In 1967, with $200 in his pocket, twenty-two-year-old Peace Corps Volunteer Russ Staples heads for Nepal. Join Russ as he travels from a small village in South India, with little more than a borrowed backpack and youthful enthusiasm, to the base of the tallest mountain in the world, a journey that took forty days and included travel by planes, trains, buses, and rickshaws. There were no tea-houses or trail signs. Rivers were crossed on weather-worn rope bridges and there were no regular flights into Lukla. Russ followed the original trek route taken by Sir Edmund Hillary’s successful 1953 ascent of Everest and that of the 1963 American Everest expedition.