It is has been a while since we have had electricity to charge my ipad so we have been neglecting our blog updates in favor of GPS route finding. In the intervening time we have completed our first multi-day trek. Before setting out on our five day excursion, we hired three extra local porters to help with navigation and to carry loads that gave us sympathetic neck pains. You may be thinking that we must be carrying wardrobes to rival royalty. Why after all would we need six porters to carry our things? It turns out that camping here is an entirely different affair from the ultralight backpacking Luke and I are use to. We each carried all our personal gear (minus a token tent to satisfy our guides) and one good humored porter carried all the coring gear. The rest of the awe inspiring loads that our porters carried were for fixing feasts of fresh vegetables beneath tents so large you could easily stand in (for us being in a tent is usually a crouching or sitting afair at best).
The first day of our trek was along the bottom of the valley of the Beri River which cuts a chasm over 7000 feet deep through the mountains. We cherished this bit of relatively flat walking before heading up the wall of the valley late in the afternoon of the first day. We camped at the town of Sudri which, like so many towns in Nepal, seems poised to slip off into oblivion from its lofty perch. After failing to find a flat bit of ground to pitch our tents in the commons area, we asked around and found a family willing to let us camp in their terraced front yard for the night. Our crew quickly took over one of the rooms (with pages of an English language learning book plastered to the walls) and set to cooking a feast for us of curried vegetables, soup with popcorn, dal bhatt and, of course, hot tea. The second day of hiking was much more taxing but equally rewarding. In the morning we had a pleasant walk through forests of ancient oaks and rhododendrons with views of the impressive Sisne Mountain in the background. After lunch, we we stopped in the town of Bhattechawa for one last cup of tea before starting the long climb up to our lakes. When we entered town the word must have spread quickly to the schoolhouse where the kids were let out of school. In a few minutes, rows of children assembled to view us foreigners as we drank our tea. Every few minutes an adult would come shoo them off but they would slowly trickle back to see us. We never found out if they would eventually get tired of watching us because we were called away to finish the last few kilometers of our hike. We have noticed that Nepalis tend to favor shortcuts over the more straightforward pathes us westerners prefer. The last bit of our hike was one of these shortcuts on a loosely defined livestock trail 1000 meters straight up the mountain. By the end, we were all beat and very happy to see our target lakes come into view.
The next day we spent coring the two lakes in a heavily grazed meadow with a spectacular mountain view, despite the ever present haze. Four or five people from Bhattechawa who had seen us the day before made the trek up the mountain to see us in action. We did our best to keep them amused while we worked. The first core from the bigger lake went smoothly but when it came to the second longer core our troubles started. We drove it into the sediment as usual but when it came to pulling it back out no matter how hard we pulled it wouldn't budge. After trying numerous pulling strategies in front of a growing audience we tried to use one of our oars as a crank to slowly apply pressure. This technique was successful in pulling up the weights and core head but we quickly realized we had lost the core tube and, more importantly, the rubber glove that holds the core tube onto the core head. We had more core tubes with us but without the extra rubber glove stored in the truck we had to cut our work short. The last two days were spent trekking back to the car along a slightly shorter but even more dangerous route down steep hillslopes often covered in a thin layer of leaves perfect for slipping on. This hair raising descent left us in a pleasant forested valley with a babbling brook that reminded me a lot of the hills above State College with giant hemlocks and rhododendrons above us and a carpets of moss and ferns below. Luke and I faired reasonably well on the descent with a price of only a few blisters and scrapes. Our respect for our porters grew even more as they managed to stay upright under their huge packs as they made their way down the trail in their light sandals.
After the disappointment of our first lake last week where we whitnessed firsthand the problem of megaphauna bioturbation (water buffaloes in the lake) I have been very nervous that all the lakes below treeline will be similarly impacted. Since this includes 2/3 of the planned lakes, I have had good reason to sweat. After finding that both of the lakes on this most recent expedition where heavily impacted by humans, my fears are confirmed. Both of the lakes we visited on this trek were in the middle of heavily overgrazed meadows with erosion forming deep gullies. Although the lakes certainly are recording variability of climate in their sediments, it will be difficult to separate this climate signal from the history of grazing in the basins. These lakes are in one of the most remote regions of the foothills and still have a long history of human disturbance. Although this is a significant setback, we have the flexibility to modify our plans so we focus more on higher elevation lakes with (hopefully) less human impacts. The original reason for the focus on forested regions was that we can do a better job of dating lake sediments if we have leaves or twigs for radiocarbon dating. Both of the lakes we have cored so far have what appear to be annual bands so hopefully we can find a high elevation lake away from human impacts that also has annual banding so we can simply count back years to determine the sediment's age.
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