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The Trek to Thorung La
Dear Adventure Club Member From the Pokhara valley of central Nepal, the enormous white crest of the Annapurna Range of the Himalayas devours the sky. Its scale and radiance overwhelm the viewer. From Pokhara the Annapurnas are stunning and choke one's breath, so huge and yet so graceful as to seem imaginary, a mirage in the cloudless morning. I dug an elbow into the ribs of one of our trekkers on the Pokhara airstrip, interrupting his farewell trance. "Care to walk around them again?" I asked. Vahtzek Jaszcz, the Polish-born pathologist and our designated deflater of trekking egos, stared up into this wilderness of ice and hanging snowfields through which we'd hiked for nearly two weeks and considered the proposition. Vahtzek said he didn't know whether he was prepared to undertake exhaustion as a fulltime way of life. "But it was marvelous, wasn't it?" he said. "Every step of the way." It was. The Annapurna Circuit puts the trekker on an odyssey of sights and sensations unlike any in the Himalayan experience. It lifts the hiker from the semi-tropics of bamboo forests and banana groves at 2,500 feet into the sub-stratosphere 15,000 feet higher, a vertical rise of nearly three miles. It carried us from through the shifting cultures of the Himalayan villages where life is hard and tough and threatened here and there by the violence of rebellion, but not so tough that it denies to the traveler the traditional Nepalse greeting of "namaste." We heard it every day, and on every turn in the trail, from women hauling fodder for the family cow or goat in a bamboo basket balanced on their backs by the tump line around their foreheads and from bearded mule herders bringing salt down from the Tibetan plateau. You were aware of the caravans before you saw them because the bells of the mule processionals in the Himalayas fill the mountainscape with the quality of Sicilian church chimes; and then around the bend in the trail the lead animal of the caravan appears wearing a stately plume of crimson and white, and we hug the upward slope of the mountain to avoid the unattractive fate of being pitched into the Marsyangdi River a thousand feet below us by the jostling of the passing mules. We walked daily, higher and higher, in the dominion of the mountain goddess, Annapurna, the healer and the protector of the harvest. We walked through forests of sycamores and Himalayan oak, and then great stands of blue pine and Himalayan fir. The changing colors of the hardwoods' falling leaves spread the floor of the forests with saffron and russet. And what kind of goddess is this, manifesting herself in the garments of perpetual snow and ice, and taking the form of four summits more that five miles high in the heart of the Nepalise Himalaya? Well, what kind of goddess would you prefer? Sooner or later the mythology of the Himalayas fuses with the chanted mantras of the Sherpas we walk with and with the prayer flags draped over the village streets and strung above the temple walls. After a while the whole atmosphere of a day in the Himalayas becomes uncanny and mystical, and here is my old friend, Lhakpa of Phortse, the sirdar of our trek, mumbling his "Ohm mani padme hums" while his roughened brown fingers slowly advance among the beads of his Buddhist rosary. Occasionally I join him and take a couple of verses. Lhakpa always looks amused when I do this but he knows it is intended to convey respect and shared reverence. On two nights we could hear their avalanches from the safety of our camps in the gorges and on the ridges. We had a few powerful hikers in our group of 16 from Minnesota, but mostly our folk were ripened by the years--the average age was obscured somewhere in the 60s--and we needed to challenge no Olympian records for quick ascent. For a couple of days early in the trek the usual raspy throats and coughs created the sounds of a moveable infirmary, and on those days the travelers lived out of each other's medicine bags. After a while the most virulent hacks and snorts subsided and we moved out of the suspected Maoist zones into the higher atmosphere and the place names got hypnotic: Braga, Manang, Yak Karogh. The scenes were startling. Waterfalls laced their way hundreds of feet down the forested walls of the ravines. In the scree left by landslides, herds of wild goat, the Himalayan thar, foraged for grass and leaped and bounded out of sight whenever we recovered from our paralysis of curiosity and made some alien sounds. Lower down, big and active languar monkeys, whose prints in the melting snow years ago might have given rise to the abominable snowman legends, bounced around in the trees, doing their best grandstand acrobatics. And then one day, just below a limestone ridge 500 hundred feet above us we watched blue sheep--some of the rarest of the Himalayan wildlife--exploring the spare forage and majestically ignoring the transfixed observers below them. And yet for the trekker struggling to reach a goal, almost nothing in the Himalayas is as memorable as the rising wind when the col or pass approaches. In the Himalayas, the word is "la," a valley, or a hollow, as in Shangri La; or Thorung La Thorung La, which leads the traveler from the Marysangdi ravine onto the approaches to the Tibetan plateau and to the shrine of Muktinath, 5,000 feet below the Thorung La. By the time we'd reached its 17,599-foot summit, the Himalayan wind had graduated into a gale, stirring the masses of prayer flags into a fury of violent flapping and thrashing. An old man presided over a primitive tea shop, offering momentary shelter but almost nobody was buying. Creatures from Minnesota don't normally flourish at 17,000 feet. In the interests of our cardiovascular systems, we slipped over the pass and headed down to the 108 rivulets of Muktinath, where Hindu and Buddhist pilgrims bathe their hands and faces in sacred waters pouring out of brass waterspouts. We flew back from Jomson a day a later. Our pilot obliged our curiosities by skimming 25 feet over a rhododendron forest on the flanks of the Kali Gandaki gorge. It tends to make you take those prayer flags seriously. My congratulations to the trekkers and their Sherpa companions. Cordially Jim Klobuchar |