A Passing Chill
By Lisa Herbertson
Feet, hands, nose, and everything in between – tick, tick, tick and tick. I mentally went through this checklist as I sat warming myself with a cup of sweet coffee in a small tea house, somewhere 3700m up a hill. Well, to be more precise, in the small, but bustling, Buddhist and Hindu pilgrimage centre Muktinath, on day eight of trekking Nepal’s Annapurna Circuit.
Some two hours earlier, at the Thorung La Pass, I’d performed the same mental check and come up with distressingly fewer affirmatives. Zero actually, since we’re counting. Luckily at that moment, I was too pumped full of adrenaline to care, and also too cold to process the information, so had sidestepped any unnecessary stress associated with potential frostbite.
The day had started in the dark at the Thorung Pedi Lower Base Camp (approximately 4540m). About 10 minutes into the ascent my quality, Made in China, torch had died and I resorted to moonlight, and the occasional flash of torch-light from others in the group, to guide the way up the steep winding ascent. An hour of walking and I’d bid farewell to my nose and feet, as we settled down for a cup of tea at the Upper Base Camp. Twenty minutes later, we were on our way and the residual moon on the snow and ice-capped path proved a much easier navigator.
Our boots crunched into the ice as we paved the way for the trekkers who would follow later in the morning. The going varied from steep ascent to mild ascent, with very little ‘Nepalese flat’ (ups followed by downs, only to go up again) in between. The steeper the climb got, the more I found myself stopping to take in the 360 degree view. Snow capped mountains and glistening blue sky surrounded us. But unlike on the previous eight days, when the mountain tops were like amazing post card images stuck in behind the several thousand metre high ‘hills’ in the foreground, we were now seeing these monstrous beasts on an I-Max screen and there was no chance my flimsy digital camera could do them justice.
Every completed ascent was like a mirage, as yet another climb awaited us. And I started counting my steps on my fingers as I walked, as I felt like someone had filled my boots with lead. About two hours later I lost all sensation in my outer extremities, and began the final slow grind of placing one foot in front of the other, until I thought I’d work myself to a standstill.
With every step I felt the altitude weighing down on me, and a lack of oxygen forcing me to concentrate on just lifting my feet
With every step I felt the altitude weighing down on me, and a lack of oxygen forcing me to concentrate on just lifting my feet. Unfortunately when I stopped to regain my breath, the oxygen seemed to go straight to my frozen bits, and replaced the numbness with pain. It became a bit of a case of choosing between the better of two evils – freezing, but breathing; or sans-oxygen and numb.
After a painstakingly long final 100m climb, we reached the Pass. 5416m! Most people don’t walk 1km horizontally by 9am, let alone vertically. And despite the general lack of feeling from the scalp down, it was a sensational feeling to have reached our goal. To stop and take in the scenery, and know that others had come before, and others would come after, but that less than a dozen people - we’d been counting - would follow us over on this day, and share the experience with us. With a 1.5km descent ahead of us, and icy conditions underfoot, we didn’t hang around too long at the Pass. Besides I had an inkling that somewhere ahead I might regain some feeling in my body, a thought I was increasingly becoming interested in.
After two to three hours of blissful downward slog we reached Muktinath. And now that we had begun our descent in earnest, things were certainly looking up. I couldn’t help smiling as, like a silent roll-call , I wriggled each toe inside my boots – 10 ticks (a grade I would also assign to the whole Annapurna trekking experience).
With out a doubt, two very icy thumbs up!
- Lisa Herbertson
