Six months late,
needlessly complicated, and questionably worded; I confidently hesitate to
present: A review of my experiences at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute
Basic Mountaineering Course 319 in Darjeeling India. If you are thinking of spending a month
without a shower on the side of a frozen mountain while subsisting on white
rice and dahl but needing the reassurance of an inexperienced foreigner then
this read is undoubtedly for you.
Just getting to
Darjeeling is enough of an adventure for most people with pigment-deficient
skin to give up entirely. After spending
43 hours on trains literally pressed up against sweaty middle aged men and
another 7 hours shoehorned into the back of a jeep, I was more than happy to
plop down in a cold concrete dorm shared by seven other stinky roommates. The sweet smell of legroom.
It turns out I
wasn't the only foreigner who signed up for Basic Mountaineering 319. There were two Norwegians, one Aussie, and a
Tennessee boy; however, we were outnumbered by exactly 80 Indian students and
12 Indian instructors, who by the way, were intimidatingly accomplished. Summiting the highest mountain in the world
isn't even a bragging point for most of them, expeditions to terrible and
remote peaks is just part of the job and you should see one of them tie a
bowline knot!
After spending a
week at the Darjeeling campus alternating our time between the lecture hall and
rock faces we were ready for our five day trek to HMI basecamp. Not ready because of the lectures on
avalanche safety or demonstrations of stomach rappels though, we were ready
because of the daily dreaded 6AM PT + 5k + yoga hour. It must have been just as terrible a way to
wake up for the people living on that road, stretching with a good yawn on
their front porch and suddenly a horde of 85 of the worst smelling humans in
existence huffing past the front sidewalk trailed by a fit local man hopelessly
filling the air with encouragements and threats. It seemed to work though, and at the end of
the seventh night I found myself nervously yet confidently trying to pack all
of the loaned gear into my comparatively tiny 50 Liter pack. I left the change of underwear and shirt
behind. After all, how much worse could
the smell possibly get?
"Rope 5, all
in?" "Sir, yes SIR!" HMI is a kind of military school; half the
instructors are even on duty as instructors and many of the students were sent there
by their military branches. The rope
leader next to me at every check-in always gave a perfect salute and stomped
one of his feet when asked a question. I
would just awkwardly answer "yep, rope 4 is all here" and sometimes
the instructor would say, "okay, now pull your hands out of your
pockets." I learned just as much
about Indian culture as I did ice seracs and belay devices and the bowel
movements of Ryan and Mark. And I
learned a lot about belay devices.
Including how to rappel without them.
Face down descending a thirty foot drop.
Just a short
sampling of a few of the things I learned:
- The history of rope making
- The names and heights of the 14 highest mountains in the world
- How to tie a double fisherman
- The treatment of High Altitude Cerebral Oedema (nothing - there actually is no treatment)
- Exact weather conditions favorable to avalanches
- How to get giant blisters from plastic mountaineering boots
- How to set a rope anchor on the side of an ice cliff
- Crevasse rescue pulley systems
- How to get seconds of the baked beans dinner side (have a pretty girl ask for you)
- How to self-arrest using an ice axe
- The importance of cardamom tea
- How to put on crampons and then use them to climb vertical glacier ice
- How to blissfully avoid your own BO stench (just don't ever take your parka off)
- Patience
There are truly more
items than I can list. I have a whole
mustache themed notebook full of things I learned. And then some things that didn't make sense
to write down in a mustache themed notebook.
Like a deeper sense of how I react to adverse conditions (hint: not
exactly like a dignified knight), the friendship bonds that can be formed on
mountains, and a clearer understanding of my own physical limitations. Which is good, because the whole point of
attending an institution is to learn. I
feel more confident, not just on mountains, but tackling life as a whole in
general after the course.
The trek to base
camp (which sits at 14,500 ft) took five days.
When you hike as a group you are only as fast as your slowest
person. When there are 85 of you chances
are that's pretty dang slow. It poured
rain that sometimes turned to snow the third night and soaked everything on my
side of the tent. I got impatient at my
own lungs as they acclimatized and lost all feeling in my toes as we got higher
up the fourth day. And. I looked out over some of the most beautiful,
breathtaking sceneries of mountain wilderness I've ever seen. Sometimes all I could do was stand and
stare.
Base camp was an
unassuming little try at existence under the shadow of a whole range of peaks
and massifs. Well above the tree line,
it never really got above freezing and so failed to possess the finer comforts
of modern civilization. Like fire and
liquid water. Each day for 10 days we
would wake up at 5 AM and leave the thin air at base camp to struggle in the
even thinner air that supposedly hung over Rathong Glacier. It was a three hour hike one way, normally
through freezing rain or snow, but it was there that we really experienced the
method and art of mountaineering. And
one guy slipped and both of his arms popped out of socket and he had to walk
three days back to the nearest road to get them reset. Actually, quite a few people (about 35) had
to drop throughout the course and surprisingly it wasn't due to the lack of
safety standards.
If you've ever tried
to cross any street in India then you already know that Indians tend to view
risk a little differently. I've never
attended a mountaineering course in the States or Switzerland so I don't know exactly
what their safety guidelines are but I have a feeling they don't order you to
free-solo climbing routes, or let you rappel down cliffs without a harness, or
pick you up and chuck you off the side of a mountain in order to learn
self-arrest. To be perfectly honest it's
one of the reasons I would recommend HMI.
Where else can you short-cut up an ice face without any rope and have
your instructors beam approvingly?
At the end of our
time at basecamp good fortune and the head of the whole of HMI whom we
affectionately called "Papa Sherpa" were with us and for the first
time in several years a Basic Mountaineering Course got to try their hand at
summiting the intimidating and technical peak of BC Roy. We woke up an hour early, at 4, slipped
across a frozen valley (literally), and started the slow assault on our
long-last acclimated lungs and legs.
Eight hours, seven pitches of rope, and zero breakfasts later I
straddled the edge of the highest peak I'd ever climbed (18,000 ft) and looked
out over an unending maze of glaciers, ice falls, and jagged ridges. The weather was the best it had been in over
a week. Thinking back, I am blown away
that the instructors were able to take an inexperienced, out of shape group
like us, most of whom had never even seen an ice axe and some of which had
never even seen a mountain, and somehow pour enough training into us within
three weeks to get 51 of us on top of a peak like BC Roy. Unreal.
So there it is. That's my account of HMI Basic 319. Did I enjoy it? Sometimes.
Did it turn me into the world's finest mountaineer? No.
Did the smell of our basecamp dormitory make me queasy? Yep. Would
I recommend it? Without hesitation.
Thanks for reading. May you climb from peak to peak.
