There are two ways to deal with uncertainty… take it in with a dollop of stoicism or manifest one’s exasperation on to the environ… having seen a fair bit of force majeures when it comes to my annual excursions into the outdoors, I should be leaning towards the former, and to that effect I sincerely try, but invariably the chagrin creeps in, mostly angry mumbles to oneself while putting up a brave face…
An unceasing two-day drizzle in Gangotri had this effect… too often in the past five years, my trekking plans had been laid to waste by erratic weather, but mostly well in advance when I was yet to depart from Delhi… this time it looked like one would be made a fool of in situ… we’d started from Dehradun in decently clear weather but the clouds came a visiting, along with the traffic, as we crossed Uttarkashi, and then just parked themselves – neither pouring themselves dry nor ceasing their perpetual pitter patter… the cacophony of pilgrims and the associated muck that is the hallmark of Char Dhams at this time of the year adding to the ire… the one buffer day we had was consumed in the temple town itself, and a pall of dejection hung heavy in the air… to add to my misery was Smythe’s accounts of his ascent of Kamet which made one yearn for the end of the treeline even more…
‘Twas by almost all accounts a miracle then, when the rain finally stopped and the skies cleared up just enough for the Forest Department to grant us the permits… for once (twice actually, as this happened with me earlier this year in January as well when we were climbing in Ladakh), the weather department’s prediction actually came true down to the hour…
Gratitude murmured, our (motley?) crew of eleven along with the guides and porters ambled up the Rudra ganga River (or Rudragairu or Rudugaira gad, take your pick), which travels a relatively short distance of about ten odd kilometres before draining into the Bhagirathi River at Gangotri… the trail went up the conifers on the true right of the river for the first half, after which we crossed a bridge to climb from the other side, snaking up a trail fairly well trudged upon… a decent way to loosen up the limbs on the first day of a long traverse… there was another group alongside us so all combined, it was a conglomeration of about fifty odd people…
We reached camp around three in the afternoon, a hike of about eight kilometres to a flat patch of meadow a few metres above the river… dwarf rhododendrons dominated whatever foliage was to be had here… and afforded a decent hour or so of birding, with rosefinches, tits and a Himalayan rubythroat… descending a steep slope, I slipped and managed to lose the battery lid of my camera, luckily there was another battery lock inside so I just covered the outer part with some medical tape which held for the rest of the trip… the next unpleasant surprise was a completely discharged power bank which I’d fully charged at home, luckily there was another which sustained me for the rest of the trip… apart from these trivialities, life was starting to look up…
Next morning found us gaining altitude again as we left the riverbank… after an initial steep climb up from the camp we ambulated along an easy incline through the meadow where a pair of Tibetan blackbirds – which I, in my characteristic naivety, had dismissed as choughs – were pointed out to me, lifers which made lugging the bulky telephoto lens worth it… the skies were again overcast, and smatterings of drizzle came every now and then, none too bothersome though… we saw a large herd of about thirty odd Himalayan blue sheep (Bharal)foraging and frolicking about the slopes above and two of us spent some time stalking them, the four rams in the group staring at us unamused as they jostled among themselves for dominance… the rust of all the road travel and waiting at Gangotri was gradually being scraped off and one finally started to get attuned to the rhythm of the mountain now… the air, the landscape, the flora and fauna… yet within the overwhelming canvas, still more static than mobile… like differential calculus, where every curve becomes a line when viewed closely enough… at an infinitesimal scale, complexity resolves into simplicity, one mused, taking things a day at a time… no more, no less…
The final part of the day’s trail was again a steep climb… the mellow middle portion was bookended by these abrupt uphill sections… it wasn’t much distance today so we weren’t too bothered… the six kilometres to Rudugaira base camp took us only about four hours which included a break for food… we arrived in sunshine at about one in the afternoon but the clouds soon rolled in and an intermittent drizzle duly set in, and we were deprived of the views of the high peaks around us, and the col itself…
At an altitude of about forty-five hundred metres, the camp also doubles up as a base for climbing Rudugaira peak, a trekking peak sitting at a comfortable height of about fifty-eight hundred metres, and is surprisingly not very popular despite its easy climbing profile… we saw a group from the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering who were undertaking that endeavour… the nearby water source here had unfortunately dried up, so everyone was forced to go down about a kilometre to a stream we’d crossed on our way up… more misery for the porters and camp staff who had to make multiple rounds, lugging fifteen to twenty litres of water each round for the kitchen…
The following day was reserved for rest and acclimatization, perhaps the first time, barring a few mountaineering expeditions, that I have taken one… but as perennially ordained, the whole day, barring a few hours in the morning where we saw a group of three young bharals come near the campsite to lick salt off the food waste, and a mountain finch pecking merrily around the campground, a drizzle kept coming and going the entire day, and there was hardly any birding that could be done… we did go for a short acclimatization walk towards the glacier in the morning, which later we came to know was a test to check everyone’s trail fitness…
Holed up inside the tent with nothing else to do, I managed to finish off another book from noon till dinner, this one a rant on climate change that one sort of raced through with a slight bit of disinterest, having heard the arguments put forth too many times before, to the point where one could rattle them off in their sleep… there was a slight bit of jitteriness in the air, for if the weather didn’t improve, we’d have to call off the expedition and turn back from here…
Thus it came as a relief when we were informed that the weather forecast for the next few days was stable and we’d be moving up tomorrow, although two elderly gentlemen in our group were requested to turn back from here, bringing our number down to single digits… another reminder that these grim spires of rock and ice are impervious to human aspirations, the line that demarcates the animate from the inanimate is carved out not by emotion, but rather the absolute lack of it…
It almost felt like a miracle when excited voices declared a clear sky the next morning… we could finally see the Gangotri and Jogin groups of peaks, as well as the lowest point of convergence twixt Gangotri III and Jogin I that was our destination… the view on the opposite side was equally breathtaking, with peaks like Deobanand Chirbas Parbat also shaking off their cloudy veils… this felt like the moving day, for once inside the glacial realms, retreat would be as arduous as pushing further…
Starting at around eight, we made quick work of the initial part which climbed through some rock sections and led us to the base camp of Gangotri III peak… this terrain was one of the leitmotifs of the journey, vast glaciers and boulder fields wandering about rather aimlessly in these playgrounds of divinity… yet the atmosphere was more gloomy than effervescent, one felt, the summits around us brooding in dark colours… the sun diffused, the waters from glacial runoffs murky with the mud…
The trail climbed gradually for the next couple of kilometres over a rather reasonable terrain of mud and small rocks, after which the moraines revealed themselves in their full and fearsome glory… for another one from our group this became the turning point as he felt bogged down with a cold and fever, and didn’t want to risk going any higher… the rest of us clomped ahead deeper into the moraines…
About half an hour of zigzagging along the path of least resistance, where we could see the myriad, monochromatic shades of the sulking glacier, we found ourselves at the base of a scree wall, by this time the clouds had made their expected return and the sky was overcast, yet some ice on the wall had melted which made the trail slushy and slippery, and to top it off, frequently sent rocks tumbling down upon us…
We hurried through this section as much as we could, for the ground was highly unstable, and the rockfall quite persistent… the terra firma had become terra mobilis… scaling this section took us to Sukhatal, which due to the recent weeks of precipitation was, contrary to its name, quite full of water… we contemplated a break here for lunch, but it started snowing so decided to push on… the trail now meandered along a ridge where the wind and snow kept increasing in a manner that could be described as beautifully (and cruelly) linear in its mathematical progression, as it kept increasing at a constant pace till it became a full-blown snowstorm, the wind lashing the face, the snow slanting into any nook and cranny it could find and assaulting any semblance of warmth there…
I grit my teeth and made a dash for the camp… luckily a few porters had reached before us so the dining tent was set up, where all the luggage was quickly dumped to keep it dry and I scuttled into a dry corner, nibbling on some chapatis and peanut butter while waiting for the weather to improve…
Which it didn’t for quite a while, and soon enough we were looking at a couple of feet of snow embellishing the landscape around us as everyone else tumbled in ragged and cold into the dining tent… once warmed up a bit, we duly scampered into the dome tents once they were set up… this was a quintessential high-altitude roulette when it came to the weather, and ‘twas going to be a gamble from now on till we made the crossing… we still had one rest day that we could forego in case conditions didn’t improve, but this camp wasn’t really a place where one would like to stick around for long… at its best, it was morose, at its worst, morbid…
But as George Harrison famously crooned, all things must pass… which includes inclement weather… and at around five thirty in the evening, as we were prepping up for an early start the next morning, the wind fell, the snow stopped and a calming quiet descended upon the camp… Auden’s Col came into view right above the camp, a narrow crescent of white seeming like a stone’s throw away, but these are hallowed portals… where it’s always farther than it looks… we were sitting at about five thousand metres of elevation now so about half a kilometre of vertical gain had to be achieved… easier said than done… after an early dinner, we crawled inside the sleeping bags for a few hours of sleep…
The alarm was set for twelve thirty in the morning, but we woke up a few minutes before that and straightaway dove into the grind of dressing and packing up… the gaiters and spikes were out today… the sky was thankfully still clear, meaning whatever cold had accumulated in the bones could be shrugged off once we started moving…
Dawn was starting to crawl up towards the horizon when we started at three-thirty, the snow conditions pretty decent despite yesterday’s fresh dump… an hour later, we hit the steep section of the climb to the Col… small avalanches and plumes of snow came down the slopes of Jogin I in the distance, but we weren’t too exposed…
Things got progressively exasperating once we were roped up, for now the speed was determined by the lowest common denominator… John Bicknell Auden, the British geologist whose name is immortalized in the annals of Himalayan exploration through this Col, would have smirked at the sight our snail-like movement, I muttered under my breath, for it had taken him and his team a little over two hours to reach the top from the base, and we took three times as much time… our guides had said five, I’d thought between three and four while we were making good speed unroped, and it was only at nine-thirty, six hours later, when we found ourselves atop the Col…
I seldom feel elated at the top, for if there’s one thing that years of ambling in the high mountains teaches you, it is that the drudgery of the descent is way more debilitating than any ascent… but for now, as we waited for the porters to catch up, the first view of Khatling glacier on the other side made it quite apparent as to why it is both revered and feared at the same time… an endless, infinite expanse of ice punctuated by God only knows how many crevasses, for we could only see the lips of a few, a much larger number hidden by the fresh snow… peaks of all shapes and sizes sent down their own swathes of ice into this cauldron as icefalls gleamed with a murderous glint…
Despite the wind coasting through the col and a mood of celebration all around, a pall of eeriness hung in the air, and one felt a strange mixture of quietude and restiveness… we waited a couple of hours at the top for the porters to catch up, one of them had abandoned his load and run back so others had to make multiple ferries to haul his load, but eventually everyone, and everything, arrived… and after the customary group photos, individual portraits and war cries that the oblivion around us would have surely scoffed at, it was time to descend…
Easier said than done, for this side has a steep gully that required ropes to be fixed… not wanting to get spooked by other people’s travails, I went in ahead to done and over with before fear and doubt could catch up… despite being quite steep, the descent was manageable, with only a couple of sections that required cutting steps… since there wasn’t any abseiling paraphernalia around in the form of seat harnesses or figure-8 descenders, one had to improvise on the fly, alternating between grabbing the rope tightly and taking controlled glissades wherever possible… though only a couple of hundred metres long, the section took a lot of time for to negotiate…
Everyone made it to the névé-field eventually, and true to the clock, a fog started to roll in around noon, and I witnessed a few small avalanches rushing down from the slopes of Gangotri III… which was not the direction we were supposed to go in but it gave one a sense of things… not wanting to get caught in another bout of precipitation, we started making our way down the glacier, the snow now much softer yet still manageable to an extent, the lack of sleep made our concentration wane at times but it was duly restored time and again small rockfalls and avalanches that ran down the slopes around us… the fog rolled in and out, so did the clouds, and everyone slowly slipped into that reverie which comes from traversing glaciers, a state of stupor where the mind and the body decide to spend some time apart, pursuing their own separate paths…
An hour of walking in such a state brought us to a large flat ice-field, where frantic conversations over the walkie-talkie brought us back to reality… some of the loads carried by the porters had come undone and deposited itself across different parts of the glacier on the descent, although no one was hurt or injured, some of the food rations were rendered unrecoverable, and some porters started feeling unwell….
This was a quandary, for we couldn’t go ahead without first ascertaining if the porters would be able to catch up with us, hence everybody just stopped and sat down for a deep dive into the wide gamut of tricks that a glacier holds under its icy sleeve… I believe we all got a taste of glacier lassitude, as the snow beneath us was cold, yet the heat trapped by the fog around us made it suffocatingly hot simultaneously, leaving one flummoxed – to stand or to sit, to layer up or to layer down, to take a nap or to desist – too many questions for which a mind in its state of torpor had no answers…
About two dozen people spent almost three hours like this, some sprawled on the snow, some lucky enough to find a rock to lie down on, some like me going back and forth between sitting down on the cold snow and then getting up to dry the trousers… despite the anguish, the landscape was breathtakingly beautiful, the elements silent and stark…
Finally, we got the message that the porters were on their way, and we decided to set up camp where we were, beating down the snow to create a solid platform for the tents as we waited for the porters to arrive… I also took the opportunity to brush my teeth, which had been skipped due to the early morning start… ‘twas almost six in the evening by the time the camp was set up, a few people were understandably exhausted and crept inside their sleeping bags at the first opportunity, I was also of the mind to skip dinner and crash after a cup of tea but managed to hang on and grab a bite before calling it a night at nine-thirty, twenty-one hours after we’d started from the base camp of Auden’s Col…
Despite the fatigue, there was a sense of relief, for the crux of the trek had been done, although in terms of the overall journey, we were just about halfway there, with another five-thousand-metre pass to negotiate after a couple of days of descent… in his account of the crossing, Auden mentions locals telling him about stories of people crossing the pass in the reverse direction, climbing the glacier to descend into Rudugaira and Gangotri, although no one had actually seen it being done… considering the glacier, it does seem difficult, but not improbable, that there might be some ancient history to the route, apart from the usual colonial lore…
This was a crossing a long time in the making for me, and satiation was rife as I slid into the sleeping bag… for this was a long trail of history that one sauntered on, a landscape seemingly still on the surface yet in a furious flux beneath it… the early explorers breathed life into lifelessness when they forced their way through an unforgiving geology, removing the blanks on the map and paving the way for posterity to probe further… the ones who follow their footsteps reinforce and sustain it with the same painstaking assiduousness…
Unlike climbing mountains, where one has to refuse to acknowledge the mystique of the massif and humanize them in order to break down its defences… trading admiration for animosity in a way, probing stealthily, lying in wait… by choosing to skirt around their flanks, one can let the grandeur of the panorama remain intact, travelling ‘into’ rather than ‘upon’, ‘along’ rather than ‘against’… not aloof, but in awe…
‘Twas a pretty comfortable night despite the frigid environs, and as we woke up to clear skies, the outlook was bright, quite literally as we had to don the sunglasses at six in the morning… wrapping up the morning ablutions in a couple of hours, we broke camp and departed around eight… perhaps the best stroll we had during the whole trek, if only for a couple of hours… the snow hard and compacted, an absolute delight to walk upon, and for a while, even the otherwise grumpy glacier seemed permissive enough to let us frolic…
Then George Harrison returned, and our fleeting moment of joy was promptly expropriated by the moraine, which was manageable – and even mildly enjoyable at first – with the boulder hopping… but then came a point when the trail our guides knew ceased to exist, ending abruptly at an ice wall… flummoxed, they branched out in multiple directions scouting for alternatives, of which a few emerged… the ones that were more direct were exposed to rockfalls, not the best choice around noon when the probability of that tumble dance is high… so we were forced to retreat back up for a few metres and cross laterally to the other side of the glacier, fixing a rope on a short ice wall to descend to a more amenable path… not too difficult, but time consuming…
Although the privations of our footslogs barely brush against those endured by the original trailblazers, the vagaries of climate change do make one wonder if we are actually retracing their footsteps, or moving through a landscape that bears little resemblance to the one they encountered… for the more immutable these landscapes seem, in reality the faster they transform… because of the Anthropocene, or even despite it…
From there on the moraines stretched for another couple of kilometres, not too troubling save for a few patches where the mud and rocks were beginning to recede and expose the slippery ice… by this time the mist was beginning to unfurl, we scurried faster expecting a white out but luckily that threat never materialized… although one did breathe a sigh of relief once this section was finally dealt with, there was a bit of heavy heartedness… for two days, the glacier had us under its spell… for better or for worse, we were a part of its pallid tapestry, tracing transient contours across its transient form…
Back on terra firma, with Bhilangna River, the glacier’s progeny, now fully assuming its aqueous form, flowing to our true left, the next section meandered along a steep slope ravaged by landslides and consequently prone to rockfalls… but by now the weather had cleared, or rather, we had veered off the weather, leaving those hallowed glacial portals married to their mist behind, so we made decent speed on this section, watchful yet swift… the final section was a steep descent to Zero Point… apparently called so because this is where one gets the first view of the Khatling glacier if climbing up trail from the opposite direction…
We’d dropped almost fifteen hundred metres today, so the first course of action was shedding all the warm clothing… the campsite was a flat grassy patch at the base of the valley next to the river… though still some distance away, it still felt like a return to civilization, perhaps because there was a lot more geniality around that returns once one escapes the clutches of torpifying temperatures…
A recurrent theme of the journey was the expectation of an easy stroll the following day and never getting it… thus one grumbled the next morning, plunging straight into crossing Bhilangna right at the start of the day’s walk, the water wasn’t deep, but the crossing was long, and with the body not warmed up, the legs really groaned, starting to shake after a couple of minutes in the ice-cold water… out of the frying pan and into the fire – thus it felt, looking at the glacier at the far end while contemplating whether to let the feet dry a bit before putting the shoes back on…
Fortitude was forthcoming later in the day though, for the trail today was a flattish six-kilometre walk along meadows, punctuated by a couple more headstreams plunging into the river below… a little after noon found us at the camping ground of Chowki, another flat patch of land surrounded by blooming dwarf rhododendrons and a few early bloomers in the name of flowers…
This was the point where we transcended decades… while Auden’s original traverse followed the Bhilangna down to the valley towards Gangi village and onward, we would again wind our way back uphill, going southwards to continue towards Kedarnath, a route opened by Indian explorers in the eighties… a fairly decent time spent on the internet looking for an account of this crossing yielded many a cul-de-sac, but one could perhaps concede to the word of mouth and take the information on its merit…
The clouds rolled in around two o’ clock as usual, but the drizzle lasted only for a bit, so after lunch I headed up the hill into the rhododendron thicket, spurred on by the information that monals could be seen there… ten minutes later, I found myself walking over shrubbery and tree roots rather than the ground, but such is the allure of exotic avifauna that one carries on… after half an hour I abandoned any aspiration of glimpsing the pheasant and focused on the incessant chirps emanating from the trees instead…
The avians’ behaviour though made it clear they were revelling in my misery, so after a futile hour spent waiting for a clear glimpse, I decided to return, only to be reacquainted with a fact that climbing up steep hillsides in flip-flops is much easier than descending in them… not the first time one had succumbed to this folly, and definitely not the last either… so I slowly scraped a safer trail down… and for three hours of painstaking work, was finally rewarded with one decent sighting of a warbler… but tomorrow was another rest day, so perhaps luck would turn…
In the meanwhile, it was decided that some of the porters would go down the valley and try to secure some fresh meat, which sounded no less than an elixir at this point… financial contributions were swiftly solicited and the mission party promptly scooted down… the feast was originally planned for dinner but had to be postponed owing to delays in acquiring the consignment… the vegetarians chuckled at our slight dejection as we huddled inside the dining tent…
Clear sunshine on the morning of the rest day and I wasted little time in getting the bins out for birding… neither did the birds as they promptly started twittering and teasing from under the canopy… refusing to relent, I persisted for close to five hours till noon, but I had met my match(es), for the avifauna was equally resolute, and apart from a few shots of rosefinches tucked deep within the shrubbery, and some flycatchers and accentors, there was nothing to show for hours of toil over two days… in terms of distance I spent walking and stalking I might have easily covered a day’s worth of hiking… but that is the appeal of such endeavours one guesses, where luck matters as much as effort…
I had firmly made up my mind to bid good riddance to the birds and photograph flowers post lunch… and then it rained… persistently, for four hours straight, so that was that… the silver lining though, were the two caprine being nudged up to the camp in the morning… the beasts unwilling, as if aware of their fate… one felt a twinge of guilt and remorse knowing their fate, but such is the vicissitude of life… promptly slaughtered and skinned, that morning we had our mouths watering at the thought of lunch, before which some fried blood was partaken in as an appetizer… sounds barbaric I know, but forbearance is not really the forte of the high mountains… and apart from our gluttony, this was also a motivator for the porters… one cannot expect them to toil unabated just for the sake of our leisurely pursuits…
Which brings one to ruminate upon these humans who seem cast from a different mould… maybe at the end of the day ‘tis but a question of economics, but in these unforgiving cold cathedrals where they ply their trade, where every step is a pontification on peril, money cannot be the only object of desire… perhaps they too, to some extent, seek the extremities of the outdoors… for these are the foreheads, the shoulders and the spines on which the annals of Himalayan exploration have been scribbled since day one, not just their modern commercial interpretations we indulge in today… perhaps not an understatement to proclaim that one’s reverence is as much for their efforts and indefatigable spirit as for the majestic landscapes… of course, ask the expedition leader or manager, and they’ll tell you there is more than meets the eye – the constant complaints, the haggling over wages and the like, but despite those professional routines, the admiration and the gratitude remains…
Dusk draped over us by the time the rain relented, and the rest of the mutton was duly polished off for dinner… after two days of descent and a day of rest, we would again start climbing tomorrow… a unique aspect of this trail is that the crux of it – the Col – is over within the first five days, and then one has to coax themselves to continue trudging onwards for the next week or so…
By now the weather had settled into the usual predictable routine of clear morning followed by precipitation later in the day, and we started on our way up to blue skies, initially climbing through a meadow, where we had a fleeting glimpse of Thalay Sagar before it disappeared into the clouds… from there on a couple of steep sections, which we hadn’t really expected, followed, not too tricky or long… which led us to the camping ground about half a kilometre below Masar Tal at around one in the afternoon… the initial plan was to camp closer to the lake but we stopped at the point where the snow, which was soft and mushy in the sun, started…
Fog and drizzle, followed by a quick burst of hailstorm then took the centre stage for a couple of hours, and the ground was white from hailstones when we emerged from the tents, a quick hour of birding around the camp got us some Alpine accentors and a Red-fronted rosefinch, before a drizzle picked up again briefly… by twilight the skies had cleared though, and prepping up for an early start the following day, we hit the sack early after a look around at the vista of the high peaks around us…
I slept to the lullaby of a burbling brook next to the tent, but its surface had frozen in the morning, so in between getting ready, I broke the ice with sticks, just as a sort of childish vengeance upon the elements… we pushed upwards around six, the snow conditions decent although I sank to the knees in a couple of places around the large boulders… Masar Tal, a quite decent-sized lake which would be emerald green otherwise, was frozen… snaking up along its edge through a steep mixed section of rocks and ice, about an hour and a half found us at Masar Top, from where we could sight Mayali Pass, the final notable climb of the trek…
We were now traversing the Dudhganga glacier, which lends its name to the river originating from here… the recession of the tongue of the glacier in recent years (although most glaciers in the region have receded as a whole) means that there is now a lake where solid ice should have been… in the post-monsoon season, we’d have an ice-free lake and rocky portions to traverse, but pre-monsoon meant that both the lake, and the slopes around it, were frozen, making for a tricky twenty minutes or so where we had to skirt around its edge rather carefully, for even one slip would imply an indeterminable fate as one could possibly plunge below the frozen surface into the water… in the end, we were spooked enough to be careful enough, and the passage was negotiated with less difficulty than expected…
From here on it was a pretty straightforward plod up to the pass… but then rolled in the ever-so-ready mist threatening a whiteout… while sight was not an issue, the stifling heat and a sense of suffocation that comes with it – as the fog traps the heat reflecting from the snow – was, so we hastened a bit, loath to get caught in any form of precipitation at this point in time…
The fears were unfounded though, and about four odd hours of steady clomping brought us to Mayali pass, a few metres shy of the five-thousand-metre mark as usually claimed, but no one was complaining… this time the descent wasn’t technical, so a quick ten-minute stop was all that was needed at the top…
But the descent though… it is always the descent… after a short section of scree we came to the innocuous-looking icefield that turned out to be a minefield… too many booby traps around rocks big and small… after getting my foot stuck firmly into the snow twice, from which I had to extricate myself with some effort, using the hiking poles to dig out the snow, a determination born out of the sheer frustration of the toil set in, and I made a beeline for the end of this stretch, as a result of which I lost sight of both the lead guides as well as the rest of the group trailing behind…
The route was pretty straightforward and well-marked with numerous cairns so navigation wasn’t an issue… an hour later saw me atop a hundred metres of steep descent into another flat section, where the snow was now mostly melted and criss crossed by numerous streams… I saw a few people at the end of this section which gave the broad direction and thus I continued ahead…
By this time my habit had become to seek footsteps trails in the snow… the end of this section brought us back into the meadows with a faint trail running on the other side of a stream which was coalesced out of all the rivulets I’d hopped across above… river crossings being one of my Achilles’ Heel in the outdoors – for although I haven’t had any major slips or incidents, there is still a nagging doubt that I always feel – I looked around for clues of the best way across, but none were forthcoming… tentatively, I went down to the bank and tried scouting a path, but with no confidence forthcoming, duly went back up and decided for the wait for the trailing group to catch up…
Fate has a sense of humour though, and so it started to rain on my parade, pun intended… I waited another five minutes but there is nothing more disempowering than standing in indecision in the middle of nowhere with the heavens spilling down upon you, so I picked up the rucksack, and without giving it too much thought anymore, found a couple of rocks and picked my way across the river… a small step for man, a big leap for this particular man… a fear conquered, and I let out a celebratory whoop, patting myself on the back for a full minute…
Hence the dismay felt even more compounded when I realized that the trail on the other side wasn’t fresh, and the river wasn’t meant to be crossed after all… the irony was palpable, the ire even more so… not the best time to brood, I decided to continue up to a hillock and figure out the next step, which luckily came in the form of the view of Vasuki Tal, with the tents of the other group visible alongside… folly corrected, I then continued onwards towards the lake, quickly finding another stream crossing and then cursing my hubris once back on the right trail…
One of our porters caught up in the meanwhile, along with a guide and few others from the group, and we rushed onwards, the precipitation now coming in heavily, rain interspersed with bouts of hail… all our other porters were far behind though, and as we reached Vasuki Tal completely soaked, the dining tent of the other group became our temporary shelter…
What we’d thought would be a temporary halt turned into almost four hours as our porters were nowhere in sight, about half a dozen of them from the other group were sent back to look for them, but broadly I assumed this was the folly of letting them go unsupervised which was the primary reason for this laxity… for all their superhuman qualities, procrastination does roam rife among their ilk…
For the hardship of waiting in cold, wet clothes, one did get an eventual reward, as the shouts of Grandalamade me scamper out… unlike the large flocks that are usually spotted in Sikkim, and for many like me, are the first visual reference when it comes to their mention, this was just a pair, in fact two females and a male, a rather gregarious bunch that allowed a decent time to get proper shots…
The porters finally arrived around five in the evening, amidst a returning drizzle… Vasuki Tal was partly frozen, but unlike other lakes we’d seen, one could see its shimmering waters… tired more from the damp cold we’d experienced than the physical rigours of the day, we roamed lazily around the camp, as most of the tents were wet and soggy… the skies cleared brilliantly at night though, and one could see two bright celestial objects that could either have been a planetary alignment or just first-magnitude stars we mistook for the former… a faint halo, which we ascribed to artificial lights from Kedarnath, hung around the horizon, indicating our proximity and eventual re-entry into civilization…
Thus, there was some mid-sleep disappointment when one heard a drizzle tapping on the tent sometime around midnight… at several points during the night, one assumed it had gone away only to hear its familiar smattering moments later… but we were nearly there, so the feeling was more of annoyance than foreboding…
We were rather appalled though, when opening the tent flap in the morning revealed that it had been snowing and not raining… that explained the soft sounds of the night, not that there was any comfort in them… capricious, fickle, fitful… call it what you will, weather on this trek behaved like a teenager almost every day…
It was still snowing as we went about our morning rituals and with no sign of it relenting, eventually it was decided to pack up and leave without waiting for it to stop… today was mostly downhill, but with a brief climb to a ridge above the lake, which, with the fresh snowfall overnight, took longer than expected, the smaller boulders now covered entirely by snow and making us circumvent them to find a different route… it took a bit of climbing but not too much, and about an hour and a half found us at the top…
From here on there was a proper built trail… the initial part was a bit slippery because of the snow but after a while it was a no-brainer series of switchbacks that led us to the camping ground above Kedarnath… this would complete my Chota Char Dhams… not the religious kind, setting foot in the precincts of these sites counts as a visit for me… I’d expected to be shocked at the sight of the palace, but I was horrified at the scale of construction that has taken place…
Despite the recent images I’d seen, my default memory is from an old poster I had as a teenager… the temple standing bare and youthful in the alpine valley, with a couple of people at its doorstep… what was before my eyes now was a degeneration that seems beyond redemption… ironically done in the name of redemption… but by now, one has learnt to leave the gods to the gods themselves… the 2013 floods should have made us wiser, yet they became the plinth for a political campaign… as before, the next ‘act of god’ would be pithily destructive, and as before, out from it will mushroom another round of politico-religious fervour…
Camped above the temple town around noon, the rest moved down to visit the temple while I remained in the camp, fearing such an abrupt reintroduction back into the throes of civilization would be too much for me… clouds and drizzle kept roving through the day… the next morning we made an early push around six, hoping, although one knew in vain, to avoid the crowds… the sixteen odd kilometres to the roadhead at Gaurikund could be described in a few simple adjectives – cauldron of filth, multitudes of muck, desecration of divinity – thus I fiddled with words while hurling down the trail, trying to stay aloof yet getting inextricably intertwined in that repulsive concoction of slush, mule dung and cacophony of noises… about three and a half hours of continuous walking downhill got me to Gaurikund, where everyone congregated in the next couple of hours and then wound their way back to Dehradun…
Altogether, this ramble through a rather famed section of the Garhwal Himalaya was greater than the sum of its parts… for nothing was overtly technical, difficult or dangerous, yet the tribulations were by no means menial… in totality, all it demanded was perseverance… to be sprightly in the face of sullen weather… to be even more plucky when breathless… to be awed, but not cowered by what lay ahead…
Itinerary
Day 1: Gangotri (~3,050 metres) – Nala Camp (~3,750 metres): ~8 kilometres, 5 hours (link)
Day 2: Nala Camp (~3,750 metres) – Rudugaira Base Camp (~4,500 metres): ~4.5 kilometres, 4 hours (link)
Day 3: Rest and acclimatization at Rudugaira Base Camp (~4,500 metres)
Day 4: Rudugaira Base Camp (~4,500 metres) – Auden’s Col Base Camp (4,850 metres): ~7 kilometres, 5 hours (link)
Day 5: Auden’s Col Base Camp (~4,850 metres) – Auden’s Col (~5,500 metres) – Khatling Glacier Camp (5,100 metres): ~7 kilometres, 13 hours (link)
Day 6: Khatling Glacier Camp (5,100 metres) – Zero Point (~3,800 metres): ~10.5 kilometres, 9 hours (link)
Day 7: Zero Point (~3,800 metres) – Chowki (~3,600 metres): ~5.5 kilometres, 3.5 hours (link)
Day 8: Rest and acclimatization at Chowki (~3,600 metres)
Day 9: Chowki (~3,600 metres) – Masar Tal (~4,400 metres): ~5 kilometres, 4.25 hours (link)
Day 10: Masar Tal (~4,400 metres) – Mayali Pass (~5,000 metres) – Vasuki Tal (4,250 metres): ~10 kilometres, 7.25 hours (link)
Day 11: Vasuki Tal (4,250 metres) – Kedarnath (~3,600 metres): ~6 kilometres, 3.5 hours (link)
Day 12: Kedarnath (~3,600 metres) – Gaurikund (~1,950 metres): ~16 kilometres, 3.25 hours (link)
