Odyssey to Bedni Bugyal – Slow Deterioration

We arrive at Bedni Bugyal, but only barely. Food, shelter and rest are in pitifully short supply. Add to that the prospect of two long, cold, terrifying nights at 11,000 feet. Continuing Jennifer Nandi's riveting account of an unforgettable trek
An hour later, Bijoy comes up to us to beg a sip of water. I point wordlessly to the guide, perched high on the ridge looking down on us with disdain. Bijoy nods but strangely makes his way further down the slope. I am too fatigued mentally and physically to question him. A half-hour of hard climbing later, Sunita takes the bottle of water from Devidutt and holds it out to Bijoy who ignores us totally. Figuring he’d overcome whatever deficiency he had imagined himself to be suffering from, we continue. Bijoy passes us muttering incoherently. 

Black clouds shroud the mountains. The air is now rich and damp and we breathe it in watermelon-sized slices. Not for the first time is my stomach reminding me that it is now lodged firmly against my backbone. Composted beneath a deep sift of wishful thinking are hot-cooked meals that will greet us in the welcoming structure that will serve as bed and kitchen at Bedni. Silently, we push on. Our tired bodies are working at full throttle. Light withdraws in great silence up the mountains. The sky is now very thick. A cold light drizzle pricks at us.

A thundercloud billows, rising ice crystals collide with falling hailstones. The hail strips electrons from the ice. The top of the cloud becomes predominantly positive and the bottom mostly negative. Now we have a "shadow", or negative charges in the lower cloud that induce a positive region on the earth below. Static electricity builds, and a negative spark is launched from the lower cloud. But we know nothing of this, just yet.


Bijoy is struggling with his backpack heavy with photographic equipment. Satish from afar notices his unsteady step and backtracks to shoulder Bijoy’s load. Bijoy resists, then relents. Satish hands him my bird guide for safe-keeping. My weather-beaten field guide is what Bijoy refers to as the Gutenberg Bible – so full of annotations, observations and descriptions is it. It is also in a sad state of disrepair.

We stop to don rain gear. Regrettably, to save weight, I’d packed two cellophane-thin plastic sheets to serve as rain coats instead of the sturdy impermeable poncho that now sits safe and dry in my cupboard at home. The light-weights will just have to do. Freezing rain plates us in silver. I pass Sahastra instructing Bijoy to keep to the centre, not veer off the edge. Bijoy drifts in a fog of distraction trying to breathe the insubstantial air. Exertion has crimsoned his face and neck. I know he is hobbled by pain in his knee, but then, so are we to a certain extent. We must steer clear of danger. The way to steer clear of danger is not to be constrained by fear. But that’s impossible. There is no congenial company of pines to shade and protect you from the incessant rain and hail. 

A wind picks up, rattling us like withered walnut leaves. The weather is devoid of both humour and dimension. It is a killer of a storm. We are battered by golf-ball-sized hail. Jagged, branched channels of lightning and upward sparks sprout like weeds from the ground. Upward and downward meet spreading in both directions, superheating air and creating shock waves that produce thunder. Devidutt walks hunching his shoulders against the weather’s onslaught. The stupid man hadn’t bargained for this. I hand him one of my plastic rain shields. A rain-drenched guide is no guide at all. 

The sun has long exited the stage, falling behind black curtains of cloud. The sky is dark well before bedtime. Spooky mists emerge, and we walk into banks of fog. Now the whiteness is our darkness. We trip and stumble, unsure. Are we anywhere? Or nowhere? Should we have stayed back home? What is this place, so spare of sights and sounds? Then the fog darkens and fades to black. I’m right behind Bijoy when the book drops. Both Devidutt and I yell at him from barely two feet away. He passes on unconcerned. I pick up my precious book and hand it to Devidutt for safe-keeping. Bijoy is a light-hearted person with a passion for writing and music. Now it seems he is light-headed as well. 

Odyssey to Bedni Bugyal – Didana to Ali Bugyal

Pressed to ascend an indefinite distance to the alpine meadow of Ali Bugyal, Jennifer Nandi's mind fastens to thoughts of self-preservation and meditations on the Zen of climbing

Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, we set off from Didana the next day on what we’ve been told is roughly an “eight-kilometre easy trek” to Bedni Bugyal. We should be there for a late afternoon lunch. We couldn’t have been further from the truth! 

We walk the flanks of the mountain and descend quickly to a trickling brook. Scrubby bushes and a higher-altitude variety of stinging nettle encroach upon our path, breaking their needles of poison on the edges of our trousers. Stinging nettle thrives in the phosphate-rich soil around human habitation. In most soils and waters, phosphorus is in short supply. Decomposers return phosphorus to the soil as the phosphate ion. A phosphorus atom, unless lodged deep in the earth, is therefore likely to spend much of its time in organisms. 

A shepherd sits under the shade of an old tree, guarding his precious herd of sheep and goats. The shepherds’ goats roam the hillsides devouring their favourite food of slow-growing oak saplings. 

We ascend swiftly through straggly oak and rhododendron. It is difficult to imagine that this was once part of a rich forest that clothed the hillsides from the Indus to Bhutan at an altitude from about 1500 m to 3000 m. Today, scant patches of that ancient green belt are the only reminders of its past glory. The large evergreen “Ban” Oak had once been the best known of the Himalayan oaks. 

There should be many Black-throated and Eurasian Jays wedging acorns into crevices to split the shell with their ice-pick beaks to get at the seeds. But birds are indicative creatures. They know this forest offers little nourishment. Lopping interferes with the regenerative ability of a tree. 

Acorns from adult oaks carry very large stores of food to sustain oak seedlings through their difficult first months. A mature tree may carry as many as 90,000 acorns. Oaks are slow growing. Eventually, they may stand four storeys high to provide boarding and lodging for birds and animals. 

Within the roots live beetle larvae. Concealed in crevices of the bark are tiny moths. They lie dormant during the day and fly around the branches at night. And just beneath the bark, beetles burrow radiating galleries in the wood. Hunting for the beetles are Himalayan Woodpeckers. The birds favour a mixed coniferous and temperate forest and, as we leave Didana far behind, these handsome pile-drivers are everywhere. 

Epiphytes cloak the bare branches of the oak thickly enough to provide a safe haven for nesting Asian Brown Flycatchers, which are just all over the place. So are Green-backed Tits. One tit, with its mouth crammed with food for its young, takes such a detour to approach its nest hole that we had to pause our predestined aptitude for peering, to allow it some privacy. 

Oaks once grew abundantly in association with Rhododendron arboreum and occasionally the Deodar, forming the chief tree of a well-known class of forest. How resplendent the rhododendron must have been with their large compact clusters of red flowers which contrast so strongly with the glossy green leaves. The Rhododendron is either lopped for firewood or its flowers picked to be processed into a kind of sweet drink that is sold by every ‘juice’ shop along Himalayan hill-station roads. 

Plantations of Chir Pine, Pinus roxburghi, were planted in place of the primary forest of mixed conifers. This species of tree does not support undergrowth. In the dry season, the tinder-dry pine needles quickly catch fire and, in the monsoon, with little top soil to protect the earth, the rain washes swathes of mountainside down in ubiquitous landslides. 

The gradient is now steeper than before and we pause every now and then for breath and for an awareness of where we are. A male Kaleej pheasant sporting a long white crest with white barring on its rump, contrasting nicely with the blue-black of its body, gives us a glimpse of its bright red facial skin before scooting off into a deep gully. 

The forest opens. Grey-headed Canary Flycatchers signal their presence with their short interrogative whistles. Tits and tree-creepers are everywhere. But their whistled introductory notes followed by a rapid penetrating accelerating trill, is quite distinct from the high-pitched chi-chi-chi-chi-chiu-chiu-chu trill of what we are more accustomed to. 

This bird is a tree-creeper with a straighter bill and with so much more patterning – dark ear-coverts with a nice creamy breast and belly and it is ever so rufous on its flanks. These Rusty-flanked Tree-creepers chase each other and settle frequently on the barks of trees, creeping up the vertical trunks and along the underside of branches, spiralling upwards in a series of jerks, probing the cracks and crevices in search of insects and spiders. Such lively behaviour – is it indicative of nest-building? 

Why do we climb? We pit our strength against difficulty; we endure hardship, discomfort and danger. It is almost as if we negate outward agencies of any kind – we put aside competition, we deny our otherwise prevalent sense of separateness, we reject the fake. We see the mountain’s magnitude, its immensity, and in doing so we drive out our pettiness. On occasion, we are so fully absorbed that we escape not just from the ugliness of greed, of noise, of noxious fumes, but from our very selves! 

Chaukhamba, the four-pronged mountain of Garhwal

I was drawn to the massif gleaming in the horizon as it towered over the lesser ranges in the foreground

Chaukhamba (right) from Bedni Bugyal. The peak next to it is Shivling (near Gangotri).
Photo: Sahastrarashmi (2002)

In September 2009, Sahastra and I took a train from Delhi to Haridwar and ventured on our second trip together to the Himalayas. On the first leg we aimed to explore the trail to Tungnath, one of the five sacred shrines dedicated to Shiva (known as the Panch Kedar). We began by taking the trail to Deoria Tal from Ukhimath, a hillside town overlooking the Mandakini. As we discovered the next morning, the mountain river, one of the tributaries of the Ganga, was a glinting turquoise ribbon thousands of feet in the valley below. Yet its muffled roar sought us out like a persistent stage whisper. 


We had spent an exhausting day riding a cramped made-for-the-mountains bus from Haridwar to Ukhimath via Rudraprayag, the confluence of the Mandakini and the Alaknanda rivers. At 4 pm the town, made respectively famous and notorious by by Jim Corbett and a man-eating leopard in the 1920s, was hot, muggy and swarming with flies. It didn't feel like we were in the Himalayas at all. 


At Ukhimath we found some respite though it wasn't cold as we had expected (or hoped -- because the Himalayan cold is at once welcome and frightening). The peak of Kedarnath, lit by the embers of a long-gone sun, presided over a great part of the evening as we sat on the lawns of the GMVN guesthouse running over our plans for the next day. 

Chaukhamba from Deoria Tal

A jeep driver dropped us off at Sari, the roadhead to Deoria Tal. Glad to be on foot again after many months, we began a laboured ascent to the lake as our city-slicker lungs acclimated to the altitude. Oak and rhododendron paved the fern-fringed path. Warblers abounded in the low canopy. As the sun came out, griffons began to circle overhead. On the sun-warmed rocks, Kashmir Rock Agamas sat motionless, their slaty blue limbs blending into the smooth stone beneath them.  Some of them appeared to be making a meal of small flowers growing among the grass.

Kashmir Agamas basking in the sun

After climbing 4 km and about 3000 vertical feet, we arrived at a glade. Sahastra, who was walking ahead of me, exclaimed, "You must see this!" A gentle meadow began where the forest ended. The edges of a limpid lake reflected the charcoal sky. And ahead of it, presiding over the horizon, was a massif. It had to be Chaukhamba.


Chaukhamba -- the name literally means four pillars -- is one of the highest peaks in the Garhwal region of Uttarakhand.  The spires range in elevation from 23,419 feet (Chaukhamba 1) to 22,487 feet (Chaukhamba 4). The highest peak was first summited in 1952 by Lucien George and Victor Russenberger, two Swiss members of a French expedition (source: Wikipedia).

A Himalayan Woodpecker tries its luck on a slender tree

We admired the peak in awe for a long time and then explored the lake. A variety of warblers and flycatchers were in abundance. White wagtails chased insects in the grass while a Himalayan woodpecker knocked on wood for luck. Black-headed jays were almost tame, coming up to the kitchen shack for morsels.


Chaukhamba remained a persistent presence on our journey from Chopta to Tungnath and all the way up to Chandrashila, at 13,123 feet the highest peak on this trail.

Chaukhamba from the trail to Tungnath

Two years earlier, on a trek to Bedni Bugyal via Loharjung pass, I had encountered Chaukhamba for the first time. Climbing through an oak forest from the hamlet of Didana toward Ali Bugyal, I was drawn to a mountain gleaming in the horizon as it towered over the lesser ranges that had eclipsed it while we were at lower altitudes. I distinctly remembered its massive hulking form and the four spires. As we watched, clouds veiled the view and we did not see it again. 


Chaukhamba has since dominated my memory of the Himalayas. Up until I glimpsed the serene and stately form of Nanda Devi from Auli. But that is another story.


Text and photos by Beej
Main photo by Sahastrarashmi