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.

By Colin Monteath for Alpha magazine

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