Kiagar Ri and its wintry coattails…

Minus forty is where Celsius and Fahrenheit – two temperature scales usually at odds – finally transcend that imperial-metric divide and meet… having recently completed an equal number of orbits around the sun, the quiet allure of this symmetry was in part the reason I signed up for a foray into the winter portals of Ladakh… the other being the fact that it seems well-nigh impossible to find a commercial winter trek where one can get away from the madding crowd… on the contrary, these days one tends to end up stumbling into them, the great outdoors a carnival replete with boom boxes and fairy lights…

Anyway, rant apart, a fixed departure to Kiagar Ri peak sort of offered what I had in mind… that there was only one day of actual hiking in the week long itinerary was something one pondered upon… but I’d never been to Ladakh in winters, so there was the allure of spending a week in consistently frigid conditions which is amiss in summer sojourns, and that tilted the scales… it’d been almost five years since I’d headed out in the winters, a brief trip to Chenap valley in Uttarakhand, so this would also quench the thirst for winter landscapes…

A sunny morning found us in Leh, sighing at the snow draped landscapes over the flight, the nip of the cold quite apparent the moment one stepped off the plane… duly deposited at the hotel, I quietly went about the business of brewing coffee and heating as much water as I could… in half a dozen trips so far, my remedy to acclimatize quickly in Leh has been consuming copious amounts of good ole’ water, and one hoped this would hold true for winters as well… rest of the day was spent lounging about, a trip to the market… I’d swapped the laptop for books this time around so there was enough content to chew upon…

With a decent night’s sleep in the bank, I headed out for a run the next morning… a couple of layers on the top and fleece lined bottom tights with a skull cap did the trick, but the thin gloves didn’t… the beginning of a week-long odyssey for the fingertips… I thought they’d warm up after five minutes or so, took them half an hour, and at the end, they froze again on the downhill… all in all, ‘twas a decent ninety odd minutes spent trudging up to the Shanti Stupa and winding one’s way back down, the Stok Range in the background making me mull over Robert Macfarlane’s winter trip to the base of Minya Konka peak that I was reading about the previous day, a reverie broken here and there by dogs one needed to be mindful about…

Rest of the day was again spent idling… we walked a little bit, to Leh Palace and then up the dirt trail to Namgyal Tsemo Gompa, followed by another trip to market and then back to the comforts of our heated room… Khelo India winter games were going on, the Ice Hockey finals were scheduled today, but we got too lazy and chose to watch cricket on the telly instead… this was the first part of the acclimatization nearing its end, with no surprises thus far…

I managed to wriggle in another run the next morning before we packed up and started the drive to Korzok village, I’d travelled a bit of this road once before enroute Tarchit village in the Rong valley, but the landscape was different this time, more white than ochre… with the partly frozen Indus River giving us company, one whiled away time mulling over the complex geopolitics traced over its meandering journey over the high mountains – conflicting cultures, sparring militaries, raspy rhetorics, veering boundaries – yet try as one might, the waters cannot be tamed by such trivial anthropic absurdities, so the river flows on, shrugging them off nonchalantly, or shaking them off vigorously by the way of flash floods if it gets too much…

The journey was rather uneventful, we got our Inner Line Permits (ILPs) checked enroute and stopped at Chumathang for lunch, the steam wafting off the hot springs into the cold air seeming rather muddled at the state of affairs… fire and ice… the roads were mostly clear, with intermittent patches of snow quite navigable on a sunny day… one wonders how anything can melt in such temperatures, but then it does…

Leaving the coattails of the Indus at Mahe Bridge, we climbed up towards the village of Sumdo, originally planned to be the base but then changed to Korzok due to lack of accommodation… the villagers were in the process of renovating houses and undertaking solar installations we were told… good on them, come summer and these roads would start epitomizing wanderlust…

Half an hour later the vista widened to become the Changthang plateau… its knowledge first came to me more than a decade ago, standing aside a signboard proclaiming the post office at Kibber village in Spiti to be the highest in the world… we looked rather lustfully then at the beginning of the trail to Parang La which would end up descending into this plateau… and then I spent a good couple of years spinning yarns about this region in the context of a snow leopard conservation project… so ‘twas in a sense, finally putting a face to the name…

We reached Korzok around four in the afternoon, the endless expanse of Tso Moriri completely frozen, the terra firma indistinguishable from the water… while Leh was still decently abuzz despite the winter, ‘twas here that one felt the true weight of the season, the cold of the cold desert coming to the fore… the landscape numbed into passivity, a pall of lifelessness draped over it… the air parched yet heavy with the weight of an all pervasive silence… this was the Ladakhi winter… quintessentially quite, solemnly suppressed…

The village is already a small settlement, a thousand or so inhabitants… but draped in white it seemed to shrink even more… the little bit of paraphernalia etched on its façade for the tourists looking rather sullen and ironic in its frozen state… our accommodation was a humble house tucked into an alley a short distance from the main road… part traditional, part embellished with modern amenities… there was electricity, albeit only for lighting and not space heating, and mobile network too…

Congregations were huddled in the dining area around a bukhari fuelled by dried dung, wood an imported luxury used sparsely… this was now a fair bit of elevation and a fair bit of extreme thermodynamics at play, temperatures now deep into minus twenties… the cold seeped to the bone, omnipresent, lulled by the warmth of a fire or a quilt for a while but never going away…

One could only marvel at those who dared to stubbornly subsist here, refusing to descend, daring to take on the elements instead… while everything else was subsumed by these conditions that bordered on the cryogenic, one saw circularity come to the fore here… nothing wasted… faeces become fuel, plastic and polythene becomes insulation, any morsel discarded by the human devoured by canids – who one had to be wary of in this weather we were warned; driven by the cold and hunger, they were known to attack people out of desperation… looking at people slowly shuffling their way through the season, one surmised that circularityis simply a corollary of austerity… its colonial, capitalist interpretations so rampantly doled out these days to appease the vocal woke nothing more than hogwash…

I went out towards the lake for a bit to look for birds… a couple of kids and a young man teaching them ice hockey came to say hello, their curiosity piqued by the big lens… a few robin accentors hung around the houses and animal pens, and flocks of horned larks scurried about the banks of the lake… the biting wind and the unrelenting cold made me relent soon through, and surviving the elements for about half an hour, I scuttled back inside the sanity of the homestay…

We were a group of about fifteen, guides, participants et al, all feeling the conditions, all playing the waiting game… three days in, cracks were starting to appear… huffing haemoglobin, struggling to keep up with the altitude… this was a novel experience in terms of physical exertion… instead of building up incrementally, one kept saving up for just one hard push… all or nothing… lots or card games and banter went around the house to while away time… I had the journal and James Crowden’s memoirs of a winter spent in Zanskar for the same…

A cold night followed, perhaps the coldest I’ve ever experienced, despite having a bed and the safety of four walls, the folly being assuming one blanket would be enough… I tried to push through it with twists and turns, curling up as foetal as I could, but around three in the morning had to get up and put on an extra pair of socks to get some warmth going into the toes… a lesson learnt the hard way…

Dawn revealed the other reason, a western disturbance forecast to dump more snow on to our already saturated disposition had arrived… there were a few wisps of cloud over the horizon when dusk had rolled in the previous evening but there was a cumulus siege overnight and it’d started to snow around midnight… just our luck, the one-time meteorological prophecies chose to be as accurate as an atomic clock… the only silver lining in the infinite of this grey was that ‘twas only supposed to last only for a day… pile more waiting on an already waiting game, one grumbled…

The snowfall was persistent but light, meaning we could muster up the intention to go for a short acclimatization walk… while starting from Leh, I’d hoped to be able to get in a run or two here, now freezing beneath four layers of clothing, it felt delusional, though if it weren’t for saving the body for the climb, one could dare to try…

We kept to the motor road… the darned plastic Scarpas – the stuff of an occasional mountaineer’s nightmare – were back again… their weight and overall obstinacy apart, one has to give them due credit for their thermal comfort and indestructible build… the body warmed up decently after ten odd minutes, testament to the difference even a little bit of mobility can make…

The road was gently undulating, and we plod along it slowly for a mile and a half, the village looking like a mirage in the endless expanse of white… my labour of lugging the telephoto lens around was rewarded with a good sighting of a woolly hare that darted hither and thither for a while before disappearing into the distance, surprised by the sudden appearance of a dozen bipedal oddities, and a flock of finches sifting through the snow for sustenance…

Three out of our group of ten made an assessment after the acclimatization walk and decided not to attempt the summit… post lunch, the trek leaders took the vehicles towards the starting point for a recce, and came back with the news that there was too much snow – both on the road and on the trail – to go out for the attempt early next morning, so we’d have to wait another day for the weather to clear… compared to big mountain expeditions and those who ply their trade in their hallowed grounds, such perennial wait, or temperature for that matter, is nothing, but for us lesser mortals, ‘tis an exercise in exasperation…

It remained overcast and snowed through the day and night… wary of another cold, sleepless night, we overcompensated, taking extra blankets and getting another bukhari lit, which led to dehydration and we woke up the next morning with a headache… I initially thought AMS had finally dawned upon me, but when another roommate confirmed feeling the same heaviness in the head, one could breathe a sigh of relief, and go about hydrating aggressively to get rid of the malaise…

The weather gods had also relented and blue skies greeted us… by now, two more members of the group had to call it quits owing to AMS… half of the group of ten were out by now, the weather and the altitude slowly taking its toll… erring on the side of caution, they decided to head back to Leh immediately for medical advice… we went for a short walk after bidding them farewell, but the toes started freezing up in regular trekking boots within five minutes, so back to the confines to the homestay it was, where I duly curled inside the blankets, preferring to read about icy travails rather than undertaking them myself… the trek leaders had accompanied the departing party out of Korzok for another recce… this time the news was positive, the only spanner in the works being the fact that we’d have to walk an extra couple of miles maybe as the service road branching out of the highway still had too much snow… nothing to do but take it in one’s stride, quite literally…

So, after five days of playing hide-and-seek with the cold, mostly shirking from it but occasionally testing its veracity, it was finally time to roll… an early dinner, loading up the backpack, and try to get some sleep… I hit the bed around seven thirty in the evening, hoping to rest till about half past midnight but the bukhari had some leakage and smoke kept pilfering into the room, so I gave up and rolled out of the bed at eleven thirty… at that hour, there’s no tiredness, just the itch to get going as soon as possible, tinged with some foreboding… packed and hydrated, we started for the hour-long drive at two in the morning… stopping midway to put chains of the car tyres for traction… sitting inside with freezing digits, one couldn’t imagine how the locals were able to do that with bare hands… it was freezing as usual, and we startled about half a dozen woolly hares who ran in front of the vehicles for a while, enchanted by the headlights, before disappearing down the mountain again…

Alighting below a large signboard by the department of wildlife protection – I forget if ‘twas a duck or a crane, there were about a dozen of these between Korzok and Leh, that quintessential bureaucratic extravagance in the name of conservation awareness – we were on our way around three in the morning… a party of eight… another participant had backed down and stayed in Korzok feeling unwell, for it turned out to be a case of pulmonary edema that necessitated and emergency evacuation to Leh turned just in the nick of time… the fine margins in high altitudes…

The first couple of hours or so we just rambled along the road and then gentle undulating grounds… building a rhythm with the heavy boots… the landscape was all shadows and silhouettes… not that one looked up and around too much, the eyes firmly focused on the ground below, either following or making footprints… late night or early morning trudges are as more about sound than sight, one feels… the soft crackle of snow and ice being compressed, breaths shallow and deep, voices inside the head… a sonic cocoon… takes me back to Joyce’s scholarly gibberish every time… walk while ye have the night for morn, lightbreakfastbringer…

By now we had had enough mobility to scrape the morbidity off the cold, the body warmed up and feeling up to the task… ‘twas just the fingertips though that always felt a bit numb, and would continue to do so throughout the day… the pace was decent, so was the distance covered… in the dark, time often seems to slip by deceptively fast, like a stream of water quietly roving beneath a glacier, and so it did, by the time we reached the first sustained uphill, ‘twas almost eight, and news filtered in that two from the group had turned back with the guide, the pace insufficient to be within the summit time window…

This was now a highly decimated group… half an hour later, as we snaked our way up the high ridge whose spine would eventually lead us to the summit, another person dropped out, hands numbed by constant forays into snow for balance… at this moment, I had to acknowledge that there’d have been some divine force that compelled me to keep a trekking pole in the bag, for never had I ever used one, and was almost about to chuck it out the previous evening to save some weight… without it, I’d have been a goner too, for my modus operandi is similar, thrusting gloved hands into the snow for balance while on steep ascents…

Perhaps this was the greatest challenge of this trek, these cruel, unrelenting, sub-zero temperatures… they never let one settle, the constant wind funnelling the ambient cold into every sinew with a sinister precision, exacerbated in the extremities – from the fingers to the nose – yet equally vicious in disturbing the core… the sun seemed like it had shifted its thermodynamic allegiance to another planetary system…

We lingered static for a bit, ensuring that all those planning a retreat were safely on their way back, by which time we’d lost quite a bit of momentum and a little bit of motivation – the latter, I surmise, is also a factor of how warmed up the body is…

From an initial number of fourteen – ten participants and four guides – we were now left to three… rather aptly, the rhyme Ten Little Nigger Boys, started playing in my head, this version to be precise which I’d heard on tape as a kid… to think it was recorded as a nursery rhyme would be an appalling proposition today… there was also this novel by Agatha Christie that I started thinking about as we started walking again, detaching the thought from the physical exertion, but then was brought back to the present rather quickly… this was no time or place to mull over racist rhymes or macabre tales…

It’s always further than it looks, taller than it looks, and harder than it looks… the three rules of mountaineering were once again manifesting themselves experientially… but we kept moving, the rest stops were short for the fear of getting cold… my fingertips by now required constant attention… I had to punctually alternate the trekking pole between both hands, warming the other inside the pocket of the jacket, despite two pairs of silk liners and a pair of windproof gloves, they were still going numb, I tried putting on a fourth pair but it was too small to fit over, so I shoved them into the pockets, gripping them tightly to get some warmth flowing… the feet thankfully, were fine, and the nose, despite getting a healthy battering, was holding on as well…

As the clock struck eleven, the time we’d set initially set for turning back, the summit was nowhere in sight… we stopped for some frozen cake, conflicted about whether to continue or turn back… opinions were divided, the guides contending that we still had some distance to go but I felt I had enough in the tank to continue going, and we still had about six hours of sunlight… we decided to continue for a while, as we were neared noon and came over the other side of the ridge, the wind started hitting us up with full force, so much so that we were breathing ice particles along with the air, the only comfort was that the sun was out, so these struggles, although irritating, were transient… to divert the mind, I tried remembering if these were katabatic or anabatic winds, and ascribed them incorrectly as the former…

Noon came calling pretty fast… the summit was still nowhere in sight, and the whole endeavour started to feel rather Sisyphean… I started thinking if this was now bordering on foolhardiness, and told the guides that I was okay to retreat if they thought the summit was still far… we stood and pondered for a while, and they relayed our intention to retreat over the walkie talkie to the trek leader waiting at the base… after ascertaining our location, he calculated that we were not very far from the summit, and egged us to proceed… with assurances from someone who had more oxygen than us to think rationally, and enough energy in the bank, we plodded on, and voila, ten minutes later, the frantically fluttering prayer flags at the summit came into view…

This was the second bit of luck, for if hadn’t radioed the base, we’d have most probably turned back… we summitted at twelve thirty, just half an hour after we’d almost decided to call it quits… oh the fine margins… the universe finally did conspire, even though it did make us fret and perspire… the stay at the summit was exceptionally short, the wind blowing with a violent vengeance, as if frustrated at its inability to foil our plans… a couple of quick photos and videos and down we went, leaving the scree for the snow as it made for an easier descent…

It’s always farther than it looks… starting down at a fair clip, I assumed we’d be down at the base in about a couple of hours… took us four and a half in the end… the mind losing a bit of sharpness and focus now that the summit was achieved, combined with a wee bit of glacier lassitude, made us slow down, but we still had enough daylight to spare… small spindrifts came every five odd minutes, but were manageable, though I did start to feel a soreness in the throat, probably from inhaling all the snow they spewed up…

Fourteen hours since the start, we stumbled back into the comforts of a heated car… the mind finally relenting its iron grip over the body, the heart full of gratitude… the drive back to Korzok was uneventful… too tired to eat, I ate an egg and some boiled rice just to get the juices flowing and melted into the half a dozen blankets left by those who’d left for Leh already… ‘twas all rather robotic from thereon… the drive back to the hubbub of Leh the next day, its undertone one of contentment now that the target was ticked off… gorging on non-vegetarian food, shopping for some tidbits to take back home… thawing back to civilization… I did manage to fit in another quick run the next morning though before the flight, and successfully navigated excess baggage by relaying it through co-travellers at the check-in…

Minus forty then… a theoretically pleasant convergence, an experiential nightmare… an interesting trivia, a frightening state of inertia… catapulted into the stratosphere, chilled to the marrow… in hindsight, and warmer climes, ‘tis all pleasant memories… call it the fading affect bias… or type II fun… the fourth rule of mountaineering – almost inevitably, the mountain always humbles…