There’s a particular kind of friendship that forms when two people have spent years throwing themselves into increasingly epic adventures together. For Meg Armon and Nat Hill, aka the Mountain Sisters, it involves the ability to giggle in the face of adversity, an almost uncanny knack for knowing exactly what the other person needs without saying a word, and a deep mutual trust when the stakes are high.
This September they’re taking that friendship and a 6.5 kg pack or two to the Himalayas, where they’ll attempt to fastpack as much of Nepal’s Great Himalaya Trail as possible in around 42 days.
Before they disappear into the wild, I sat down for a chat about everything from what makes the friendship tick, their training and route planning, to what they’re carrying, potential luxury items and why they’re going in with a taste for adventure, but without any illusions about who’s really in charge.
Nepal was quick to remind us who’s in charge. After this interview, severe flooding hit the country, leaving us all in stunned disbelief. After significant consultation and deliberation, Nat and Meg are still planning to go, but the excitement surrounding their adventure has now been mixed with deep sadness and concern for the country, its people and everyone affected by what has happened. They have revised their route but have been encouraged to come and be part of the incredibly important part of Nepal’s economy: tourism.
Our thoughts are with Nepal.
Meet the Mountain Sisters
Before we dig into the big adventure, I asked both Mountain Sisters for a quick introduction.
Nat: My name’s Nat Hill. Meg and I first met at Outward Bound about five years ago, where I worked as a physio. I’d just finished running the Te Araroa Trail and got back to Outward Bound about three days before the Covid lockdown. Then I was thrown into a bubble with this lady, which turned out to be one of those pivotal life moments that I’m forever grateful for.
Meg: Gosh this feels like an episode of Love at First sight…I’m Meg Armon, and I’d refer to pretty much the same timeframe. Someone had told me that Nat was really cool and that we’d get on really well. Then I saw her for the first time at the physio and thought, ‘Oh my Gosh, I’m going to have to make a good impression on this person because apparently, we’re supposed to get on really well.’ So I tried to look very cool while she was annihilating my leg, haha.
Nat: You unnerved me! I’d heard about this awesome person named Meg, and I was like, ‘Oh-oooh! I better do a good job so that maybe she’ll be my friend and come run around and play outside with me.’
Meg: We were both very adventurey, which was an instant connection. From the start we had a very similar way of approaching adventure. There were a few times when we were out together, and I’d look across at Nat and she’d have exactly the same dark smile on her face as me. You know the one. The “things are not going well, but here we are so lets get this done” sorta smile.
Nat (puts on an evil voice): Laughing in the face of darkness! It’s our shared way of handling things when the going gets tough.
Meg: That’s always been one of the things I love about Nat. Whatever the mission is, she’s like, ‘Yeah! Let’s do that!’ She just gets excited and then we work out the details.
Big adventures
The two girls became good friends, forged the Mountain Sisters and started adventuring together. Over the past few years, Meg and Nat have collected an impressive list of mutual events, with GODZONE Chapter 12 being the most recent big one.
Meg: Another big one was doing the Three Passes in a day.
Nat: We’ve also done the Wangapeka Track and Heaphy Track over two back-to-back days, with a night in Karamea.
The Wangapeka trip is a pretty good example of how we operate. We were driving towards the start when there was this massive thunderstorm and rain hammering down. This was definitely a moment when we glanced at each other and thought, ‘Do we need to revisit this idea?’
Meg: Who’s gonna call ‘this is a bad idea’ first? But again we checked the weather reports and thought in great detail about the route, and both decided that it was still a good call.
That’s something I’ve really enjoyed about adventuring with Nat. We make decisions together. That collaborative approach is very important when you’re doing things like trotting across Nepal.
During the chat, both girls frequently refer to their ability to make decisions together as one of their biggest individual and mutual strengths. When adventuring together, they don’t take on clearly defined roles. Instead, filling whatever space needs filling seems to come very naturally to both.
Nat: When we’re out there, we don’t necessarily travel side by side the entire time. Sometimes one of us is 100 metres ahead of the other. But there’s never that feeling of, ‘Oh shit, I’m leaving her behind,’ or, ‘I feel like I’m being left behind.’
Meg: Exactly. When I’m with other people in the outdoors, I sometimes find myself wondering, ‘Are they wanting to stop? Am I going too fast?’ With Nat, everything just flows. We don’t have fixed roles where one person is usually “this” and the other “that”. We’re both very observant of our own and each other’s journey, do our thing and just step in where needed.
At this point, the giggles creep in...
Meg: Sometimes Nat is freezing and can’t use her hands. Sometimes I’ve broken a rib and can’t breathe properly…
Nat: No worries matey, I’ll breathe for you! On a more serious note: because we’ve spent so much time outdoors together, you just get a vibe for what the other person needs. It was painful enough watching her suffer through Godzone with fractured ribs, let alone having them, so if I could have breathed for you I would have! Meg has such mental strength…It’s incredible.
Meg: Nat knows what not to say to me when I succumbed to whimpers for a particularly shitty seven-kilometre section on GODZONE after racing with a broken rib for five days.
Nat: Meg knows how to help me when I suddenly stop 1 km from the end of a 60 km run mission, we are both totally drenched and I announce ‘I’m freezing!’ and suddenly rip all my wet top layers off in order to put something dry on. Meg instantly dives into my pack, grabs something out and helps me throw it on as I can’t use my hands. Thinking about it now, it’s ridiculous but at that moment she knew I needed help and one more gel wasn't going to cut it.
I think that’s what makes us work. If one of us is struggling, the other one just steps into that space, no questions asked.
Destination: Nepal
Well, one thing’s for certain: the Mountain Sisters are a cracker of a team, with a fair amount of boisterous courage, serious outdoor skills and plenty of laughter to get them through whatever they’re doing. But how did they end up with this Nepal adventure on the map?
Nat: The Nepal idea started with us deciding that we wanted a good, bootie adventure. We got the world maps out and started thinking about where we wanted to go and what sort of bootie-ness we wanted.
We looked at places like Europe and parts of South America. But Nepal had been on my bucket list for ages, so I gravitated towards Nepal straight away.
I’d never been, and I’d heard so much about the culture, the people and their kindness. I love being surrounded by mountains, and the Great Himalaya Trail seemed to have everything: jungle, mountains, high passes, incredibly remote areas. It just looked like the perfect place for what we wanted.
Meg: Yep, I was also very keen. I’d already been to Nepal once, into the Solukhumbu area, south of Everest. During that trip, it was really special to be a New Zealander in that part of the world because of the relationship between that area and New Zealand, particularly Sir Edmund Hillary’s work there.
We stayed with an incredible family who, at the time, were the family of Kanchha Sherpa - the last living Sherpa from the 1953 Everest expedition. We walked into this house and were welcomed with, ‘New Zealanders! Come in. Tomorrow I’ll introduce you to my father.’
The next day, we found ourselves sitting in Kanchha’s bedroom, on his bed, and he was showing us all these photographs from that first expedition and talking about Edmund and Tenzing. Looking back even now, I am still in a little bit of disbelief about what an incredible life experience this was.
Giving back
While looking forward to their own adventure, both Meg and Nat express how privileged they feel to be welcomed into the country and given the opportunity to experience its elements while being looked after by locals along the way. And with that privilege comes an urge to give something back.
Nat: We’re supporting the Himalayan Trust and have started fundraising again. This amazing organisation works alongside Nepalese people in the back blocks to improve education, healthcare, and fresh water for villagers in remote Nepal.
What I really like about it is that it’s not just about arriving somewhere and deciding what people need. Their work is done alongside local communities, with the aim of supporting what they actually want and need.
Meg: Exactly. That’s really important to us. We’re going into Nepal because we want to have this incredible adventure, but we also want to recognise that we’re incredibly privileged to be able to travel through these communities. If we can contribute something positive while we’re there, that feels like the right thing to do. Not only by spending our money in the country but also by working alongside the Himalayan Trust who is so well established there.
Nat: So we’ve set up a Givealittle fundraiser around the trip. We’d love people to get behind that, because 100% of what we raise is going towards supporting this work.
Meg: And hopefully we can do more than just raise money. We’d love to connect with some of the communities and, if the opportunity comes up, visit one of the schools or projects along the way.
In light of what recently has happened, supporting the people and communities of Nepal feels even more meaningful. If you feel connected or inspired to do a little more, please consider supporting their Givealittle fundraiser for the Himalayan Trust.
Goals and hopes
Completing the Great Himalaya Trail is no small feat. Not many people have gone out to finish it, and some of those who have managed it have called it their worst experience ever (true story!). While the girls are heading out in the hope of completing as much of it as possible in the time they have, they’re extremely aware that the trail might have different plans.
Nat: We’ll be tackling the trail east to west, and the entire length of the trail is about 1,700 km. But all the exact numbers are surprisingly difficult to pin down. Depending on what you look at, the elevation gain is quoted at around 88,000 metres.
Meg: But when we looked at GPX files ourselves, we got something closer to 240,000 metres. So yeah, who knows… For our trip, we’re working on roughly 42 days and something in the region of 42 kilometres a day, with about 2,300 metres of elevation every day.
Nat: There are just so many factors that may slow us down. Altitude sickness, stomach upsets, trail rerouting, mother nature…
The goal and the hope is to finish as much of it as possible, keeping an open mindset and remaining flexible with plans so we can roll with whatever crops up. But overall, I would just be so happy with the adventure of it, and for both of us to come away happy and healthy and have this experience and bonding time along the way.
Meg: It would actually be pretty arrogant, and potentially dangerous, to go into that part of the world with a firm fix of: “This is what we are going to achieve.”
Many have done the trip before us; some have run with a helicopter support crew, some have raced it, some tramp, and some have done it with a light trail type pack after scouting many of the segments prior to their attempt. But all that is not our reality.
For us we have a clear strategy of what we hope to do and how we hope to do it. We’re going unsupported. We’re carrying our own gear. We’re taking a double-skin tent with us and we are reading and running the trip as we see it out there. In a modern world where so much is certain, I cannot wait to be immersed in the middle of a big uncertain adventure.
The kit
Now comes the very important part everyone was probably waiting for. What does the travel kit of two adventurers travelling light in the hope of covering big distances in the Himalayas actually look like?
Nat: With our gear, we’re trying to find that sweet spot between “as light as possible” and “appropriate for the conditions”.
Meg: Our tent is a NEMO Hornet Elite – an ultralight double-skin tent weighing around 800 grams, including the poles. The double skin should help us stay drier inside. The flipside of something that light is durability. It isn't designed for extreme alpine winds, so we’ll need to be careful about where and how we pitch it.
Nat: You’ll laugh, but we are three weeks out from our departure, and we are still organising our pack. We had an awesome pack, but it’s quite wide for both of us. There is a new La Sportiva 34-litre sort of fastpacking pack. It’s freaking amazing and exceptionally well designed. So we have to talk to our friends at La Sportiva and see if we can take it with us.
Meg: For footwear, we’re both sticking with La Sportiva, but we’ve chosen different shoes.
I’m taking the Jackals. I really like the way they wrap around my foot and give me good contact with the ground. There’s a lot of trail footwear out there with enormous amounts of foam and stack, but I’ve gone in the exact opposite direction, and Nat even further.
Nat: I’m taking the Bushidos. I’ve got a fairly wide forefoot and they suit me really well. My foot spread after running the Te Araroa Trail, so I hope I don’t return from Nepal with flipper feet!
I’ve worn the Bushido for the last few times at GODZONE, so I know my feet are happy in them. We’ll also take a second pair of shoes and have those sent to us somewhere along the route.
Meg: For water, we’ll use a LifeStraw along with a Steripen and aquatabs, and carry lightweight three-litre water containers, which we can fill if we’re moving away from water supplies for a period of time.
Further items are foldable LEKI poles, a medium weight sleeping bag, a sun shirt, fleece layers, a rain jacket which will hopefully protect us well from all the elements, thin rain trousers, shorts, a sunhat, sunglasses, sunscreen, mid-layers, thermals, microspikes, and a Fenix HM65 HT V2 headtorch. Also merino socks and a down jacket.
We also each have a pair of warm down pants that are constructed from an oversized men’s down jacket. Basically, two giant sumo-wrestler-style legs with upside-down zip pockets. They cost about 50 cents, rather than around $900 a pair if we were buying them. Thanks, Mum, for helping make them!
Nat: Cold is probably one of the things we’re least confident about. Temperatures could potentially drop to around -15°C, and neither of our sleeping bags is designed to comfortably sleep at those temperatures on its own. So we’ll be relying on our clothing systems as well.
The shareable things will be the tent, the cooker, the gas, the first aid kit, a little repair kit and a bit of cord. Maybe we should also pack a tow rope that connects us to each other. My strength is going downhill, whilst Meg’s is uphill. So I can tow her down whilst she’ll drag me up.
For those who were getting a little too serious about this: the tow rope was obviously a joke 😉.
Some luxury
The question of whether there were any luxury items the girls were allowing themselves for the trip was met with another eruption of laughter.
Meg: I was thinking of a second pair of undies. And I’m considering taking a small comb. Otherwise, my hair is going to become a haystack. And maybe a cotton T-shirt to sleep in. It sounds ridiculous when you’re trying to save every gram, but there’s something about having one clean, comfortable thing to put on at night.
Nat: There were chats about headphones for when the going gets tough, but that’s another electrical item that needs charging, so they might not make the final cut. And a razor, maybe?
Meg: Or we buy one in a village, if they’ll have any. We might reach the point where we’re looking like yetis. I guess if we find ourselves being hunted, it’s probably time to invest!
Nat: Oh, and definitely toothbrushes. But I don’t consider that a luxury, as you have to keep your mouth clean to avoid ulcers and look after your teeth with all the sweets we’ll eat for calorie intake. But that’s pretty much it. I’d say that pulling everything back to the bare bones is also part of the experience.
The route
So, if there might be a possibility to buy a razor along the way, what does the route actually look like?
Nat: There are “islands of safety” in the more established trekking areas. Here we’ll resupply on food and other things, maybe be able to send ourselves some parcels, have a decent meal and a bed in one of the tea houses, as they call them. They are dotted along the way.
Meg: But then there are huge gaps between those areas, particularly as we move further west, with potentially days where we’ll be on our own. So when we are in the more remote regions, or we’re not getting to a tea house at an appropriate time, we’ve got the tent and the food and dehydrated food we’ll be carrying.
Nat: I really hope we’ll have enough juice to get through this trip and don’t come back totally wasted. A lot of people who do similar trips lose a lot of muscle mass, and neither of us is starting off huge, so as long as we keep feeding ourselves three snickers at a stop…we’ll probably be alright.
I expect us to eat a lot of pringles, peanut butter and cans of tuna. Nutrition won’t be perfect, and we’re not expecting to get every vitamin and mineral we need every single day. We’ll just eat whatever we can get to keep going.
What about route setting, communication with the outside world and the cultural approach?
Meg: We’ll be in and out of reception, with people back in New Zealand helping monitor the weather and communicate important information. My husband Dave and our friend Lacey will be our eyes and ears from afar.
Nat: If we’re about to commit to a particularly remote or challenging section, we can make a decision to delay, change our timing or move faster depending on the weather and conditions. We are working closely with our outfitter in Nepal who will help us do this on the fly. The mountains get the final say and we always have to respect that.
Meg: We’re not going to take paper maps, which I feel a bit emotional about. There are just so many and the level of detail is varying degrees of helpful. Instead, we’ll take a third phone that is completely dedicated to navigation.
Nat: We’ll also carry sarongs so that we don’t rock into villages with bare knees when wearing shorts. We want to be culturally appropriate and respect Nepali ways of life. And we have to think about how we structure our days so as not to arrive in a village at a time that’s rude. We definitely want to share time and meaningful experience with locals and that means not arriving at ridiculous o’clock or having any expectations of service.
Another thing the girls wanted to clarify is that this adventure is not a technical mountaineering expedition.
Meg: We want to travel across Nepal and, as a result of that, we know we'll encounter snow and be around the sides of glaciers, but we’re not setting out to climb technical Himalayan terrain. We'll carry microspikes as an insurance policy for icy sections, but we’re not going out to immerse ourselves in a mountaineering environment.
Nat: The Great Himalaya Trail has a high and a low route. We’ll be sticking as much as possible to the high route, and there are sections where the high route moves into much more technical mountain terrain. But we’ll be dropping down and skirting through underneath it.
Reality check
The scale and greatness of this trip is almost impossible to put into words or even imagination. But while the outside world might mostly see two people having a cool adventure in Nepal, the reality behind this trip goes far beyond what meets the eye.
Meg: I feel that with a mission like this, it’s easy for people to just see the trip. I think it’s just so easy to minimise this to: “those two went out there and had a good time.”
Nat: Which we hopefully will, but there’s all the hard grind and the sweat of training in the previous years. We absolutely loved it, so that’s an important aspect of it. And we had this ultimate goal, which felt great to work towards.
Meg: I’m not really an athlete, so in the last couple of years I worked with a coach to get as fit as possible for this trip. It has been a life full of ongoing physical activity and two years of intentional coaching and training before we could go on with this trip.
Nat: It takes years to build a solid engine you can throw anything at and not break down. And even with that there's still a chance of injury. Maybe with a year of training, you can get something done, but you don’t know how you’ll be on the back foot coming out of it. Your body needs to get used to recovery times as well, doing things day after day and knowing what it feels like chucking all the calories in, how to handle it and how all the equipment works.
When asked whether this will be their biggest adventure and physical challenge yet, both confirmed that this will indeed be the case. However, saying that also made them want to put things into perspective: choosing an adventure is very different from being confronted with unwanted adversity.
Meg: In the context of the privileged environment of our lives, I do feel a bit of discomfort about saying that this will be hard. Yes it will be a challenge, but we are choosing to take it on.
That’s very different from the adversity people experience when they don't have a choice. So I hold that quite heavily and find it difficult to speak about knowing in many instances in life people don't have a choice. We're incredibly lucky to be able to decide that we want to go and do this cool thing.
Nat: Hopefully, our story will also inspire others that they too can do it. You don't have to be the fastest, strongest or bravest person in the room to go and do something like this.
You need a goal and some good coaching, and you can build yourself up to achieve that goal. So if there’s anyone wishing to commit to a similar adventure: the right advice and preparation will definitely get you there!
Follow the Mountain Sisters on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mountain_sisters_/
Visit the Givealittle page: https://fundraise.himalayantrust.org/mountainsisters
More about the Himalayan Trust: https://himalayantrust.org/