Days 1 and 2 were spent hiking up trough the lush Sikkimese forests. They were fairly easy days with no more than three hours trekking each day. I had left Yuksom (the starting point at 1800m) with an Israeli girl and a British guy, as well as a guide, a cook, three porters and three dzo’s (a mixed breed of a yak and a cow).
Day 3 saw us arrive at the Zongri trekking hut, at 4000m, when the worst of the weather set in. We arrived to find a group of two Aussies, two Kiwis, two South Africans and another Irish girl. The driving rain meant that we were unable to leave the trekking hut for a good 36 hours. Luckily for me, this constituted an acclimatization day in my itinerary (or a day of rest), when I hadn’t planned to move anyway. For the others, it meant a day was shorn off the end of their trek.
On the morning of Day 5, we awoke bright and early to find the sun shining and the mountains inviting our ascent. We lost one Kiwi, the Israeli girl and the British guy (who had only planned to come as far as Zongri anyway) and the remaining seven of us started up the mountain to the Thangsing trekking hut, set in beautiful meadows at the bottom of an awesome glacial valley. We went to bed early to prepare for our ascent to the Gochela pass the next morning. This is the valley we stayed in in Thangsing.
After a 1.30am breakfast of porridge, we started up the valley under the cover of a starlit night. By 5.00am it was bright and we had reached the first viewpoint, a mountaintop overlooking a glacial moraine stretching up to the Gochala pass. It was cold… really fucking cold! We could see that there was snow on the pass and its access ridges (the rain we experienced lower down had been snow up here). Many of us weren’t really kitted out for snow and were already pretty cold, so only one of the Kiwi guys, the other Irish girl and myself continued (yes, the Irish are hardy fuckers…!).
After a near-vertical descent, we traipsed across a dry lake bounded by Mt. Pandim to the east and huge glacial ridge to the west. After the lake, we reached the snowline, but the snow was still cold and concrete-like so at first it was easy to walk on. We moved up the access ridge, but the trail was super narrow and wasn’t one that was meant for snow and we quickly found ourselves moving across the face of a very high steep ridge standing on extraordinarily icy snow (needless to say, we didn’t have crampons or any of the kit one might have appreciated in such a scenario). I was roaring at the guide that “this just isn’t fucking safe, you fucking gobshite”. One slip and… well, who likes to think about that. The trail was traversing the ridge, rising slowly towards the top, but at one point it became so steep that we decided to ‘go vertical’ and make a break for the top of the ridge. Using sticks and our boots we hacked footholds into the snow and climbed the ridge like a ladder.
When we got to the top of the ridge, I was fucking ecstatic that we hadn’t died and was… ahem… “marginally flipping out” at the guide that he had brought us that way. (He later admitted he had never reached the pass in snow). We decided to come back down from the pass by a different route, but first we had to make our way along the top of the ridge to the pass.
This was not as easy as it sounds. As described the ridge was about 300m high, and had steep slopes of icy snow. As we walked along it, every now and then, there would be a fucking ginormous boulder in our way. Some of these we could climb over, but others we had to walk around, meaning we had to go onto the sleek, icy face of the ridge, either to the east or the west and somehow manipulate ourselves around a boulder. We had about four or five dodgy boulders to circumvent, but with teamwork and resolve, we did a good job and arrived at the pass at about 8.00am, six hours after having left camp and just as the sun was coming over the mountaintops.
In fairness, the view we were rewarded with was nothing less than spectacular. Although the view of Kangchenjunga, the worlds third highest mountain, was somewhat underwhelming due to its distance (20km to the north), it formed a nice backdrop to things. And the view back on the valley, its glacial ridge dividing a lower dry lake/desert from a higher (startlingly blue) lake and the surrounding 6-7000m peaks was absolutely gobsmackingly beautiful.
OK, this entry is way too fucking long, so basically over days 7 to 9, I came back down the mountain again and am now in Gangtok, the capital of the Indian state of Sikkim.
See below for pics…
Peace out,
Ur man in the mountains…
1 comment:
fair play conor that looks hardcore!! some pretty cool pictures in the snow!!the one of u jumping has to be ur new profiler!!xx
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