| We walked above
eagles and listened to the crunch and thunder of an avalanche pouring
down the white precipices of Cho Oyu. It was miles away but the sensation was intimate and electric. Thousands of tons of snow and ice surged down the mountain slope before exploding in a cloud of snow powder when they struck the glacier. The echoes of the avalanche subsided and the snow cloud it spawned sped soundlessly across the glacier, fogging the ravines beneath us. Like a comet, it was one of those rare and transcending spectacles of nature, graceful but inscrutable. For five or ten minutes it crept through the mountain corridors, exploring the walls, slowing and dissolving and finally vanishing into the cliffs. I heard a gasp from one of our small group of trekkers threading through the Gokyo Gorge of the Himalayas. "I couldn't have imagined this," the trekker said. Imagined what? The power and lethal beauty of the avalanche? Yes, partly that. Or was our friend rhapsodizing about our altitude, which had now lifted us above the forests of rhododendron and Himalayan fir to more than three miles above sea level? Yes, that too. But above all what startled him was the raw immensity of the Himalayas. For two weeks we walked through the heart of the world's greatest mountains. The trail to the icy emerald of Gokyo's three lakes, lying at 15,000 feet, brought us close to the scenes of the Himalayas' celebrated melodramas, most of which had sprung from the human urge to seek something beyond. With many Himalayan climbers, that urge had expanded into obsession and given rise to some of mountaineering's most historic acts of heroism, tragedy, triumph and vanity. Not all of us in our past might have been immune to such urges. But in this October in the Himalayas of Nepal and the Tibetan border, our motives were quieter. The mountaineering sagas, the myths of half-human, half-beast creatures, the sounds of chanting monks and the epic scale of these mountains-1,500 miles in length with stratospheric summits-dominate the imagery of the Himalayas. They tend to obscure one important truth about another side to them. People of average physical condition, across almost all age brackets, can walk the high trails of the Himalayas without being required to display any symptoms of bionic behavior. The one indispensable requirement is to come with a lot of curiosity and a reasonable tolerance for fatigue at the end of the day. To get along with the kids in the villages the requirements are even simpler. Bring along some used tennis balls. They have instant power to make you part of the gang in every Himalayan village I've ever seen. For two weeks we walked with our Sherpa companions, porters and yaks, camping en route, hiking toward a promontory called Gokyo Ri at 17,600 feet. Gokyo Ri is a bouldered, conical aerie surrounded by some of the mightiest of all Himalayan summits, Everest, Cho Oyu, Lhotse and Makalu. With most in our group of seven, the terrain was new. For me the Himalayas are now practically the hills of home after 25 years and 15 visits. The landmarks of those visits are shared by most people who trek in the Himalayas. You are moved by the solemnity of the monastery at Tengboche and entranced by the waterfalls of Chomoa and Jorsale. The babble of the chaotic market at Namche Bazaar on Saturday mornings is enticing. Prayers flags snapping in the wind and banks of mani stones welcome the traveler to one more Sherpa village. To these you want to add the ethereal lines of the sacred mountain of Machapuchare in the Annapurna Range, and more. But the gorge of Gokyo was new to me. The familiar parts of the trail receded quickly. Behind us were the Buddhist sanctuaries of Pangboche and Tengboche, the fluted ice fields of Thamserku and Ama Dablam and the village of Phortse hanging 500 feet above the Dudh Khosi River. Once we were launched into the Gokyo landscape, the words of Samuel Taylor Coleridge"s "Xanadu" seemed engraved on every cavern wall that emerged, on the cascades of the Dudh Khosi and in the vast boulder fields brought down by the glaciers. Coleridge's picture of Kubla Khan's dominion was half-fantasy, half reality. It could have been almost pure Gokyo: "A savage place! As holy and
enchanted as e're
beneath a waning moon was haunted by woman wailing for her demon-lover.And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever it flung up momently the sacred river." The Dudh Khosi. It rose in the glaciers of Cho Oyu miles ahead of us, past the wild goats of the Himalayan slopes and the walled potato and buckwheat fields of the Sherpa farmers.It swept thousands of feet below the lonely pastures of the village of Machermo.There a few years ago originated the single most credible report of an assault by a Yeti, or abominable snowman. It still attracts aggressive argument among keepers of the Yeti legend. They found a yak demolished in one of the pastures, its head practically split down the middle. The yak is the largest domestic animal in the Himalayas, shaggy, powerful and often bad-tempered. The head Sherpa on my treks for the last ten years has been Lhakpa Gyalu of Phortse, a conscientious and spiritual man in his 50s whose sons include a monk at Tengboche and two who have reached the summit of Everest. "Lhakpa," I said, "what do you
make of those stories
of an attack by a Yeti on a yak at Machermo?" On the trail, when he is simply walking, Lhakpa recites his mantras by the hour, his beads in hand. Ohm mani padme hum. "Some people don't like how I answer that question," Lhakpa said. "They don't believe the Yeti story." "And you, Lhakpa?"
"I believe it. I saw what the
Yeti did to that yak.
No human could have done that." In the camp dining tent that night, we kicked around the Yeti story and arrived at no conclusion. We did hit the sleeping bags early, more or less by unanimous consent. One of the gifts of a Himalayan trek is the free-floating conversation it generates in a clan of unabashed individualists. We had the full spectrum. Ed Schoenberger was a 63-year-old retired school teacher from Pennsylvania; Dr. Lisa Soldat a family physician now living in Des Moines, Iowa; Thomas Wilkes, a 32-year-old Montessori teacher in Boulder, Colo., a powerful hiker who once traversed the Appalachian Trail, a kind of restored Johnny Appleseed who each day cleared refuse from the trail and shagged tennis balls with the native kids; David and Gertrude Juncker of Minneapolis, who now find the year ruined unless the Himalayas are part of it. And Sherri Lanaski of suburban Minneapolis, a highly verbal globetrotter who once supervised UPS truckers and became everybody's pal on the trek, dishing out sacksful of candy bars and happy insults in the dining tent. A few developed altitude sickness. The Sherpas got them down to lower altitudes in a hurry, once employing a village horseman who spent most of the day drinking the local beer and getting into fights with some of his old adversaries on the trail. All of our forces, however, emerged unscathed. The rest of us soldiered on to Gokyo, past the jeweled lakes and, on the climactic day, to the summit of Gokyo Ri. For five days we'd scarcely seen the sun. The summer monsoons dragged into October and forced us to charter a helicopter to get from Kathmandu to the Solu Khumbu of the Everest mountains. On the day we arrived on top at Gokyo Ri, the clouds dissolved. In front of us was a mountain scene I had never before experienced. Everest's naked black crown towered above all of the other giants, but the harsh face of it seemed softened by its snow slopes stretching into Tibet to the north. Cho Oyu, the eighth highest mountain, was practically in our laps and to the east the white pyramid of Makalu lifted into the stratosphere. Everest's 8,000 meter neighbor, Lhotse completed the stunning symmetry. The sun and the breeze made Gokyo Ri some kind of high altitude Eden. We could have stayed all day. But we had to make Machermo before nightfall through the fog that gathered later, an atmosphere that any self-respecting Yeti would have loved. All that had been missing was one legitimate Himalayan storm to flavor the trek. A half hour before we reached the end at Lukla, thunder crashed out of the foothills and lightning lit the high peaks. Bolts of it raced from ridge to ridge and a downpour ushered us into the streets of Lukla. We sloshed into a guest house and crowded around the dung-fed fire in the dining room stove. Someone said, "Namaste." It means "I praise the God within you." The translation may be slightly poetic, but nobody in our group was prepared to argue. ---Jim Klobuchar Jim Klobuchar 763-258-1371 e-mail: jim@jimklobuchar.com www.jimklobuchar.com www.jimklobucharwrites.com Cordially, Jim Klobuchar |