached Everest Base Camp in Nepal on Apr.30 after a 14-day guided trek. She recently shared her story with Duke, describing the physical and mental challenges she faced during the journey and how her connection to the Duke community motivated her along the way.
Anand and her husband, Mukesh, both Indian-origin and in their fifties, joined a group of 28 hikers in late April for the trek that started in Lukla at 9,383 feet and ended at 17,598 feet. “You would walk four or five steps and have to stop to breathe,” she told Duke.
Often trailing behind the group, Anand said the trek pushed her beyond what she thought was physically possible. At one point, when she paused to catch her breath, her husband pulled out his phone and called out, “Come on, the Blue Devils never give up!” prompting her to smile and reply, “Yep, Blue Devils go to the end,” while continuing her climb in a Duke cap.
Anand told Duke the experience was like nothing she had done before. “We hardly ever go to the gym, we don’t exercise much,” she said. She credited Duke’s Get Moving Challenge, a fitness initiative organized by LIVE FOR LIFE, with helping her train for the expedition. As part of a team called the DCI MiSTiC EmBraCers, Anand started hiking up to 8 miles on weekends in William B. Umstead State Park. “I knew if my team knows about it, it will create extra motivation in my mind because I can't let my team down,” she said.
Despite her preparation, the altitude proved tough. By the time she reached base camp, Anand’s oxygen level dropped to 64 percent. It returned to normal after the group descended 3,000 feet by helicopter. “There’s a huge difference between here and there,” she said. “Whatever we heard about what it takes to do the EBC, it was very different in reality.”
She recalled the beauty and unpredictability of the terrain. “Every single day the terrain was different, more beautiful than the last one, lesser and lesser oxygen and colder,” she wrote in an email to her Get Moving Challenge team. “The tea houses... had no electricity, heating or basic amenities. It was like surviving on a cold planet surrounded with ruggedly majestic mountains.”
Anand said the journey left a lasting impression. “Touching that rock filled me with an inner peace that I have never felt before,” she told Duke. Her husband added, “There comes a point in the trek when it’s just you and the mountains... and it’s kind of spiritual.”
Now back in Durham, she said she’s holding onto that sense of peace and the lessons the mountains taught her.
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