Lion Peak - Retreat plus R & R

After the heady euphoria of climbing my first peak, I was eager to get back down the glacier for the simple reason that we did not have much food left! But when we woke up the next morning our little summit camp was plastered in freshly fallen snow, we were enveloped in cloud and could not see very much. Prudence dictated that we wait for the weather to clear before descending the crevasse ridden glacier. In the event, we had to wait the whole day. We brewed tea and nibbled the few almonds and other dried nuts we had left, and lay around in our sleeping bags chatting. Being stormbound in a small tent with your fellow climber offers plenty of time for conversation, especially if neither of you have your ears plugged with the ubiquitous pieces of audio devices so prevalent these days. Back in 1985, neither of us had the luxury of owning even the humble Sony Walkman, so we were oliged to converse.


Occasionally, I would poke my head out of the tent to see if the snow had stopped falling, then fall back into my siesta. We spoke of various things, none of which I can remember now....but the day passed pleasantly enough, except for the hollowness in our stomachs, which of course increased the tendency for producing flatulence: this in turn called for more incense sticks to be lit by Ravi and we inhaled a potent mixture of clean mountain air flavoured with body emissions and "aggarbatti"(joss stick) fragrance!

We spent a lot of time watching the clouds roll up the glacier

The next day, 31 August dawned not so bright but fair enough to move. We also had no choice as we had run out of food! Moving as quickly as we could with our heavy packs, we were soon at the Camp 2 site. We paused briefly here and then kept going downhill till we arrived at the Hawa Mahal camp in the afternoon. We had managed to leap across most of the crevasses unharmed, though I did slip on the ice once and took a small tumble and hurt my knuckles. You can see why I've named my blog The Accidental Climber...I seem to attract mishaps all the time! Thankfully, they are mostly minor in nature and rather embarrassing to report. As for the more serious incidents, so far I have survived to tell the tale!



Ravi strikes a farewell pose below Lion



I am ready to go down



Ravi takes the plunge!



Bir Singh and Rinzing now came up to help us and by the end of the next day we were camped at the snout of the Bara Shigri where it flows into the Chandra river. Bir Singh was a young lad of 16 from the village of Urgus in the Miyar Nala and was portering to earn some money in his school holidays. Rinzing worked out of Manali through a trekking agency. We had met them earlier with the Bengali expedition and they had agreed to help us when we were done with our climb. Both were extremely fine gentlemen and very very strong. They were also very bold, unlike the two porters we had brought out of Manali and who had rather inconveniently abandoned us in the middle of the Karcha Nala.

Thanks to Rinzing and Bir Singh, my journal for 2nd Sept reads : "This morning we left the Bara Shigri glacier snout at 6:30 am and walked quickly to the Karcha Nala which we reached at 9 am. Crossing it was a piece of cake. I brushed my teeth and had a head wash on the other side."

16 year old Bir Singh

Rinzing Lama

Ravi Kamath

Bir Singh fording the Karcha Nala

Rinzing helps Ravi across.
Dharamsura and Papsura glitter in diamantine splendour in the distance.

We walked leisurely to the tea shop at Batal which also doubled as the bus stop. Here we bumped into Ravi's old friend Tashi who was  chaperoning a group of French trekkers to Chandratal, the lake that is considered the source of the Chandra river. And so an idea was born : why don't we make a quick dash to the lake ourselves since we were running ahead of schedule in our plans? The French group left the tea shop at 10:30 am, Rinzing boarded the bus to Manali at 11:15 am with most of our luggage and the three of us settled down to lunch before boarding the bus going to Kaza at 1:50 pm. The 11 km to the Kunzum La (the pass that divides Lahul from Spiti) was covered by the bus in an hour as it grunted its way slowly up the gravel road with its short and steep switchbacks. We got off the bus at this 15,060 ft (4590m) pass, posed for a few photos and visited the little shrine, then marched for 3 hours, mostly downhill, to reach the tranquill waters of Chandratal at 6 pm.

Shrine at the Kunzum La with the peaks of the CB (Chandra Bhaga) group behind

The dry and arid landscape of Spiti from the Kunzum La

One of the CB peaks from the pass

Bir Singh with Spiti background

Unfortunately, it was cold and windy as we put up our tents on the shores of the lake, though this did not deter a couple of ducks from flying around the far shore. Bir Singh woke us up at the crack of dawn (5 am) with a welcome cup of tea and we were packed and ready to go by 6. An hour later we came across the camp of Tashi's group - they had trekked up from Batal with their mules. They offered us tea which we gladly accepted. They were an obviously well run outfit - one of them was enjoying the luxury of shaving with hot water! We thanked them for their hospitality and sped on our way, munching on puris and peas bought from Batal the day before. We soon intercepted the road descending from Kunzum La and continued at a crackling pace. We were just in time to hop onto the Kaza - Kulu bus at Batal; A nice lunch followed when the bus stopped at the Chatroo tea shop and we were in Manali by 5 pm.

The rapid transition from the serenity of Chandratal to the bustle of Manali was a little distressing, though  adequately compensated by a princely repast of mutton curry and rotis at Lakshmi Dhaba!

For Ravi this was the end of his mountain holiday. Before catching the bus back to Delhi he took me to visit his old friend Nalini. Nalini lived in the very first (at least in those days) cottage on the right hand side of the road as you drove in from Kulu. The cottage was called SNUG and was a charming structure, very traditional and very old world. Nalini herself was full of  old world charm and it was a delight to meet her. She was originally from Mumbai (then of course still Bombay), and had been the principal of a school there. She was one of the earliest women to complete a mountaineering course at the Western Himalayan Mountaineering Institute in Manali. She had so fallen in love with Manali then (the early 1960s) that she decided to sell off her property in Bombay and settle down here with her two other friends Shashi and Gautam. Hence the name of the cottage SNUG : the U linked their initials together! Gautam was no more, but the name did not change.



Ravi with Nalini in her orchard



Nalini treated us to tea and biscuits and a stroll in the little apple orchard at the back of the house. She was a great storyteller and filled us in with the goings on in the little town and of course some of the gossip. It was a wonderful afternoon interlude, but we could not linger: Ravi had his bus to catch whilst I had to prepare for the next phase of my adventure : a trek across the Sara Umga Pass, where I would ascend from the Tos valley and descend into the Chota Shigri glacier. Bir Singh had agreed to accompany me on this walk and I looked forward eagerly to the delights of an unhurried stroll through gorgeous alpine scenery and to cross the challenging 16,000 ft pass...

The Hadimba Devi shrine in Old Manali

Lion Peak : Into the Den

Though I had slept quite well I woke up depressed to a cold and cloudy, grey sky. Arvind had had another bad night and had decided to go back to Manali.

We repacked our kit bags and helped him to cross over to the Batal side of the nala. He headed off to the teashop to see if he could rustle up some aid. Luck was with him as he returned within the hour with Gautam and Raju, our new porter recruits. They helped him get back to the bus stop with his baggage while Ravi and I proceeded to transfer our reduced loads to the Bara Shigri side of the nala in a repeat of the previous day's rope sling manoeuvre. We dumped 5 kg of "theplas" (fried, supposedly long-lasting Gujarati parathas) among the boulders as the long moist journey from Mumbai had kindled a healthy growth of fungus on them! Thus lightened, we began the slow approach to the snout of the Bara Shigri glacier with the help of our two new porters who had now returned after leaving Arvind at Batal. They very gladly accepted 6 kg of atta and the remainder of the theplas which Ravi and I now planned to jettison as well - our plan was to trim our weight and go in as light as possible. The porters concealed their booty up a small gully for them to pick up on their return. It was great to be walking again and to realise that perhaps our little expedition might still arrive at the base of our peak!

Our two porters enjoy tea and rotis with the shepherds (with dogs)

After a short tea break with some hospitable shepherds from Palampur in Kangra who were herding their sheep up to the high pastures we neared the terminal moraine of the Bara Shigri as it thrust its millions of tons of rock, soil and detritus into the Chandra river. Clambering over huge boulders we finally decided to pitch tents for the night in a little grassy enclave among the rocks. The sun dipped rapidly behind the retaining wall of the glacier with its rocky crenellated summits and the temperature plummeted.

Traversing high above the Chandra river we move towards the snout of the Bara Shigri, visible at the end of the frame.

I pose with one of the porters

Ravi is silhouetted against a striking mountain backdrop. Dharamsura and Papsura are the two big peaks on the left.

Closing in on the snout of the Bara Shigri glacier across the wide Chandra valley

We camped for the night a little beyond this point

Camp at the mouth of the Bara Shigri

Next day, four hours of boulder hopping on the tangled moraine of the glacier, laced with a liberal dose of collapsing mud slopes, brought us to what was called Centre Camp in the historical accounts of the exploration of the Bara Shigri glacier. It was hot and it was dusty and it was exhausting. It was hard to believe that we were traversing a river of ice, frozen beneath all the ugliness. Everything was shades of brown, ochre, black and grey. A few hardy stands of pink willow herb struggled to add a dash of colour to the barren wilderness. The only human encounter we had that day was with four people descending the glacier. They were from the large expedition from Chittaranjan in West Bengal which was camped further up at the junction of the Lion and Bara Shigri glaciers. These four gentlemen were going back to Manali to replenish supplies of kerosene and food which they were running out of......when they told us that there were 14 mouths to feed at their camp, we were surprised that they had not factored this into their logistics planning. We exchanged pleasantries and when we enquired from them how far did we have to go till Centre Camp, they confidently predicted "4 hours at least"! When we actually made it there in the next 2 hours we were mighty pleased with ourselves: perhaps we had given the impression of being an extremely slow-moving group to our friends to have come up with their estimate. It was still just before midday and blazing hot; we cowered in the shade of the rocks after putting up our tents. Out of curiosity I placed my temperature-reading watch out in the sun and hastily put it away when the reading touched 51.6 deg Celsius! I remembered then reading about an Australian expedition on the north face of Everest which had to deal with severe sunburn in a high glacier bowl where the heat of the sun gets reflected by the vast mirror-like slopes of snow and focused like into the basin....out here in the Bara Shigri, it was the rocks that were heating up and grilling us mercilessly.

I am flanked by Gautam and Raju at Centre Camp.
The NE face of Dharamsura provides a fitting backdrop.

An early dinner at 5:30pm and we called it a day. Four hours of trudging up the moraine the next day finally brought us to the junction of the Lion nala and the Bara Shigri glacier. This is where the large group from Bengal was camped and this is also where we established what we called our Advance Base Camp. We exchanged pleasantries with Deepak, Dilip and Neelkanth from the other expedition - they were very hospitable and offered us tea and biscuits as we set up our tents. Gautam and Raju were paid off for their services and we watched them skip happily back down the glacier.

Since it was only mid-day, Ravi and I picked up some light loads from our pile and hiked up the Lion Nala for 2 hours until we reached a spot christened "Thanda (Cold) Camp"  by Josephine and Barbara of the Women's Kulu Expedition 1961. They had named it thus because of the extremely cold winds that they encountered here, right at the base of the icy snout of the Lion glacier. Twenty four years later nothing had changed, it was still a freezing, uncomfortable campsite on rocks. Later we were to modify the name to "Hawa Mahal" (Palace of the Winds). We dumped our loads here and rushed back to Advance Base, to be offered tea again by our neighbours!

"Thanda Camp" or "Hawa Mahal" was just below this icy snout of the Lion Glacier.
Two figures can be seen descending the slope in this telephoto shot from the camp.

They topped up their hospitality by inviting us over to their camp for dinner and we were only too happy to accept, as we were now truly tired. They had a full time cook turning out meals at regular intervals and we were shocked to see some electric bulbs strung up in their kitchen mess tent! Power was being supplied by a couple of large batteries. We concluded that their budget was significantly more than the micro finances Ravi and I were operating on......on return to Mumbai we sat down and calculated that between the two of us we had spent less than Rs.4000/- on the whole trip. This included transportation, food, hotel and porter charges!

Anyway I was glad that someone had the means to offer us a free dinner of delicious chicken curry, meat, chapattis and rice at 14,000 feet on a glacier! I tucked into the meal heartily but Ravi who is a vegetarian, ate his usual small portion. I shall always remember that sumptuous repast and am eternally grateful to those kind gentlemen from Chittaranjan. It was almost midnight when we finally fell asleep, happy and content. We had every reason to be : in exactly a week's time after leaving the hot, teeming, tropical and humid megalopolis of Mumbai, we were poised to fulfil our little Himalayan dream.

Lion Peak : The Seed is Sown

I licked my wounds for 3 months after the Dudha debacle. The doctor in Bandra whom Margaret (my wife) and I roused from his Sunday afternoon siesta at his house took a cursory look at my bleeding head, prescribed a few painkillers, and told me I would be all right.

Well, he was quite wrong! I stayed home for a week, calling in sick, doing a post mortem of the accident. I knew I was lucky to be alive : if my skull had struck the rock at a different point, I would not be narrating this story. Needless to say, I was not wearing a climbing helmet - I did not even own one. Ah, those halcyon days of amateur rock climbing!

When my wound showed no signs of healing after a week, I trotted off to the medical clinic at Air India where I worked and showed it to the company doctor. He was horrified that the Bandra doctor had not put in a few stitches and closed the wound : that would have had me on the right track and enroute to healing. Now the wound was infected. This resulted in a portion of my head being shaved off and the proper medication applied. I was granted rest for another 3 weeks!

I had plenty of time now to not only critically examine my fall but also to ask myself certain searching questions :

• At age 29, was I too old to start rock climbing? Even though I had completed the Basic Mountaineering Course at the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering 7 years earlier in 1978, I had not really taken up rock climbing after that...I had stuck to hiking in the Sahyadri and trekking in the Himalaya.
• Was I going to risk life and limb and a livelihood by pursuing this sport?
• Was this fair to my spouse?

The questions were resolved 3 months later when I stood alone below the Classic route at the Dudha slabs. Though this small 3 pitch climb was the easiest on the slabs, I felt nervous. I knew I was trying to prove something to myself. A couple of weeks after the accident, I had successfully climbed the Table Top route with Ravi and Faruk and this had purged my fear. Faruk was to become my regular climbing partner in the next couple of years and we would spend many happy hours wandering up the cliffs.




Faruk on the first pitch of Table Top



But right now, as I looked up at the sloping rock, I realized I had no back up. I could not afford to make a mistake. Any error could prove fatal. Banishing all negative thoughts, I began to climb. The first pitch went smoothly, to the shallow cave-like feature where there was a bolt hammered into the rock for a belay. I paused here for a while, looking out over the dammed Dudha lake at the smoky pall that hovered over this part of industrial Thane. I thought about the little Himalayan climb that Ravi and I had been planning now over our last few meetings. I would take the short train ride from Bandra to Matunga Road station and sit in Ravi's shop (called Avi Industries after his eldest son Avinash) and shoot the breeze with him. Though Ravi was about 15 years older than me we got along well. Ravi had not been to the Himalaya for a long time, so when I mooted the idea that we should go and climb a mountain, he readily agreed!

Since I was not really a mountaineer (merely doing a course at an institution does not make you a climber), I had to be careful that we did not bite off more than we could chew. I found the perfect peak after going through a couple of old issues of the Himalayan Journal.

Lion peak in the Bara Shigri glacier happened to have a decent altitude of a little over 20,000 feet (6187 metres), did not involve any technical climbing, and was situated in the rain shadow area in Lahul. This last factor was important, because it was easier to get off work in the monsoons than at any other time of year! The peak had been first ascended in 1961 by the Kulu Women's Expedition - Josephine Scarr and Barbara Spark had driven a Land Rover all the way from England and spent a couple of weeks climbing in Lahul and Spiti.

It had been almost 2 years since my last visit to the Himalaya - a trek in the Langtang Valley of Nepal - and I longed for those high mountain valleys and glaciers.

A few fat raindrops suddenly brought me back to the present; a pre-monsoon thundershower pelted me with rain, a heady smell of sizzling rock and earth being suddenly cooled came to me like a heady perfume, and I scurried up to the top of the route, through the crack on a boulder which heralded the top of the hill. I was safe now and enjoyed the walk back down to Mumbra. The monsoons would soon drench Mumbai but I would escape to the high ground in Lahul.

On Independence Day - 15th August - Ravi and I boarded the Paschim Express at Bombay Central railway station and headed for the freedom of the hills - or so we thought. Thirty six hours later, we had exchanged the warm and moist humidity of Mumbai for the cold rain of Manali. Accompanying us was Arvind Thakker, a young lad foisted onto us by Paresh Daru, an old friend of Ravi's. Paresh had told Ravi that Arvind was just coming along for the ride, he was keen on a little hike in the Himalaya and promised that he would be no burden on us. He was in his late teens and had never been in the Himalaya.

The three of us checked into a poky little "hotel" where Satish Patki was holed up. This was the same Satish who had held my fall at Dudha...now he was on his way back from a climbing expedition himself. On his reccomendation, we engaged two porters to help us lug our loads to a base camp on the Bara Shigri glacier.

We boarded the Kulu - Kaza bus at 6:15 am on Sunday, 18 August. It was already quite full, but we did manage to grab seats for ourselves after loading our kitbags onto the roof of the bus. As the bus groaned up the twisting mountain roads through the villages of Pulcharn, Kothi, Gulaba and Marhi, the rain came down hard and cold. The driver of this public service bus was kind enough to let us get down at Rohtang Pass and take some photos. At 13,050 ft. the Rohtang Pass is the gateway to the districts of Lahul and Spiti and is the defining demarcation between the moist and lush valleys to its south and the arid landscapes to the north which eventually merge into the high deserts of Ladakh.




Left to Right : Ravi Kamath, Arvind Thakker and our 2 porters pose on the crest of Rohtang Pass.

 As we descended towards Gramphoo, the rain ceased and the sun came out briefly. More people piled in and I was sharing my seat with a Spitian lady and her 6 month old baby. The bus grunted on its winding way; the road was now unpaved and some of the hairpin bends had such a steep gradient that the driver could not risk negotiating them without asking some passengers to get off and walk a couple of hundred yards and then reboard. When the young mother got off to lighten the load, I was literally left holding the baby!



The road into Lahul after the descent from Rohtang


With a sigh of relief, we heaved ourselves off the bus at Batal, at the base of the Kunzum La which separates Lahul from Spiti. Batal, at that time, consisted of one teashop where we refreshed ourselves before crossing the suspension bridge to the south bank of the Chandra river. We walked downstream on the wide floodplain of this river for perhaps half an hour to be confronted with the turbulent little Karcha nala which debouched onto the valley, bringing snowmelt from glaciers hidden high above. It was already late in the afternoon and the rising water level and the speed of the current made it inadvisable to ford the river. We were extremely mindful of the incident a couple of years earlier when 6 people had been drowned and washed away when fording this stream in spate: we had seen the little stone memorial erected in their honour. We would have to wait overnight and cross early in the morning when the flow would have diminished by the nightly freeze in the high mountains.

We pitched our three little tents on the banks of the Karcha and settled down, glad of the respite after 4 days of travelling from sea level at Mumbai. We were now at around 11,000 feet and were not feeling our best, especially Arvind who had a splitting headache and nausea, classic signs of mountain sickness. The porters elected to cook for us and the potato pulao they produced was delicious. We washed it down with a warm and soothing malt drink (Ovaltine). Arvind barely ate, another bad sign.



Dusk falls at our camp on the banks of the Karcha Nala


I slept fitfully, still reeling from the sudden change in altitude. We packed up early next morning and were ready to move. The flow of the Karcha had eased a little, we could even see that the water level was lower than the evening before. But things can be deceptive : the porters took a few tentative steps into the river and pronounced it unfordable. We spotted a little island of sorts in the middle of the stream and suggested that we could break up the crossing into two halves. With a belay from Ravi, I ventured out into the cold, fast flowing water and  waded across gingerly, making sure that the current did not sweep me off my feet. At the deepest portion the water came up to my thighs, but I made the ford successfully. Now it was the turn of Arvind and Ravi. With me hauling in the rope, they too joined me on the island.

Our two porters had been watching the proceedings rather sceptically and obviously thought we had taken leave of our senses: they were local hillmen and chose caution as the better option. They refused to budge. All our baggage was on their side. After a little discussion with my friends, I decided to cross back to the porters; then I walked a long way upstream, hoping I could spot another, easier, shallower, crossing with a reduced flow. I was out of luck.

As a last resort, we ended up stringing a rope across and hauling all our luggage to the island with a rudimentary contraption fashioned from a carabiner and a short sling : this basic "pulley" method actually worked. Arvind joined me and Ravi remained on the island. To their credit, the porters did help in this operation. I paid them off for their short time with us and saw their backs disappear towards Batal : 2 tiny dots in the vast floodplain of the Chandra valley.



Ravi (left) hauls one of the pieces of our luggage to the island while Arvind (right) anchors the rope
at the other end.


Arvind and I hurried across to the little island before the waters rose again for the day. We pitched our tents and settled. We were still in a state of shock that our little expedition had become shipwrecked on this little piece of turf in the middle of the Karcha Nala. Surrounded by our heavy backpacks and 5 kitbags, we assessed our situation. The good news was that  we were now being compelled to spend a second night at this altitude: this was good for our acclimatisation. The bad news had many components: if there was a flash flood, the island would be submerged and we would be swept away down the river and deposited (probably as corpses) into the bigger Chandra river; how were we to get ourselves and our stuff to the camp (three marches away) where the Lion glacier flows into the Bara Shigri glacier? How and where should we look for resources?

As always in such situations, it helps to attend to the little tasks at hand; it clears the head of confusion and gives you time to address the problem. Both Arvind and Ravi had taken a dunking in the frigid water as they had neared the shore of the island that morning and were in need of drying out, which they proceeded to do. I devoted my time to organizing the campsite and brewing some tea, a process guaranteed to calm the mind!
As we sipped from our cups and watched the late afternoon light throw a veil of warm ochre over the surrounding slopes, we felt contented that at least for the moment we were safe, had food and fuel, and were about to spend a second night in this stark and gorgeous landscape. We had some plans forming in our heads and would put them into place at the crack of dawn.