Painted Mountains_ First ascent - Stephen Venables.pdf

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Painted Mountains
First ascents in the Indian Himalaya
Stephen Venables
www.v-publishing.co.uk
– Contents –
Part One: Kishtwar Shivling
Chapter 1 – A Dream
Chapter 2 – Causeway of Distress
Chapter 3 – Monsoon
Chapter 4 – Getting to Know the Mountain
Chapter 5 – On the Wall
Chapter 6 – The Summit
Chapter 7 – Return to the Earth
Part Two: Rimo – The Painted Mountain
Chapter 8 – An Invitation
Chapter 9 – Mangoes and Momoes
Chapter 10 – Beyond the Inner Line
Chapter 11 – To the Lake of Bones
Chapter 12 – Exploration
Chapter 13 – Seven Days on Rimo I
Chapter 14 – The Far Side of Rimo by Jim Fotherington
Chapter 15 – The Double-Humped Camel and Mahendra’s Bridge
Postlude
Appendices
Appendix 1 – Expedition Diary: Kishtwar-Shivling, 1983 1983
Appendix 2 – Mountaineering in the Kishtwar Himalaya, 1947–1985
Appendix 3 – Siachen Indo-British Expedition, 1985
Appendix 4 – Exploration and Mountaineering in the East Karakoram, 1821–1985
Acknowledgements
Maps
– Part One –
Kishtwar Shivling
– Chapter 1 –
A Dream
Snow began to fall at dusk. Inside the tent we struggled to cook supper. The stove was an
old punctured tin can filled with smouldering lumps of dried yak dung. Our smart
pressure stove had been abandoned many miles back, when we failed to obtain petrol for
it. In the forest we had managed well, cooking on wood fires, but for three days now we
had been above the tree line, forced to improvise, and I had felt slightly ridiculous
climbing up to the Himalayan watershed with a large bag of yak turds tied to the top of
my rucksack.
Now, on the evening of 11 September 1979, we were camping at 5,300 metres on the
crest of the Himalaya, in Kashmir. That afternoon we had for the first time looked north
to the brown desert landscape of Zanskar. We had planned to cross the Himalaya and
continue through Zanskar to Ladakh; but one look down steep ice slopes, curving down
out of sight on the far side, had been enough to deter us. Philip, my brother, had virtually
no climbing experience and no crampons to cope with the hard, glassy, ice, so we had
abandoned our plan and decided to return the way we had come. As evening was already
drawing in and cold damp clouds were swirling around, we had stopped to camp where
we were, on the ridge, pitching the tent on a small moderately level patch of snow. Now
the wind outside, the horrible black fumes of yak dung augmented by diesel on our
makeshift stove, and the cold, seeping insidiously through the tent floor, all intensified
our feelings of failure and despondency.
The following day we set off back south. We walked down through grey drizzle and
stopped in the evening to camp in a cave, eking out a pitiful meal of dried onions and
mashed potato.
Morning transformed everything. The sky was blue; a meandering stream glittered
silver in the sunlight; and, as we sauntered down through meadows of edelweiss and
cotton grass, the air was filled with the vibrant twittering of a thousand songbirds.
Suddenly, failure was forgotten and I could abandon myself to the exuberance of a
radiant autumn morning.

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