The awful sensation of the crevasse bridge collapsing under my skis will never fade. Engulfed by an explosion of powder snow as the wafer-thin crust crumbled, I plummeted 25 metres down a parallel-sided shaft, landing heavily on a plug of snow that hung precariously in the icy chasm.
As I thumped onto my hip one ski ripped off, rattling into darkness below. It took a moment to register that my glasses were smashed and that sharp pain speared through my pelvis. I figured my thumb might be broken. I yelled up to my teammate Wilf Dickerson then, instinctively, pulled out my camera and snapped Wilf’s worried face. As the fog of jumbled thoughts cleared, I focused on one definite problem. The rope was in my pack!
Just moments before, Wilf and I had been skiing un-roped through an icefall at 5,000 metres. Tucked away in an unexplored corner of Tibet, it was exhilarating to be the first climbers to catch sight of the tops of 6,500-metre peaks emerging over the rim of the Lhagu neve. Alas, we had fallen into the trap of travelling blithely on an unknown glacier. Stupid! Our only other hope was the rest of the team, well down the glacier. I could be stuck for at least eight hours. I was already shivering, with cold and shock. With Wilf all-but helpless on the surface, I had to get myself out of this hole.
Clipping my crampons on, I gingerly bridged down the scalloped ice below to a position where I could see the tip of the wayward ski. After a dozen attempts, swinging a pole to and fro on the end of a sling, I managed to snag the ski skin with the hooked self-arrest grip. Remarkably, the crevasse was just the right width for me to bridge. I propped my back against one wall, jammed my legs across the gap and pushed hard. Cautiously I inched upwards. With crampon spikes scritch-scratching on the ice, I wiggled towards the sun.
As I craned upwards, I could see that Wilf had lowered a string of ski poles, safety straps and slings and was valiantly swinging the contraption backwards and forwards in the hope I could reach it. Finally, after a series of desperate lunges with my ice axe, I snared a pole. Gripping the basket in my teeth, I hauled up the free end of the rope and attached it to the pole. Snaking skyward, the lifeline rose towards the light. I took a deep breath and started clawing my way up the wall. With a final heave, I flipped out of the cavern and lay gasping at Wilf’s feet. I trembled with relief as we hugged. Together we hauled out the pack then skied wobbily down to the cluster of tents.
I had been drawn to this venture, my fourth expedition to Tibet, by an interest in Frank Kingdon-Ward, the doyen of Himalayan explorer-plant collectors. On his 1924 journey Kingdon-Ward botanised extensively around the ‘great bend’ of the Yarlung Tsangpo, Tibet’s mightiest river.
With its source 1,800km to the west near Mount Kailas, it is now known that the Tsangpo transforms itself into the Bhramaputra and flows into the Bay of Bengal after surging between two striking peaks, Gyala Peri (7,150 metres) and the giant, Namcha Barwa (7,782 metres). But in the late 1800s, the Tsangpo Gorges were rumoured to conceal a waterfall that rivalled Victoria Falls. Protected by fierce tribesmen and impenetrable terrain, the Tsangpo was the centre of considerable geographical debate. Determined probes to unravel its secrets were made by the pundit surveyor Kintup (1880) and British explorers Eric Bailey and Henry Morshead (1911-13).
In 1933, on Kingdon-Ward’s second journey to the region, his party traversed from the Mishmi hills in Assam to the Salween River in SE Tibet. They crossed the
4,600-metre pass Ata Kang La to breach a formidable mountain barrier that separates the sweltering jungles of Burma and Assam from the Tibetan highlands. Beyond Ata Kang La, Kingdon-Ward found himself surrounded by the magnificent landscape of the Kangri Garpo mountains.
During a three-month stay in Shugden Gompa, the dedicated botanist described both the plants and the mountains. This is the land of the blue poppy, the plant discovered by British explorer Eric Bailey in 1913. Although the Meconopsis blue poppy species is difficult to grow in our gardens it remains a popular flower because of its attractive and unusual deep turquoise hues. It was his subsequent exploration of the region over many expeditions that found and documented the many varieties we enjoy today.
Kingdon-Ward noted that the Kangri Garpo range swept westward in a single 280 km arc of uncharted peaks, untravelled glaciers and a maze of forested gorges until it crossed the fabled land of Pema-kö near Namcha Barwa. His passion for the land shone through in his writing:
…a country of dim forest and fragrant meadow, of snow-capped mountains and alpine slopes sparkling with flowers, of crawling glaciers and mountain lakes and brawling rivers which crash and roar through the mountain gorges… of lonely monasteries plastered like swallow’s nests against the cliffs, and of frowning forts perched upon rocky steeples… and no country in the world is so deeply rent by rivers… so bristling with high peaks.
Kangri Garpo has been sealed off by the Chinese military since 1962. However, in 2000, I heard that the indomitable Japanese mountain traveller Tamotsu Nakamura had received permission to spearhead a reconnaissance into the hills around Lhagu, a cluster of hamlets that lie between Ata Kang La and the now-ruined Shudgen Gompa.
Enamoured of Kingdon-Ward’s historical accounts and intrigued by Nakamura’s challenge, my friends and I launched a flurry of messages to the China-Tibet Mountaineering Association in Lhasa. We knew that an attempt on Kangri Garpo’s highest peak, the virgin Chombo (6,805 metres), would likely attract a hefty peak fee, so we settled for an exploration permit that gave us a wide-ranging licence to roam.
Our dream was to climb lesser peaks as they caught our fancy. But one, Kang Yadok, a striking 6,400-metre summit mid way up the Lhagu glacier leapt out at me from Nakamura’s photographs. Kang Yadok’s heavily corniced ridges would certainly be a tough proposition. Irrespective of whether we could attempt this peak, the terrain between Kang Yadok and the head of the glacier was, as yet, unseen, even by local villagers.
Leaving Lhasa in mid October, with two jeeps and a baggage truck, our convoy ground over the 5,000-metre cloud-cloaked Serkhim La, then on down into the Tsangpo watershed. We crawled along, following the raging tributaries Parlung Tsangpo and Yigrong Tsangpo that feed into the main gorge system. Like swarming ants, road crews toiled away to build retaining walls in an attempt to keep the landslide-prone road from collapsing into the river. Though we had delayed our journey until the ebb of the monsoon, there was still axle-deep mud in places. With dizzying drops just a tyre width away, this was not an excursion for the faint-hearted.
The route from the old capital Pome up to the Zayul-Lhagu turnoff, stands out as one of the finest alpine highways anywhere. Around each hairpin bend soar unknown peaks, tumbling rapids and steep fir-clad hillsides laced with liquid amber-stained trees. Chinese influence seemed to diminish as we entered the higher eastern extremity of Tibet. Buddhist Chortens grace the entrance to each village like giant pawns from a chessboard, emerging from the soil as inevitably as mountains. This is the southern fringe of Kham and just as the People’s Liberation Army found in 1950, it would still take a bold Chinese dragon to confront a fiery-eyed Khampa in these parts.
Harvest is a busy time for Tibetan women. The threshing and winnowing of barley on flat mud rooftops was in full swing as we pitched our tents in Lhagu village. Nearby, in wood-slab shacks perched over bubbling streams, waterwheels clicked, turning heavy stones to grind barley into the staple flour, tsampa. While some used yaks to haul a crude wooden plough through the soil, others spread basket-loads of dung in the fields.
It was an honour to be invited inside homes to share tea. Once my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I found decrepit flintlock rifles in the rafters, dusty portraits of a youthful Chairman Mao and, sequestered away inside silver charm boxes to avoid discovery, hand-tinted images of a rosy-cheeked Dalai Lama in 1959 just before he fled to India.
Outside, the reality of a remote community hit home. One of our team, Nick, a dentist, rolled up his sleeves, boiled instruments and, during two intense clinics, extracted some 40 teeth. It was the only time that we didn’t see the Lhagu folk smile.
Meanwhile, distinctive Khampa men, with high burnished cheekbones and shiny black plaits laced with red silk tassles, assembled the yaks that could be spared from ploughing duty. It took a solid week to ferry gear through a progression of dumps and camps on the Lhagu.
We found evidence of campfires where parties had crossed the ice in search of rare herbs for sale to China’s medical industry. The skis came into their own after we established ourselves at 4,500 metres in the centre of the glacier. On a smooth surface we could glide along even with heavy packs.
It was on October 25, while skiing above Camp II, that I fell into the crevasse that could so easily have been my tomb. Curled up in a sleeping bag that night, on the verge of tears, I shook uncontrollably while nursing a badly bruised hip. In the dark next morning, we roped up in two teams. We tip-toed through the icefall on ski-crampons, our headlamps bobbing across a crystal ocean.
Later, we crested the rim of the icefall and entered an enormous undulating neve. The scale of this snowfield only became evident after we reached 5,300 metres under the soberingly steep western flank of Kang Yadok. It felt a rare privilege to stand beneath these 6,500-metre peaks, unnamed, untouched, simply sitting quietly astride the crest of the Kangri Garpo. Through the saddles to the south lay India’s Arunachal Pradesh and Burma.
Keen to minimise access problems through the Tsangpo gorge, we had chosen to arrive late in the post-monsoon season. With winter coming, it would have been bitterly cold to venture above 6,000 metres.
We turned our skis to the morning sun and left. In camp once more on the lower Lhagu, still days away from the scented herbs in the moraine, there was a whispering of rain that overnight turned to snow. The temperature plummeted. Cowering beneath sulking clouds, Lhagu had turned its face to winter.
We tried to spy out the complicated access to Chombo. Thus far, no-one has even approached this massive peak. The scope for exploratory mountaineering in range after untravelled range in Tibet is staggering, perhaps only rivalled by Antarctica.
As a final gesture of hospitality we were ushered into a riotous wedding party. I can’t remember a wedding before where the extremely shy groom preferred to be away up-valley tending horses. From a vantage point amid the ruins of Shugden Gompa, the hub of Kingdon-Ward’s plant paradise, I looked back across a mirror-smooth lake to Lhagu.
With the construction of the road into the village, life will inevitably change. Tibet too, will increasingly confront pressure as the sweeping industrialisation of modern China gains momentum. Already, the four-year construction of a railway from Golmud to Lhasa is under way. Even this remote corner of the world is getting nearer to the rest of us. Long may the sanctuary of the Kangri Garpo Mountains remain.
Taken from Under a Sheltering Sky - Journeys to Mountain Heartlands by Colin Monteath
