Story: Broken Ground: Trekking in the Indian Himalaya

I fell in love with the Himalayas when I was twelve and the power went out in Maine for a cold week in February. I read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air by flashlight, huddled in my living room with my brother and sister, sheets hanging from the doorways to trap in heat. After that, I was hooked, drawn to be among the highest mountains in the world.

My chance came fifteen years later, on holiday break from a primary school in India where I was teaching for the year. The night before vacation began, I lay on my mosquito-netted bed and opened my guidebook to a map of the country. I looked for the inverted V’s that indicate high places and I found the closest ones two thumb widths away from the bed in Varanasi where I lay that night. The next morning I hailed a rickshaw and rode 10 miles to the train station with my backpack pressed between my knees. It was hot and dusty and I boarded the overnight sleeper with a film of dirt clinging to my forehead, and pools of sweat stained into my t-shirt.

I felt the Himalayas long before I saw them. In the city of Gangtok, in the Shangri-la state of Sikkim, northeast India, sidewalk peddlers and children walking home from school are inflected with the feeling that something vast hovers just out of sight. I have seen this since in Kathmandu and Darjeeling, other mountain cities, the feeling like religion that every aspect of daily life is oriented towards the mountains. Walking the streets of Gangtok in my hiking boots and fleece, I found a guide who was leaving tomorrow on a ten day trek to the base of Mount Khanchendzonga, the third highest mountain in the world, even more beautiful than Everest the guide promised. I didn’t need to be sold and signed up on the spot. He told me that the jeep for the trailhead would leave just before dawn the next morning.

On the trail, heavy yak hooves make sparks when they rub against the rocks underfoot. It is just one of the many surprises about the Himalayas and it is clear early on that these mountains are not what they seem from a distance. I glimpse the peaks through breaks in the blooming rhododendrons that line the trail. The mountains seem impossibly far away, like cloudships guarding some precious knowledge, and my day’s walk feels like a feeble effort.

But the mountains can be approached. I pass a slow moving pack of sixty-year old Germans, pecking along with walking poles and wide-brimmed sun hats. They’re headed there, too. Behind me, I hear the yakman spit curt directions to his herd. “Hooaw” and “chh, chh,” he yells, to cajole the grazing beasts onward. The landscape changes as we climb, the rhododendrons yielding to a gnarl of scrub brush and dwarf trees. They thin until the land is only brown and yellow, patches of straw grass dotted with improbable boulders which remind me of fossil soldiers on a long abandoned battlefield.

On the last night before the final walk to Kangchenjunga, we camp on a great wide plain coursed by the Prek Chu River and surrounded by 22,000 peaks. These mountains are mere foothills in the Himalayas, but higher than all other mountains anywhere else on Earth. I talk with an Austrian who has climbed in the Alps and he says, wait a few years before you go see any other mountains. Everything looks small after the Himalayas. I wake up in the middle of the night, needing to pee and I stumble out of my tent on wobbly legs, barely awake. I could be back home, a child again, with my parents asleep downstairs. Then the cold air catches me awake and there is hook-nosed Mount Pandim looming up into space, reflecting moonlight to fill the valley.

The Himalayas are young mountains bearing, all the brute strength of late adolescence. Mount Everest grows at an estimated 4 millimeters per year and the whole Himalayan range is pushed continuously higher as the Indian subcontinent barrels deeper and deeper into the Eurasian landmass to its north. I have walked among the Appalachians back home, ancient mountains that are in the process of settling back into the earth. In their time, the Appalachians were the tallest mountains in the world, taller even than Everest. Today they are covered in deciduous forests, like and old man’s beard, and the wind whispers through the Shenandoah Valley with the melancholy of old age. By contrast, the Himalayas are ribald and bawdy, world-beaters who’ve never known defeat.

The Goecha La pass, overlooking the base of Kangchenjunga is a five hour walk away and we start early to get there before the wind whips up. Outside my tent, the frozen grass crunches beneath my feet and there is a glow behind Pandim, where the sun is beginning to rise. My legs are stiff from the sleepless night on the hard ground.

Finally, up top, after five hours of walking. The Goecha La pass is a great tumble of rocks a thousand yards from the base of Kangchenjunga. It is protected space between here and there and after that, only straight up to the top. Stripes of prayer flags flutter nearby. The secret of the mountains, I realize, is that they were not created like a painting. From a distance, white peak on blue sky, they suggest a master stroke of a creator. But up close they are contingent and incomplete, projecting themselves millimeter by millimeter into the uncertain future. The boulder I sit on and the ones I saw below are the evidence of the Himalayas’ violent growth, splinters of the cleaving, erupting earth. There is the white peak, to be sure, but everywhere around it, the landscape is jumbled and uprooted, strewn with rocks and sprinkled with a fine gray sand ground by the earth. It looks like the wake of a natural disaster which, of course, it is.