It's now June 4, and we've been back in 1-lane road country for about 36 hours. I'll try to catch you up:
We stopped the evening of our last post in a freshly constructed town next to a river and a deep, steep, rocky gorge lined with tall pines high above on the cliff edges. The roads in the mountains of Western Nepal are a relatively new addition to the landscape, and people seem to be moving down from the high slopes to profit from the road construction efforts. Someone stole Rames' mobile phone during the night while it was charging at an outlet in the room next door, and whenever the guides called the mobile, the woman who picked up claimed to be half way across Nepal and would give it back if we only drove to meet her. Needless to say, we haven't got the phone back yet. I also saw the largest sow I have just about ever come across, suckling piglets in the dark. Her jiggling white form scared the bejeezus out of me in the dark when I went out back to spit my toothpaste after dinner.
Excuse me for a moment- I am being thrown around in my seat in the truck and can't type. Bad roads. (1 hour later) Ok, back again. Road is semi-paved now.
We then drove on to the town of Raka, where we met the porters who had taken the bus to meet us in the mountains. Originally we had wanted to start the hike at Haku, but the porters were eating lunch at Raka, and the locals insisted that the trail up the ridge from their village was a much better route than the way from Haku (surprise surprise). After an afternoon of laundry in the river, we organized gear and were hiking by 7:30 AM the following morning. Our head porter, Naran, hired 4 locals to help with guiding and carrying gear. Garrison and I were hiking out front, following the switch backs up through the pines. When I caught up to Garrison on the trail near the top of the first portion of the ridge, he hushed me and whispered that he had seen a few baby wild cats. He then showed me the video of these cute little fur balls playing at his feet before the mother showed up and hissed them away. I peered through the bushes and could hear their coughing cries, but I could not see them. Naran caught up to us, and when he caught wind of what was going on, he started yelling to scare away the cats- apparently wildlife is "many many problem" as he put it. We seem to have very different ways in which we interact with wildlife on the trail.
Garrison and I kept walking and made it to a flat spot on the ridge first. We enjoyed the views to the south of nearby grazed hillsides and terraced fields with large peaks in the distance. The porters took some time to catch up, and we discovered one had quit in the first 500 meters of our ascent. Naran ran back down the trail with another porter to help carry up his load to our resting spot. After handing out Trader Joes chocolate to all the porters to give them some motivation to keep going, we continued up the ridge to a sheep herder refuge at about 3300 meters elevation. We decided to stop for the night even though it was only about 2 pm because we had a sure water source on the relatively dry hillside. Garrison and I took our cameras another few hundred meters up the hillside to take a few photos of the dark afternoon storm clouds. I noticed that the altitude was already significantly slowing down my pace. By 9 pm, we were blanketed in a could bank and surrounded by sleepily "baahing" sheep (and a layer of sheep droppings on the ground) bedding down for the night.
We were up by 5:30 to watch the sun rise, and we were hiking up the ridge crest by 7:30. After ascending another 300 meters, we contoured around the west side of a taller ridge through an old growth oak forest covered in hanging green moss. We then popped out on an open saddle with a small ancient stone stupa/temple overlooking the trail and valley. We climbed up the ridge crest to the south and above tree line. We handed out mid-afternoon chocolates to the porters again (this time it was caramel and sea salt flavor- I don't think the porters know how much I wanted to eat the entire bar by myself). We stopped for the evening at another, higher saddle around 4000 meters elevation. After setting up our tents, I dragged myself after Garrison, who was jauntily hiking up the hill to scout a lake with a few local teenagers who were up on the mountain harvesting some type of caterpillar to sell to China as a medicine. On our way back to camp, a cloud crept up the hillside and spread over us, and a light hail pattered down on our rain jackets. The sun was setting in a gap in the clouds, and we stopped on a ridge crest to appreciate the misty view. Dill, the guide/cook, informed us that the porters were unwilling to continue further into the mountains past the next camp site and that we would likely need to "day hike" over multiple passes to the next series of lakes. We were assured that we could make the walk to the lakes in 2-3 hours. Garrison attempted to explain that we would need to move base camp again after the following day because day hiking to the further lakes was nearly impossible and dangerous, but we apparently weren't getting the message across.
Up early again the next morning after a cold night (frozen rain on the tent in the morning). While the porters moved to the next camp site, we cored the lake Garrison had scouted the evening before on the other side of the the ridge. Sheep, horse, and cow bones were scattered all around the shore, and the locals told us that an avalanche a few years ago had killed 2 shepherds and hundreds of livestock grazing around the small lake. Despite the seemingly remote location, we managed to attract an audience of about 30 Nepalis who sat in the meadow on the lake shore laughing and chatting about our efforts. We then packed up our coring equipment, and Naran and one of the local porters (Prem) helped us hike the gear over a large pass to the next camp site to the south. My head was hurting and I was pretty cooked by the time we arrived at camp at 4250 meters elevation. Garrison seemed a bit tired, but he was hiking fast as always. This new base camp site sat in a valley between two roughly parallel north-south cliffs/ridges that arched up to 4600 meters along their spines. Naran kept insisting that we set up camp next to their tents on a section of wet ground covered in uncomfortable looking softball-sized rocks. After my experience the previous 2 nights listening in my tent to the guides/porters' late-night guffawing (and coughing from the smoke from their fire), I decided to move my tent about 20-30 meters away across a snow melt stream. The guides seemed puzzled as to why I wouldn't want to sleep 2 meters from their tents. Since there were no trees, one of the porters gathered armloads of damp horse manure and lit it on fire. Acrid smoke filled the air (and also my tent, despite my efforts to move away from their campsite) even after the porters went to bed. Garrison and I walked to a nearby ravine to photograph a snowmelt waterfall and stopped at a field of curious meter-wide perfectly horizontal flat rocks that appeared to have been thrust up out of the saturated alpine soil on pedestals of thin grass roots and mud.
After a night spent hacking my lungs out, I woke up with a throbbing headache, raw throat, and running nose. Garrison and I walked about 60-70 minutes with Dill and 3 local porters to a lake to the southwest. This lake was still half- covered in about 1 foot of ice and sat at about 4400 meters on a pass between two peaks. By the time we finished coring, both of us felt like death. The water was 3C, and we were huffing and puffing just making small movements. We took frequent breaks on the way back to camp, and then rested for about 2 hours before dinner. Clouds had been gathering since mid morning, and as soon as we finished eating, thunder started to rumble in the distance and Dill commented, "our God angry." I responded, "I certainly hope not" and went to my tent to organize some gear. Immediately hailstones started drumming on my fly, and lightning began striking closer and closer to our campsite. We were in the middle of a storm cloud caught between ridges that dumped about 2 inches of hail on us over the course of 40 minutes. Just when I thought the light show was over, sleet began costing my tent and rapid flashes of close lightning strikes shook the air. By 7:30 PM, the storm blew over the next ridge, and the valley around us looked like a scene from a Christmas movie in the fading light. The temperature dropped to just below freezing and I shivered the night through in my old sleeping bag.
After spending the night counting down the hours until dawn, I climbed out of my (again) frozen tent at 5 AM. Pink alpenglow was just beginning to light the white cliffs around us. After taking a few photos, I walked over to ask Garrison how he was feeling and immediately started to worry- I could hear the crackling of fluid in his lungs as I approached the tent and he croaked, "I think I have pneumonia." I grabbed my med kit and asked him a few questions and took his temperature: 98.6F. I doubted pneumonia, but with our rapid elevation gain and the headaches, I was seriously concerned about HAPE (high altitude pulmonary edema). We decided to descend to one of Garrison's backup base camps at 3750 meters as soon as the sun came up a bit and thawed out the slick slopes. We slipped our way to the bottom of the closest valley (and below the snow line) and followed the Gidi Khola (river) down stream for about 4 or 5 km. Despite the the balmy 15C weather, Garrison and I had trouble staying warm in the mid afternoon sun. While Garrison rested, I washed my clothes off and learned how to make spicy tomato fry (achar) from our head cook, Dill. After dinner, I put on every piece of clothing in my backpack and shivered with a fever in my tent.
I slept much better at the slightly lower elevation, and I woke up feeling refreshed and less like I was having a spike driven into my forehead. Garrison was not feeling much better, so we decided to continue our descent and to cancel the coring trip to the other high lakes 500-700 meters above us. (Science is important, but in my experience HAPE is even more serious.) Locals had told us that we could follow the river down as it gradually wound through the steep valleys out of the high mountains and ridges. After about 2 km, we discovered that we in fact had to re-ascend to above 4400m to be able to descend any more (the porters are unable to travel off trail or bushwhack at all due to their ridiculous pack size). We crept up back to 4100m and contoured around the ridges leading back to the north towards Haku and Jumla. By noon, clouds covered the sun and lightning began to strike closer and closer to our ridge. We were eventually hiking in driving hail with thunder booming all around. We came across a large rock overhang in the cliff bordering the trail (we were at 4100 or 4200m) and the guides decided to stop for the night in this dripping shadow of the mountain. Garrison joked that we should stay away from the back of the cave, because the clouds had covered the mountains in a fog and we were in the "Misty Mountains" after all (Hobbit reference). Heavy sleet fell outside the cave, coating the steep slopes in white slush. The clouds cleared off by sunset, and Garrison and I warmed ourselves and dried some of clothing outside in the setting sun.
Garrison started painfully trudging up the steep trail on the hillside outside the cave at 7AM the next morning. (I was happy to leave the damp and dirty cave.) We contoured further to the north and made a large "last uphill" (as the guides assured us) push up a ridge to over 4400m. Garrison was clearly feeling the fluid in his lungs, and the staring groups of spry Nepali teenagers who followed along with his shuffling footsteps didn't help much with morale. No one wants to be ogled when they have HAPE. We reached the ridge crest, and the guides pointed out that we would have to drop down into another steep valley then re-ascend a few hundred meters to the next ridge before finally descending down the long ridge nose to the north towards Jumla. The porters and guides stopped for tea at a semi-permanent tent structure at the bottom of the valley, then we worked up the ridge and down to the north past another temple/stupa covered in moss. We descended a solid 1000m, then the porters jogged (with 70 pound packs) down the rest of the mountainside to the town closest to the trailhead. We walked to the closest road head and Rames met us with the vehicle near a footbridge across the river. Garrison and I squeezed into the front seat so we could all try to fit in the SUV, but the head porter and guide told us the rest of the porters were walking. We protested, and they responded that, "those boys like to walk". Right, I'm sure they really want to walk the next 3-4 miles to Jumla afterhaving just descended over 6000 feet. Welcome to Nepali porter culture.
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