A Walk to an Ethereal Mountain

With Jim Klobuchar    At 3 in the morning in the Himalayan village of Landruk a powerful amber light flooded the inside of my tent and bolted me awake. I sat up in the sleeping bag and zipped open the flap of the tent’s vestibule, gawking for the source of this high altitude light show. I found myself looking into an enormous full moon that had climbed above the summits and suddenly ignited the Himalayan landscape.    It lit the snowfields of Annapurna South and seemed to liquify the exposed granite of the cliffs that rose above the glaciers of the Annapurna massif stretching for miles to the north. No matter how many times one had stood in the midst of these mightiest of mountains before dawn, it was the kind of scene to burn itself into the brain. Somewhere above that chaos of ice and stone rose the fluted peaks of Machapuchare, where we’d camped a few days before.    You’ll have to forgive a certain amount of mush-headed romanticism when I get around to Machapuchare. I have an oil of it hanging in the stairwell of our home. It’s the most elegant mountain I have ever seen. The Hindus call Machapuchare sacred, and if I we’re a Hindu I’d light some sprigs of juniper beneath it to show my reverence. I’m not a Hindu, but I’ve considered lighting the juniper. The mountain is that lovely, isolated and introspective, its peaks thrusting into the sub-stratosphere like the tailfins of a great fish.    We trekked for 11 days in the heart of the Annapurna Range, five of us laboring in the unfailing Himalayan collage of sensations from dazzlement to exhaustion. We traveled through a vast rollercoaster of flagstone staircases and forests of sycamore and rhododendron. Gauzy blankets of moss repelled the sun’s most strenuous attempts to intrude in those musky woods. The monkeys had better luck. They chirped and quarreled and mocked the plodding trekkers, while the hawks and eagles wheeled slowly a couple of thousand feet above us It it went that way, day after day, and it might just as well have been a dream. Bob Distad, Gertrude Juncker, Kazia Gajl-Peczalska and her son from Warsaw, Kazimier Peczalski, were my companions. From the fairy tale setting of the Pokhara Valley in Nepal, we trekked with our Sherpas and porters into the Annapurna Sanctuary, whose centerpiece is a vast amphiteather that puts the Himalayan traveler almost within touch of these gigantic fortresses of rock and ice. It is a place of uncanny intimacy with an exalted world.    And yet Nepal is not a place where the reality of the world’s turmoil magically disappears in the midst of its high world of ice and sky and the mumbled mantras of our Sherpa companions.    On the second day we reached Gorapani, the historic Horse-Watering Pass where caravans of ponies carrying salt from the Tibetan plateau and the old Silk Road meet the rice caravans from central Nepal. The Nepalese government, locked in a civil war with rebellious Maoists, has pulled practically all of its army, police and civil agencies out of the Annapurna district to avoid incidents in which trekkers or tourists might be caught in a firefight.    Despite seven years of fighting, tourism remains Nepal’s biggest source of foreign revenue. The Maoist movement grew out of the desperate poverty in which most of the Nepal’s 25 million people live. While the Maoist attacks and bombings try to avoid what western military people would call collateral damage, they have generated a war that has resulted in thousands of deaths among government personnel and Maoist fighters and periodically shut down some of the Nepalese meager infrastructure.    In the Annapurna district, most of the militancy takes the form of a shakedown of foreign trekkers and tourists. The extortion is widespread. "Give us a thousand rupees apiece (about $13) as a donation," the usual pitch goes. "We need it to fight the government’s corruption."    We were met in Gorapani by a young Maoist political officer, who invited me into a kitchen tent where our Sherpas were preparing supper. "Namaste," he said, in this case, "good evening." I said Namaste. The Maoist delivered a brief speech denouncing the Nepalese government, which is now being provided with military assistance by the United States and probably India. The Maoist said he had no animosity toward the American people, although this avowal of friendship didn’t necessarily seem entrenched. He wasn’t showing a weapon but he probably carried one and he had friends outside the tent. He said he meant us no harm but would admire a thousand rupee donation apiece. The company that provides us with our Sherpas, porters and equipment had counseled us to comply with the Maoist shakedown. It turned out not to be necessary. Our lead Sherpa volunteered 5,000 rupees from the company to cover its clients. The Maoist wrote a receipt for the extorted cash and left the tent with the folded rupees in hand.    Despite this predictable scene, the Annapurna district presents no shortage of trekkers. We met hundreds of them, from India, Germany, Australia, Italy, France and Japan.    We saw few Americans. But the Nepalese government maintains stricter control of the country’s other major trekking area, the Solo Khumbu of Everest, Ama Dablam, Thangboche . Except for another Maoist orator we met on the trail, we were otherwise unmolested. And by the time we reached the Annapurna Sanctury and the Annapurna base camp, the Maoists had faded into the forest. We hiked the two miles and 2,000 vertical feet from the onetime Machupuchare base camp to the Annapurna base camp, set in a marvelous cirque of glaciers, moraines and white world. And what a reception!    Ahead of us an avalanche glissaded down the ice chutes of Annapurna South, falling more than 2,000 feet before dissolving into a cloud of powder that rolled a half mile across the amphitheater floor but posed no hazard to the gaping travelers. In front of us stood the enormous bulk of Annapurna I, the first 8,000 meter peak climbed more than 50 years ago by the French. In a Hindu chorten near the lodges that now serve trekkers at the Annapurna base camp was a memorial honoring Anatoli Boukreev, the powerful Russian mountaineer who may have been slandered by some accounts of the Everest disaster in the late 1990s. He was killed in an avalanche on Annapurna I during an attempted winter asscent a year later.    But this was a day for the sun and for living things in the Annapurna Sanctuary. The sun poured out its nurture and healing on the Annapurnas, the legendary dwelling place of the goddess of the harvest. Waterfalls flashed off the hanging glaciers of Annapurna I and goats scrabbled in the meadows.    This is a big world, the Himalayas. It can be a savage one, as it has been for Tibetan refugees seeking freedom in their barefooted journey over 20,000 foot mountain passes. And yet to the seeker it can be endlessly alluring and, on days like this one, absolutely benign.     Cordially   Jim Klobuchar