Odyssey to Bedni Bugyal - In another world

In the charming alpine meadow of Bedni Bugyal life goes on as if on another planet, though Jennifer Nandi notes that our inexorable worldliness has preceded our arrival here 

Life's symmetry, reflected in Bedni Kund

Trishul peeks fleetingly behind scudding cloud and the earth is white. I can hear melt- trickles from beneath the snow. Here, at its source, the Bedni Ganga trickles from under an overhang of ice. The upper reaches of this river are clear, rich in oxygen but poor in nutrients. Yet its narrow bed and fast-flowing waters possess considerable erosive abilities – both by chemical weathering of the rocks over which they pass and by the abrasive action of rock particles. 

Nanda Ghunti peeks through a veil of mist

Last night’s hail and snow has buried all irrelevant detail. The bright yellow flowers of a cluster of Marsh Marigold – of the Buttercup family – spring silently by the brook, nestling against a boulder. Such flimsy things they seem, just a step up from the leaves, with no heft. Yet last night’s blast of cold wind has neither withered nor shrivelled it. Frost failed to kill its basal, toothed, shining blades. It sits an easy prey to hail, storm and blizzard, a miracle of growth. What strength in fragility! Some mountain species resist becoming frozen solid because of the sluggish liquid moving in their cells acting like antifreeze. The fragrant, lavender-coloured flowers of Primula atrodentata lift their compact globular head from their icy bed. The whole flower vibrates with the attention it’s getting. The true miracle in the mountains is the manner in which every vestige of decay is seized upon by the roots of plants. 

Marsh marigolds are a burst of vibrant colour against the bleakness of the landscape

The Bedni springs from hidden aquifers under the earth. It will serve us during our brief stay here. I gargle and spit and wash and pollute this spring at its source. I hurry down to the ‘kitchen,’ with visions of hot porridge. Devidutt is warming himself in a blazing fire. There is an unusual amount of light streaming through. I look up – more rafters are missing… I take our entire ration of dalia, cook it with some vermicelli, milk and sugar – the result, a whole load of very appetizing nourishingly sweet porridge. The men arrive and devour the breakfast with great relish. They let us know, much later of course, that they had already swallowed the morning’s quota of energy bars! Sunita and I sit outside, hands cupped around our comfort food, and decide that as wonderful as this is, we are too old to trek with the cooking left to us. Devidutt is a guide with no training, content to lie back like some Old World nawab, one knee cocked, a cigarette (Sunita’s preferably) dangling from his thin lips. His small and subtle artifices to absent himself from volunteering a service exasperated Bijoy. The pony-owners are always ahead of us in one-third or one-fourth the time we take to arrive camp. With a fee I’m sure they could’ve been entrusted to make tea, cook us some breakfast and a meal at the end of the day. 

We turn to look upon the mountain peaks of Trishul and Nanda Ghunti. Thick, irregular and scattered clouds float past the peaks, between us and the sun. The thinner edges of the clouds, more efficient at scattering light forward toward our eyes, shine brightly giving them a silver lining. For this moment of pure magnificence, all is worth it – our hunger, pain, suffering, fatigue, our insecurities and anxieties – all fall away. It is true that the wilderness can revitalize. We fill ourselves with wonder and awaken the genius in us that can infer the vanished past from a hint of rock. 

‘Let’s go birding’, we say, with energy anew. 

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! 

Encounter - The Himalayan Monal

Even a peacock must bow to this unchallenged monarch of Himalayan fowls
 
In May 2007, on my first visit to the Uttarakhand Himalaya, the Himalayan Monal (Lophophorus impejanus) proved utterly elusive. Fighting altitude sickness in the foggy heights of Bedni Bugyal, I was offered a tachistoscopic glimpse of a metallic blue streak with a white rump and an orange tail. That's about all. Out of reluctant pride, I ticked my checklist. But all along, I felt guilty that my sighting was of such low quality that it hardly merited an entry. Payback time arrived two years later. 


In the third week of September 2009, my friend Sahastra and I trekked through the alpine forests and grasslands of Chopta and Tungnath. Tungnath, at 12,073 feet, is the third of the five Kedars (where Shiva's dismembered body is believed to have fallen on earth) and the highest Shiva shrine in India. It is believed to have been built a thousand years ago.

At 12,073 ft, Tungnath is the highest Shiva shrine in India, and possibly in the world

The grey stone temple blends well into its backdrop: plunging cliffs watered by a trickle of sweet springs and rock faces slathered with alpine vegetation -- grasses, daisies, primula, gentian, marsh marigolds, docks, and arrangements of ferns, lichens and mosses that would chasten even the most sylvan of landscape artists. A few hundred feet below, the grassland (or bugyal, as it is known locally) is broken by shrubs like juniper and a dense undergrowth of dwarf rhododendron. Here, rufous-bellied tits and orange-flanked bush robins dart inconspicuously along with Hume's warblers and grey bushchats. Lower down, the grassland meets the first trees of the forest -- stands of fern-girded oak and the relatively inviolate deodars.

Mist cloaked the forest, making birding impossible

But it was not here that we spotted our first Monal. On a misty afternoon in Chopta, 4 km downhill at the base of the Tungnath trail, we took a walk along the road hoping to spot something. Two days ago, we had been gifted with the lucky sighting of three (first, one for sorrow and then two for joy) Yellow-throated Martens, whom I dubbed Marten, Luther and King. But this afternoon's pursuit appeared to be fruitless. The dense fog made photography impossible and walking dangerous. We kept to the road to avoid toppling off a cliff. Halting abruptly at a bend, where a shepherd's trail branched off into the forest, Sahastra hissed: "Pheasant!" 


Sadly, the human eye does not come equipped with fog-lamps. We could tell the shape of a large brown bird, not quite peahen-sized, with a mottled back and a prominent white ring where its folded wings met the base of its tail. We froze to avoid flushing it but it ambled into the thicket and into the cover that the fog offered. That evening, a look at the pages of Grimskipp told us that it was indeed a female Monal. Not quite the appetiser we craved, but enough for a tick on the checklist. But that first morning at Tungnath was where the Himalayan Monal revealed itself to us. We saw two males foraging unconcernedly on the verge of the forest. And then we flushed two hens, which whirred up in the air like partridges, arced and descended into the oblivion of the rhododendron shrubbery. Thus encouraged, we descended into the shrubbery and were rewarded with the sight of three more male birds. We heard them call -- a loud, not unmusical bugling -- and saw them flash their white rumps in flight. We were quite overwhelmed by the glut of good fortune. 


We returned to Tungnath again two days later, riding mules at the crack of dawn to get to the summit of Chandrashila (13,386 feet above MSL) in time to catch a glimpse of the snow-capped peaks of Trishul and Chaukhamba before the rising mists blotched them out. At a tea stop, a beautiful red fox slunk past us, its coat rich russet and slightly grizzled with a creamy white tip to the tail. Further up, we glimpsed a magnificent male Monal, and then another with two hens. We flushed another bird off a cliff edge, and its brilliant metallic blue plumage glimmered as it caught the sun. We felt so accomplished that we wanted to take the rest of the day off and laze. But like diligent birders, we put indolence aside and got down to work. Through the day, more Monals showed themselves to us. This was indeed a happy hunting ground for the state bird of Uttarakhand (and the national bird of Nepal). 


That evening, we heard the Monal call as dusk darkened the Himalayan sky. On our second descent of Chandrashila, we saw more than three or four birds foraging late into the twilight. Early next morning, as we left Tungnath for Chopta, we came upon a Monal cock foraging at eye-popping proximity near a cliff edge. It seemed unperturbed by our presence and took a few unhurried steps as we approached. The sun was not yet up and the dawn light was very tricky. Sahastra called out metering instructions to me as I battled vertigo in my attempt to photograph the bird. As I struggled with the exposure, a hen walked into the frame. And for the next five minutes we had the time of our life as the cliffside became dotted with Monals -- at least three males and four females. Finally, my encounter with the Monal had been fulfilling. It was hard to leave the hills without a pang gnawing at my heart.

The interzone between forest and alpine grassland is the typical habitat of the Himalayan Monal

While foraging, Monals seek the shelter and obscurity of the dwarf rhododendron thickets

From behind a rock ledge, a helmeted head peeks

Suddenly, the hillside was alive with Monals

Not to be outdone, a queen joins her king

Stately enough to dent a peacock's pride

ALSO SEE: My Facebook photo album 'Himalaya: The Monsoon's Last Breath' 




 Sahastra's video of the Monal:


Monal at Dawn from Sahastra Rashmi on Vimeo.
Photographs © Bijoy Venugopal