TRAGNAG, Nepal – There are two lodges in Tragnag.
They usually remain empty, due to their location on the path less taken.
After crossing the glacier field, we stopped in the first one but chose to stay in the bunk of the second because of the smell.
Tragnag is the staging area to cross the Cho-La pass.
Like I said, it is the path less taken.
It is hard, dangerous, cold and full of ice but it can save you three days when traveling from the Gokyo Valley to the Khumbu Valley.
From Tragnag it takes about 6 hours up and over the saddle to the next little yak village.
Tragnag sits at about 15,400 feet, the pass at almost 18,000 feet.
To put that into perspective, Mt. Whitney, the highest peak in the continental U.S. is 14,494 feet high.
So, we relaxed for the day. Natasha read while Alan and I chased pheasants up a cliff and climbed higher than we should have without ropes or gear.
The night was a brilliant quiet and we slept in our earthen bunkhouse.
When I woke at 6 a.m. it was snowing, little curls of wind blowing like a beautiful Christmas dawn. We decided to wait and let the sun come up.
It did, not much changed, but we were armed with resolve and male ego.
When we stepped out, strapped down and laced up, the snow blowing into our untucked corners, a bystander might have seen a caption under that picture of us that said something like, “Do not try this at home especially in wind, fog and snow like this.”
Actually, every single guidebook said just that.
Eight hours later, cold and wind burnt. Shunned and hungry and exhausted.
My knee badly bruised and bleeding, the blood freezing to my leg.
Snow covered everything and the fog was so bad that the twenty feet in front of us looked exactly the same as the 20 feet behind us, to the left and to the right of us.
We spent four hours in a boulder field we never should have been in.
Boulders as large as cars and as slick as spring lizards surrounded us and our limits of vision.
Ice you can’t see until you say, “OHH SH*T!” met us everywhere we stepped.
Quads stinging, full of lactic acid and lungs burning like they do at 18,000 feet.
We couldn’t find the pass, we couldn’t see anything.
We wondered if we could find our way back. With only two hours of daylight left, heading back was the only thing that seemed right, but not necessarily possible.
The fog and storm had relaxed a bit but a bigger one was blowing in for the nightly snow come down.
We questioned our survival skills in a place with no shelter, no trees, no life.
Boulders, skree and big valleys to climb down andmake mistakes in.
Alan and I sat on the hillside, the wind blowing our map like temptation to an unchaste skirt.
We looked at each other and then the compass for a moment of uncertainity, “It’s the red part of the needle, right?”
Natasha sat, counting fingers and toes, relishing knuckles and cuticles, wondering which of those digits the cold Himalayan night would let her keep.
Natasha felt the need to tell me that we were lost again.
I re-voiced my decree of, “Stop it! We’re not going to have spend the night out here,” although Alan and I both knew we only had one shot.
Four valleys sat to the right of us in the span of five miles.
One of them was the right one, but if we miscalculated we did not have enough daylight for a “do-over.”
There was already talk of what to do when we chose the dead end.
Simply said it was “Well, we’ll just have to get as low as we can, we have three of those space blankets.”
The storm was growing grayer and colder and meaner.
I felt my knee tightening and swelling.
Alan’s eyes were droopy and his skin cadaverously pale.
The wind was blowing back my scent to me.
Sweat gone cold in an instant, a wet dog in Gore-tex and Capilene.
Alan had his hypothesis, and it was different than mine.
Natasha was nervously biting her nails and relishing her fingers for one last time.
Neither of us had a good enough argument to debate the other.
I decided I was less sure about mine than he was with his, and we headed down.
The clouds started spitting hail and sleet.
As we headed down from the ridge to valley number three, we passed a chorten made of stone and carved tablets.
The sun hung low and in the winds of that coming storm, the prayer flags whipped and barked from the chorten like chained chanting dogs.
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