| Summary | None |
| Owner | Eric Gilbertson |
| Creation Date | 2010-02-01 22:14:44 UTC-0500 |
| Description | Eric Gilbertson, Matthew Gilbertson, Lennon Rodgers
Dec 30 - Jan 5 I was travelling to India in January for a school project and decided to fly in a week early to check out the Himalayas. There wasn’t enough time to acclimate to climb anything major, so I figured I’d get some trekking in and scout out some future mountains to climb. Lennon and I flew into Delhi a few days after Christmas and started the long journey north to the mountains. Travelling over land in India is a slow and risky endeavor, as we found out through 2 days of travel to get to our trailhead. We took an 8-hour public bus ride north to Haridwar that was probably the scariest drive I’d ever experienced (before the next day’s ride, at least). The roads had no lane lines, cars often drove on the wrong side of the road, the bus driver was a maniac passing all kinds of cars the whole time, and Lennon and I were stuck in the front next to the windshield with no seatbelts. We made it, but the next day was possibly scarier. We took a 6-hour taxi to the town of uttarkashi on a 1.25-lane road with 1000ft + cliffs on the side, no guard rails, blind turns most of the way, and no seatbelts (well, I actually strategically sat at the rear door ready to jump out if the car started over the cliff, so a seatbelt would have only held me in the car). At uttarkashi we learned that the road farther up to our planned trailhead had to cross a stream that was frozen over and too dangerous to proceed, so we changed our plans and started up the trail to Dodi Tal. Half of our two-man team insisted on getting a local guide while the other half adamantly refused, but in the end we got a guide. We specifically told the guide that he had to bring his own food and tent and let us hike wherever we wanted. He would basically be there in case we got into trouble or needed to find a ride back to town from one of his buddies at a trailhead. I was a little skeptical about trusting him after every other Indian we had dealt with along the way had tried to cheat or scam us, and in the end this guide proved no different. He drove us to the trailhead and we soon learned he had neither tent nor food, and 5 minutes up the trail a teenage kid appeared and the guide passed us off to the kid as our “new guide”. We tried to argue but then just decided to hike where we had planned to and let this kid tag along. We made it up to Dodi Tal (a lake at 10,000 ft) that night and camped out. The next morning we let the kid lead/hike with us up to Darba pass, which was right at the edge of snowline at about 12,500ft. It was pretty impressive how there was about 2ft of snow on the north side of the pass and it was completely dry on the south. Lennon was battling a throat infection and a fever and decided to hang out at the pass while I decided to go tag a summit. Our “guide” was reluctant to go farther but I convinced him to, so we headed off up the south end of the pass. We headed through a bunch of snow at first on the north side of the mountain, then reached a knife-edge ridge which we followed to a local maximum that the kid said was Darba Top. There were some other maxima farther along the ridge but the kid said he wouldn’t go any farther so we took a victory snack on that 4150m summit. Actually the kid had brought no food or water so I had to provide him with everything. I even had extra clothes for him because he looked pretty unprepared. We glissaded back down to the pass and Lennon and the kid hiked back to the camp while I stuck around to tag the summit on the other side of the pass. It was slightly shorter at about 13,000ft and apparently unnamed, but had awesome views of a 7000m peak called Bandarpunch to the north. We returned to Dodi Tal that night and planned to climb Dhiarabugal (4000m) the next day following trails on our little map we had bought in uttarkashi. The “guide” said he didn’t know those trials and didn’t want to go with us. That was fine with me – he was a liability anyway and we were basically taking care of him the whole time. So he left back to his village. The next morning we headed up what we thought was the trail marked on our map, and what was the only thing that looked anything like a trail leading out of Dodi Tal. It climbed up steeper and steeper to the top of this pass in the woods, then started traversing along a ridge. After about 2 hours of following this we found an old abandoned shepherds camp and then the trail started fading away. We followed it a little farther before realizing it was actually just a deer path at that point. We then decided to go back the way we came and find a different way up dhiarabugal. It looked like it would be a lot faster to just cut through the woods and intersect our other trail rather than backtracking so far along the ridge, so we just cut down into the woods. I bet no other westerners have ever seen the woods we were in, and we felt very remote. We undershot the trail a little bit but eventually hit a water drainage and followed it back up to the trail. We then followed the trail back to a little village near the trailhead called Agoda. Lo and behold we found our original guide in that village waiting for us in the trail and he said he would guide us up dhiarabugal the next day. Lennon wanted to explore the little village which we hadn't really gotten to see yet, while I decided to get one more mountain in. We had descended all the way back to 5000ft and the mountain was up at 13,000, so it would be a big climb. We pitched our tent in the village that night and feasted on chipatee and dahl cooked by our guide. The next morning he showed up with a backpack full of just 10 chipatee (kind of like Indian tortillas) and said that was all he needed for the 15-mile hike. We could never remember the guide’s name but after that day he was forever known to us as Mr. Chipatee. Lennon checked out the village and later hiked back to uttarkashi while I hiked up the mountain with the guide. Mr. Chipatee claimed he could do the climb in 6 hours, and thought I could do it in 7 or 8. We’ll just see about that, I thought to my self. As we climbed higher it started to rain, but then it changed to snow above about 9000 feet. Mt. Chipatee was smoking most of the way, which was pretty surprising to me at that altitude. At about 11,000ft we came to some old wooden houses and stopped to build a fire and roast some chipatees. We soon made it to the top and it was pretty cool with several inches of fresh snow everywhere. Unfortunately all the 7000m peaks to the north were obscured by the clouds and snow, but I had gotten my fill of them the previous day. Mr Chipatee didn’t want to fool around up there and immediately headed down. I stayed around longer to take pictures and ended up running down to catch up to him. We eventually made it down to a village on the other side of the mountain and Mr. Chipatee proudly looked at his cell-phone clock and proclaimed that we had done the trip in just 5 ½ hours, apparently a new record. In the village we met one of Mr. Chipatee’s taxi-driving buddies and had a scenic ride back to Uttarkashi. |