ON The ROCKS
Hanging by a thin rope hundreds of metres above the ground... the rush of rock climbing
I placed a number 3 cam1, my old Clog2 pinkslinged unit, and it was a perfect fit. I clipped in a long sling and made a bomber3 3-piece belay4 station, and tugged on the rope three times, to let Zubin and Kailash know they could start climbing. I yelled, “Climb on!” for good measure, but they sure as heck couldn’t hear me from beyond the corner and over the wind. So I hoped the yanks would suffice, and then kept them tight on belay, my muscle memory taking over. Now that my lead was over for this pitch, my brain could afford to relax. So I looked up and out at the horizon.
in front of me were incredible rocky peaks, fingers of stone and ice reaching up for the sky. A slender thread of whitewater strung the base of the valley below. Also perfectly visible, perhaps a thousand feet below, were the walls of the PWD guesthouse compound where we had managed to finagle an electricity-less room for the night. Our Audi Q5 was parked inside, packed to the gills with climbing and camping gear. I breathed in fresh, clean, cold Himalayan air. Life couldn’t be more perfect.
After about half an hour, Zubin’s helmeted head appeared on the slabby rock face twenty metres below me. He was moving slower than I expected. So the climbing wasn’t as easy as I thought! We were two pitches5 above the deck6 now, about 80 metres from our starting point on the steep, grassy scree7 slope below. At least another pitch lay above, possibly two. I had no clue, because no one had climbed this rock face before. Unlike in the US or Europe, here there was no guidebook, no information, no prepared belay or rappel8 anchors. We were doing a first ascent.
A first ascent! It was unbelievable that rock this good hadn’t been climbed. In the rest of the world, nearly all good quality rock faces have been climbed, developed, documented and popularised. Hordes of weekend warriors throng the lines.
Here, the rock was a gift that kept on giving. Every hold was solid, every move perfect. every scary step up on a tenuous hold led upwards to a perfect, solid jug. The friction was incomparable, the quality of the granite, superb. Multi-coloured lichen smeared the crystalline face. I felt at peace, I felt at home.
Yes, there was always that fear. What was above. What was the way out? Would we end on a sharp summit or a small ridge with an easy descent?
the long Way around
I was only three years old when I first felt the rush of air on my face on the open road. I was nestled in between my father and the gas tank
of a Yezdi as we went hurtling down to the local market to pick up eggs.
Thirty years later, the rush of rocketing down a road to nowhere remains. Behind the wheel of the Q5, S tronic tranny switched to manual, and I flip, flip, flipped up and down between first, second and third as we raced the SUV beyond Kaza.
The winding road was flat here in the Spiti valley, the mountains epic. A grey mist descended over the earthen towers, fantastical castles rising in the sky. A sandstone canyon appeared as a rift between the steep mountain rising on our side. The car grunted as I downshifted and raced over a broken stony track. The road didn’t even deserve to be called a mule path. But the Q5 took it all in her stride.
I was 18 when I first took this road, on a hitchhike-backpack trip that ended in Tabo, in that fabulous landscape of this valley. I didn’t need religion, because there are many heavens on earth, and these incredible places are it. days hunched over a laptop in the office disappeared as I was sated with views of a rushing river below, broken rocky peaks above. But to race this road wasn’t why we were there…. We were there to find what could be one of the world’s most epic rock climbing destinations.
Something that had pricked when I was young had become a full-fledged pursuit now. As a climber I had climbed rock and ice all over the world, graduating from trad9 routes in seneca rocks and the gunks on east Coast USA to the epic walls of Yosemite, before moving on to the legendary climbs of the Alps.
but i hadn’t climbed much in india, because, going by existing information and content, there wasn’t that much rock to climb in India.
Above: Nearing Kaza. It is good luck to stay left of any Chorten on one’s path
The problem with indian climbing, and the reason why indian climbers don’t hold a stick to their us and european counterparts, is (partly) the lack of accessible and developed highquality climbing areas. Americans practice their skills in the popular shawangunks of upstate new york, before tackling the big walls of Yosemite and finally the Himalayas. Parisbased euros developed fontainebleau as a bouldering site so that they could improve their skills for the incredible Aiguilles of chamonix.
but according to still-popular wisdom, indian climbing was and is only about the Himalayas. Ask most Indian ‘climbers’ over the age of 50, and they’ll disdainfully sniff at Indian rock climbing. climbing, according to them, is only himalayan mountaineering – remote and far away, requiring days or weeks of hiking with gear, food and supplies before reaching any quality rock or ice.
Our objective was to blow this ridiculous myth out of the water. There was road-accessible rock climbing in india, and it was going to be of epic, world-class quality.
Tales of incredible rock walls in sangla valley, and in a remote place called chotta dhara, had reached me in the past few years.
Further ahead, in the area between rohtang Pass and Kunzum Pass was supposed to be an entire region of perfect granite. ‘chattru’, a traveller’s pitstop, was where the bouldering10 circuit flocked during the summer months, when hampi and badami became hot and sultry, and the cool wind of the Himalayas beckoned. dhillan chandramowli, a regular contributor to The Outdoor Journal told me that a semi-mythical brit called ‘Pil’ had developed much of the bouldering action there, and the topos11 were available in a guidebook at Laloo’s dhaba.
I mentioned my findings to my long-time climbing mentor Mohit Oberoi, owner of the Adventure 18 chain of outdoor gear stores. He told me he’d climbed a beautiful line called phaedrus (after Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) in 1990, a 20-pitch route. (One pitch is one rope-length, typically ranging from 40 to 60 metres). My imagination was fired. This had to be done!
sangla to chotta dhara, In two and a half days
A long drive out of delhi led to Thanedar, just beyond Shimla and Narkanda. I hadn’t known much about the place at all. Just before leaving i’d called rajesh ojha, owner of banjara resorts, to ask about sangla – which is when he said we should spend the first night at his property at the home of Himachal’s apples. As it turned out, this was where a certain stoakes brought apple cultivation to himachal pradesh – the root of much of its current wealth.
After a quiet sleep surrounded by apple orchards, we headed in the direction of sangla, and adventure.
sangla was as beautiful as i remembered it. But something had changed. It wasn’t just the full bars of cellphone reception. It was something more. My eyes. I saw rock everywhere. My jaw dropped. This was indeed India’s Yosemite, as Mo had put it. There were big walls up in narrow valleys, there were roadside crags all the way, there were alpine peaks above the big walls! What on earth was going on? Had no climbers discovered this place?
We opened the sunroof and Zubin sat up on the car with the go Pro. We filmed everything. I craned my neck looking up at rocks, rocks, rocks. Everything looked great, but I needed something particular. My two companions on this trip, Kailash Kalyani and Zubin Atre, did not have much climbing experience. Zubin is a yoga instructor who’d done some climbing, and Kailash is an ex-Microsoft engineer who was very keen on adventure. However, they were both completely new to multi-pitch trad climbing. It was possibly slightly foolhardy of me to take total newbies on such a trip, but then I’d taught many climbers over the years. I’d also
learned the Euro attitude of just going for it. finally, there just weren’t enough climbers in India. I felt it was important to take new climbers out to incredible locations. That was the only way the sport would grow in India.
next to the road i found something that looked right. A short boulder-y rock face led to a vegetated ledge. Above that, there was a solid looking crack leading up at least another pitch, with a small pine tree growing to the side. I studied the rock for details. It looked fairly straightforward with good protection. It was going to be their first trad route.
Two hours later, i rappelled back to the ground and unclipped from the rope. Holding a fireman’s belay on the line, I helped Kailash and Zubin rap down as well. A success! Their first ever trad route, their first ever first ascent, and first ever rappel! We were as mad as the very first ascensionists experimenting with everything they did. I grinned, pleased.
We drove onwards, slowly, looking at every crag we could spot. For this trip I was interested in only one thing: road-accessible, easy routes that were also good for protection and descent. These were the kinds of routes that made climbing popular in the rest of the world - easy enough for everyone, including amateur recreational climbers to jump on or take their families to, as well as not needing much time to hike up to. We spotted and GPS-marked
several such potential crags (i even racked up at the base of one before realising we’d run out of sunlight). The next day, we continued onwards. From Sangla we managed Kaza in a single day, which i hadn’t expected, full credit to the Q5. Then towards Kunzum Pass and beyond. The road was astonishingly bad. We were averaging perhaps 14kmph – and not because we were being careful about the car. This wasn’t a road by any angle – it was barely even a widened trekking route. It was getting dark by the time we crossed over from spiti valley into lahaul, so we took the turn-off for Chandra tal lake and camped out there for the night.
Mysterious and rocky peaks towered above us. Were these the chandra Bhaga peaks? I felt very little, like a hobbit on a long journey. Water thundered down, our sight-lines were long, in every direction i looked i could see many kilometres away, up valley and down river, up mountain and down long, narrow cascades. What a wondrous place.
Finally… chotta dhara.
first ascent: two and a half yogis
finally, both Zubin and Kailash had reached the belay ledge. They were ecstatic about the rock and the climb, with Kailash looking a little out of breath. It was only natural, as we were at about 4400 metres. I clipped them into the anchors and we all rested a little, and took some pictures. They looked relaxed and happy, which was good – but i was stressing about the bigger adventure still ahead of us – descending off this face. Luckily, with such amazing quality rock, protection wasn’t going to be a problem. In the worst case scenario we would rappel off leaving behind gear. A few cams and nuts cost a few hundred dollars. Our lives were worth more.
Kailash had left behind my zero-size Wild country cam, because he couldn’t get it out. I belayed him back down the pitch to retrieve it after explaining how it worked. A light drizzle came and went, and the sun continued its path across the sky. It’s truly incredible how much one can actually get done in a day, a day spent outdoors.
After Kailash retrieved the piece, i climbed up another pitch until i hit the intersection of an overhang and a blank slab. Leaving a solid nut and maillon12 in place, I came down to the guys.
“okay… looks like one more pitch left, but it gets tougher than before. The options are a very poorly protected tricky slab, or a strenuous overhang. Alternatively I suggest we descend now – we’ve been climbing for most of the day, and i think you guys have had a great experience. What say?”
We agreed to rappel off the route after having done two and a half pitches. We’d created a beautiful line, perfect for climbers of any grade and ability, super-protectable and perfectly accessible. I hammered in a piton13 and a nut, slinging it together with a carabiner14 and a solid maillon. Luckily I had brought a pair of 50m double ropes, the new salsa 8.2mm ropes. I didn’t even know how long it was till the ground – but i could belay the guys down to the gully that went up in between our rock face and the adjacent one. A full 50m descent – a full rope length! After they were safely down, i rappelled down carefully, not bouncing too much on the anchor.
The sun was coming down as i descended, creating that wonderful evening orange glow. The milky way would come up soon, in glorious multi-colour. We named the route “Two and a half yogis”, partly as a joke, partly because we hadn’t finished that final pitch – for which we had to return. We were only two days away from delhi here, with first ascents in the bag, stars in the sky. There were many routes to climb, all around us. I tried to think, to calculate - how many lifetimes worth of routes were here, by us / eu standards, where one crag could have several routes all bunched up barely metres apart? Years? Lifetimes?
This was an epic climbing destination, both here and Sangla. Finding such places and climbing them? A climber’s dream.