I'VE WONDERED WHAT it's like to be a porter since I first misspelled Kathmandu. Ten years ago, while living and studying in Nepal, I escaped that urban ashtray for a month and lived in Simigaon, a steeply terraced farming village one valley over from Everest, where most of the men were, or had been, trekking porters. The way they described it, portering was one big party, hardly work—a lighthearted affair that bordered on "happy peasant" cliché. Could that be true? I wanted to find out by working with porters as a porter—except for that small detail of carrying heavy things.

A dhoko-naamlo isn't fun. It's an ancient tradition from a simpler, more Hobbesian time. The dhoko, a cone-shaped basket with a flat bottom, is woven out of bamboo slats to be roughly as tall as your torso. The naamlo, or tumpline, is a section of rope with a three-inch-wide head strap, generally cut from a flour or rice sack. Wrap the naamlo around the back side of the dhoko; position it just in front of the crown of your head; insert anvil collection.

Aside from the fact that you can get one for roughly a dollar in any Nepali village, the dhoko-naamlo's main virtue is that it allows one to carry backbreaking amounts of gear. In treks like ours, 25 kilograms, or 55 pounds, is the minimum any porter will carry. Twelve-year-olds routinely carry 20 pounds between villages, and in an exhaustive 1999 study of 635 porters, the average weight was 160 pounds. A trekking porter earns between $3.50 and $6 per day and the equivalent of a day's wages in tips per week—assuming he gets them. According to Porters' Progress, a fledgling cooperative based in Kathmandu, guides frequently steal their porters' tips. Despite this, almost every Nepali ethnic group works as trekking porters: Sherpa, Tamang, Magar, even the Tharu, whose home in the 300-foot-high lowlands certainly gives them no historical or biological advantage. I would be the first porter I knew of from Weak Rich Westerner caste.

My longtime buddies at Sherpa's Adventurers, a Nepali restaurant in Boulder, Colorado, loved the idea. They offered an exhaustive list of contacts in Solu-Khumbu (the Everest region), my notes filling with the names of a dozen folks—three Nima Sherpas, two Ang Tsering Sherpas, two Pasang Sherpas—and walking directions. I set off this past February with light spirits and 50 pounds' worth of sneakers, jackets, and watches to deliver to their families.

Finding a job wasn't quite so easy. I arrived in Kathmandu to discover that Prachanda, leader of the 11-year-old Maoist insurgency, had come out of hiding to make a public appearance at a fiery rally downtown, foreshadowing the local strikes that would cramp travel in the coming weeks. Tourism has already declined so steeply since the rebellion—by 70 percent at its nadir—that only a rare porter finds three months of work per year. To make matters worse, peak season wouldn't start for two weeks. And then a cold snap hit, canceling mountain flights to Solu-Khumbu.

Striking out in Kathmandu, I rerouted to Pokharaa, low-lying launch pad for Annapurna treks. But interviewing blind at the 100-odd trekking agencies there left me jobless and down in the mouth, thinking I should just give up and carry baskets of rocks at the local quarry for 14 cents a load. Roughly a week later, however, dumb luck found me chatting with the Chinese. I began pleading my case just as they were getting ready to start their trek.

I introduced myself to the group's guide, Shiva, and then my fellow porters: Kharkhar Chantel, 43 years old and wearing a CarQuest baseball cap; Gopal Rai, 35, wearing Gold Star vinyl sneakers and one layer of thin fleece, head to toe; and Hari Rai, 18, in cotton cargo pants and hoodie. I gave them a respectful namaskaar and declared that I would soon carry one of their 60-pound loads on my forehead.

They smiled and namaskaar'd back.