Rock/Ice Climbing in East Asia - Beyond Belief

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Outside Magazine March 2003

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The Hard Way
Beyond Belief
In Bhutan's pristine alpine sanctuary, even a heathen climber can see the light
By Mark Jenkins


	(Illustration by Rob Clayton)

TO PROPITIATE THE GODS, Sonam the cook lights a sang— a small votive fire of fresh juniper bows sprinkled with buckwheat flour— as soon as we reach camp. The smoke purls up like a blue ribbon between the wet, black canyon walls while Sonam says a prayer. Jon Miceler, a tall, bespectacled reed of a man in a conical Asian hat, and I stand in the muddy yak meadow, watching from beneath sodden umbrellas.

It has been raining ceaselessly since we began the trek five days ago. This may be a sign from various tutelary deities that we are unwelcome here.

Bhutan is populated with more deities that Italy has saints. They are alomost all fearsome, particularly those who dwell in the mountains.

"No cheelips [foreigners] have ever entered this place," says Sonam, perhaps implying that Jon and I, two American travelers, are interlopers who could be responsible for distressing the gods inhabiting this Himalayan valley deep in northern Bhutan.

Earlier today, hiking through a narrow gorge on a trail so heavily overhung with flowering rhododendrons that it was like a secret passage, we stopped at a chorten, a primitive Buddhist shrine, in the forest. A moss-covered cairn topped with a faded prayer flag tied to a branch, it had been carefully garlanded with flowers by passing nomads. Sonam collected a handful of fuchsia blossoms and placed them at the base as an offering. When I asked him why he'd done this, he shrugged. Later, walking a crooked path carpeted with rhododendron petals, he whispered that we needed protection as we entered the sanctuary of the mountain gods.

The rain douses the sang, but our group—Jon and I and seven Bhutanese support staff—is already ensconced inside several nomad huts. They are crude, built of stacked river stones with a roof of planks split from a nearby tree. You crawl in through a hole in the rocks. Inside, there is a fire pit and fir boughs spread over the dirt floor. The leaking roof is so low you have to crouch, and the boughs are infested with fleas. Still, once a fire is crackling, it is a warm, snug shelter.

During the night, the rain stops for the first time in nearly a week. We awake in a different world, almost as if we've passed through a sacred portal. On both sides of the valley, frosted mountains, formerly hidden by curtains of mist, rise sharply into a cold blue sky. Looking northwest up the valley, we see a sawtoothed spine of brilliant white. Jon and I scramble up the side slope to get a better view.

The spine, one valley west and still at some distance, is the east ridge of the highest mountain in Bhutan and the highest unclimbed peak on earth—Gangkar Punsum. Its immensity is staggering: 24,742 feet of intimidating, swordlike artes. Gangkar Punsum is home to one of Bhutan's animistic gods, and it has a fierce, even savage, visage. The summit is not a benign dome but a point of frost-blue ice as threatening as the thunderbolt of Channa Dorji, Tibetan Buddhism's wrathful deity of power.

"No wonder it was never climbed," I say.

"And never will be," Jon replies. Gangkar Punsum lies on the border of Bhutan and Tibet, about 300 miles east of Mount Everest. At least four expeditions attempted it in the mid-1980s—Americans and Japanese in 1985, Austrians and Brits in 1986—but all failed. The American team, which included Rick Ridgeway, Yvon Chouinard, and John Roskelley, was stymied by bad directions and did not even reach base camp. Then, in 1987, following reports from villagers that the gods, furious at this trespassing, were taking revenge by sending crop-flattening hailstorms, Bhutan banned mountaineering across the kingdom. To the Bhutanese, mountains are sacred citadels, no more meant to be climbed than the dome of the Sistine Chapel or the minarets of Mecca.

Jon Miceler and I had come not to poach the peak but to pioneer a route along its southern flank. Jon has studied Buddhism extensively and was based in Asia for eight years. He speaks and reads Chinese and Tibetan and knows more about the fantastical, complex history of the various forms of Himalayan Buddhism than anyone I've ever met.

Jon owns High Asia Exploratory Mountain Travel Company, an outfitter that guides custom expeditions throughout China, Bhutan, and India. He is also the founder of Inner Asian Conservation, a small NGO devoted to wildlife conservation and helping governments develop sustainable methods for managing tourism and trekking in the last pristine places in the eastern Himalayas. His conservation work in Arunachal Pradesh, India, was recently awarded a MacArthur Foundation grant. Jon had been invited by the government of Bhutan to scout a route to the base of Gangkar Punsum from the southeast; the goal was to determine the feasibility of creating a Himalayan haute route that would traverse directly below the peak, perhaps eventually connecting to Bhutan's epic, 25-day Snowman Trek.

We stare at the craggy hulk of Gangkar Punsum until, inevitably, clouds begin to engulf it. First the summit disappears, wrapped in a white scarf, then the adamantine shoulders. Soon the mountain vanishes altogether.

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