More Ladakh

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After I returned from the Nubra Valley, I decided against going on a trek, and instead began looking for other people who were interested in climbing Stok Kangri, a 6,153m (20,188 ft.) peak near Leh. Agencies all over town were advertising for regular treks, but after much searching I only managed to find one place that had an expedition (in the most diminutive sense of the word) planned for Stok Kangri. However, when I returned in two days to meet the other two guys who were to be going with me, two Israelis, the agency informed me that one had broken his leg and the other didn’t want to go without his friend.

I made another circuit around town, stopping in probably 25-30 different agencies, and not one of them knew of any groups or people headed to the mountain. I left my name and guesthouse phone number with many of them and told them to call me if any other people expressed interest. My other two options were to go alone - either through an agency or not. However, going alone with an agency was more money than I was willing to pay, and I wasn’t sure how good of an idea it was to go alone and without a guide. I could have organized the equipment, food, and donkey myself, but I knew that it was necessary to cross a glacier and I was concerned about falling in a crevasse while alone and unroped.

While I waited for a group to coalesce, I visited more or less every gompa/monastery within a day of Leh. Although it’s possible to get to most of them by bus, another guest at my guesthouse gave me the idea of renting a motorcycle and knocking a lot of them out in a single day. This struck me as a great idea - ever since riding around on GD’s Royal Enfield (the quintessential Indian motorcycle, found in great numbers all over the country) in Mumbai, I had been thinking about how great it would be to have one back home in the US. Unfortunately it quickly became clear that it probably wasn’t a good idea to learn how to drive a motorcycle on mountainous Indian roads (I couldn’t really handle it in town), so I had to swallow my pride and opt instead for a 150cc scooter.

Once I got over my disappointment and resigned myself to speeds of no more than 50mph, the scooter was a lot of fun. I was able to get to some monasteries that were off the beaten path, which was nice except that at some of them I was unable to find a single monk to let me access anything beyond the courtyard. At one of the monasteries, a rather unfriendly monk informed me that he didn’t have keys, then as I was about to leave, he came running down the steps and jumped on the back of my scooter without saying a word. I tried to find out where he wanted to go, as well as inform him that I was rather inexperienced at driving the scooter alone, let alone with someone else on the back, but he just stared straight ahead. I took off, and after about 10 minutes he tapped me on the shoulder, got off when I stopped, and that was that. He was just in time, too, as it wasn’t long before I left the “road” (as it more or less ceased to exist for 20 meters or so), and the loose sand I opted for instantly made the scooter disappear from beneath me. I managed to stay on my feet, but the scooter suffered some superficial wounds. I returned it after dark and for the next three days went out of my way to avoid walking by the shop where I rented it - not the most honorable course, perhaps, but the scooter was far from pristine in the first place, and I expected them to demand something wholly unreasonable from me as compensation.

A few days after the Israelis fell through, another agency informed me that it had found two Singaporeans who were interested in climbing Stok Kangri. They had just left on a two-day jeep trip to a distant lake but I was supposed to meet with them when they got back. Of course, once they returned to Leh they decided that they weren’t up for it and immediately left for Manali. By now it had been seven days since I had left the Nubra Valley and I was no closer to climbing Stok. I was seriously considering trying to climb the mountain on my own, but by a stroke of luck word had gone around the guesthouse about my plans going awry, and one woman who comes to Ladakh more or less every year knew a guide who was going with a few clients in two days time (it happened to be one of the few agencies at which I didn’t inquire, though I had walked by it and for some reason they hadn’t advertised the expedition). The next morning I went by to see about joining the group, only to find that it had lost a member - an unfit Israeli girl had rightly decided that she wasn’t up to it. Fortunately the other member, an English guy named Neal, was as committed as I was, so we were set with two.

The approach days were remarkably easy, as the ponies carried almost everything. We reached our camp each day by early afternoon, so Neal and I had plenty of time to try to secure our arrestingly asinine tent. The tent wasn’t big - the floor area was just big enough for two people - but it had a central upright pole that almost allowed me to stand upright inside. The only way to get the fly taut was to guy it out about half a meter off the ground. Ground stakes were useless. At the first camp Neal and I spent hours hauling rocks to the tent so that we could build mini-cairns at each guy-out point, and we were rewarded with a fairly quiet night as the fly didn’t really flap in the wind. At Base Camp there weren’t as many rocks, and the nights were windier. The fly flapped so wildly that it was hard to talk inside the tent, and it made it even harder to sleep (it’s sometimes difficult to sleep at altitude anyway when you’re still acclimating).

Our guide and cook, Riga, is a Tibetan refugee. He was an excellent guy and a better-than-decent cook. He spoke five languages, including very good English, but he did have some quirks. He informed Neal and I about the two different types of yeti; one is larger and aggressive, and will attack humans, while the other always yells “go away” (Riga gave a demonstration of the call) and will run away if you try to approach it. When Neal tried to explain that there’s no credible evidence at all of yeti, Riga calmly assured him that they are in fact somewhat common, and that his friends had seen them, although he himself hadn’t. He also had what he called a Tibetan calendar that supposedly predicts the weather each day for the entire year. I was rather skeptical about its accuracy but it was at least correct for our summit day: stormy.

In spite of my difficulties in finding a group in Leh, we were far from alone on the mountain. A very experienced Swiss couple was climbing independently, and a Spanish guy and Swiss guy who had just completed a popular 8 days trek were there with their guide, along with two Americans (though one was suffering from altitude sickness and didn’t even leave Base Camp). In talking to the Swiss guy, I quickly learned he lived in Fribourg, the city where I studied for a year, and a short while later he said that he was actually from Düdingen, a small town near Fribourg, which is also where a few of my friends and acquaintances are from. Eventually we discovered that we had a number of mutual friends in Fribourg, though we had never met each other. Small world.

We awoke at midnight on summit morning to have a quick breakfast of porridge and leftover thukpa (a type of Tibetan noodle soup) before setting off to make the most of good snow conditions. Typically snow freezes at night, allowing you to walk on top of it, but when the sun comes up the snow will soften throughout the morning and make the going much more difficult, as you’ll sink up to your knees or further with each step. The sky was completely overcast when we set off, and before long the wind picked up and it started snowing. I foolishly hadn’t replaced the batteries in my headlamp, and within an hour they were dead (the cold surely didn’t help). The first two and a half hours were fairly easy going, in spite of the fact that I had to rely on the lights of the people ahead of and behind me to see my surroundings. We soon reached the glacier, and although we weren’t roped together, I wasn’t too worried - I was near the back of the group, so if anyone was going to fall in a hidden crevasse, it would be someone ahead of me. We stood around for a bit while the Tibetans tried to figure out the route, but soon we were across the glacier and began a long climb up a moderate snow slope towards the summit ridge.

When Neal and I were at the agency in Leh, I wanted to inspect the equipment, but the guy assured me that he would personally make sure everything was ready. Once we got to Base Camp, I discovered that one crampon was broken, and neither Riga nor I was able to figure out a fix. As if having only one crampon wasn’t enough, I was also supplied with a tiny pink ice axe that threatened to break my will. Fortunately Neal had crampon problems as well, and had the same ice axe, so together we forged on.

Dawn began to break as we ascended the snow slope, and with it the clouds began to break up and the snow more or less stopped. It took about an hour to make our way up sometimes-exposed ridge to the summit. Neal and I both turned out to be more fit than Riga, so we left him behind and summitted about half an hour before him. Although the last few hundred vertical meters were slow going, I felt quite good. Even eating a Kit Kat at the summit was rather arduous, as chewing and breathing at the same time proved about as difficult as walking uphill. We took some pictures, enjoyed the limited views, and set off downhill to get off the ridge and escape the wind. The ascent had taken six hours.

After breaking (or at least calming) in the hours after dawn, the weather showed signs of getting worse once again, so we decided to descend all the way to 4500m, the site of our first camp (Base Camp was just under 5000m). The rigid plastic boots weren’t so comfortable for my shins and toes during the nearly 1700m descent, and I was quite tired when we finally reached camp at about 1pm. We napped for a few hours until the bad weather caught up with us, then set up our tent as best we could as it started snowing again. After a very good night’s sleep (in spite of the damn tent), we walked out the next morning and got a ride back to Leh.

I’m still in Leh now, but at 5AM tomorrow my bus leaves for Manali, a popular tourist destination in the mountains of Himachal Pradesh. It will likely take about 22 hours on the road (if all goes well), split up over two days. I’ll take a break from buses for a few days in Manali before boarding another one for the 16-hour ride to Delhi. This will likely be my last blog entry, unless something unexpectedly newsworthy happens over the next week. I fly out of Delhi on the morning of June 27th.

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Photos

Matho Gompa
I couldn't find a single monk here. There were loads of construction workers, though.

Site of Camp 1
(Camp 1 is actually lower than Base Camp. I didn't name them)

Base Camp
Our terrible tent.

1:00 AM
The snow starts falling.

Dawn
The eastern sky at dawn. The two experienced Swiss are on the snow slope.

Summit Ridge
If you look closely you can see someone in the lower part of the picture, just right of center. I'm not sure who it is.

Cone-headed at the summit
Note the single crampon and the manly ice axes.

Stok Kangri Massif
Stok Kangri as seen from my guesthouse room.