Kelly Hammond repeating Everest basecamp fundraising trek three years after major earthquake in Nepal

It was an opportunity Kelly Hammond couldn’t pass up.

Since she was 17 she has dreamt about Mount Everest, so when the opportunity arose to trek to the fabled mountain’s basecamp she knew she had to do it. This will be her third attempt and she’s hoping the third time will be the charm.

She had to cancel her first attempt for personal reasons. The second ended after devastating earthquakes struck Nepal after the team she was travelling with had already arrived in Kathmandu. They aborted their plans and returned home early.

In the past she had eight months to prepare for the trip; this time she has just four days.

Hammond had planned to repeat the trip with her 2013 trekking partner, Brandy van Gelder, in 2019, but on the weekend she received a call from the Dream Mountains Foundation that a spot had opened up on the 2018 Dream Team—did she want it?

Of course she did. And when she told her husband Ed about the trip and that she would have to leave on April 27, he said, ‘You’re going.’ Her children are excited for her, too. But she was nervous to tell van Gelder that she’d be travelling without her.

“Telling her that I was going without her I think caused me the most anxiety because we’d had this pact together (to try again), but when this opportunity arose I could not turn it down,” said Hammond. “We had a lot of dreams together—fulfilling physical dreams, emotional dreams—and once we were thrown into that adventure on a different level, our dreams changed and it became more of being globally aware of the needs of others, certainly in a time of natural devastation like (the earthquake).”

Just like Hammond’s family, van Gelder has been a huge support. “She said to me, ‘make it there, take that picture, breathe it all in…and bring back the adventure for me. I will be taking her every step of the way.”

Van Gelder still plans to make the trip in the future, and Hammond will be documenting this trek every step of the way in photos and in a journal for her friend.

Brandy van Gelder (left) and Kelly Hammond on their way to Nepal in 2015 (supplied photo)

Hammond is physically fit so the demands on her body aren’t a concern for this trip, and she’s ticking off the list of things she needs to pack and accomplish before Friday. She picked up her visa from the Embassy of Nepal in Ottawa yesterday and stopped in to talk with Gillian Barth, the woman whose place Hammond will be taking on the trip. She’ll be carrying a banner for CARE Canada, the charity Barth was raising funds for.

Mentally and emotionally, Hammond is still preparing herself.

“It’s going to be full circle for me in many ways. It’s going to be very cathartic and healing as well,” she said. “Everything that we saw in 2015 in a place where I was looking for enlightenment and soul searching and happiness and my dream coming true certainly turned upside down.”

This will be not only a way to fulfill my dream but also to see what is happening in Nepal now and how they are recovering from that devastation. It’s really important to me to see how they are coming back out of that trauma and darkness.

And she is thrilled that she’ll have another chance to fulfill her dream.

“It is an opportunity that keeps presenting itself,” she said. “There is a reason for me to make this journey. I just feel that when those doors open, and you are presented an opportunity, you have to take the step and you have to travel that road to find out why you’re meant to be here and what’s on the other side of that. Because there’s too many stars that needed to be aligned for this to happen and for me to be able to accept this position so quickly and to make all the details come together.

“Life is so short, and I’ve had so many losses in my life in the last year that I think, why wait and put off any opportunity? Because you just don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow.”

Hammond plans to update the Facebook page she and van Gelder started for their last trip with photos and details from this trek. You can follow along here.

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