Last Sanctuary
By his own admission, Hugh Thomson was somewhat underprepared—in terms of mountaineering training—to join the 2000 expedition to the inner sanctuary, the valley that encircles Nanda Devi, among the most inaccessible peaks of the Himalayas. His kit bag contained nothing more useful than a set of miniature bottles of vodka. But he was well versed in the history of earlier expeditions, including the first successful entry into the sanctuary by Eric Shipton and Bill Tilman in 1934 and later ascents to the summit. He weaves their adventures and characters into his witty and erudite narrative of his own expedition, which included such mountaineering luminaries as Narinder ‘Bull’ Kumar and the late George Band.
The valley surrounding Nanda Devi is encircled in turn by two concentric rings of high mountains, and can be entered only by one treacherous gorge. It has an abundance of wildlife and flowers unimaginable to anyone on the blizzard-blown heights that enclose it. Thomson calls it the ‘last’ sanctuary, one of the few places left on Earth relatively untrodden by mankind.
But there’s a serpent in this paradise. In 1965, the CIA hatched a hare-brained scheme to plant a nuclear-powered spying device on the summit of Nanda Devi to keep an eye on China, which had by then developed an atomic bomb. If the plan was daft, its execution was incompetent. As their team approached the summit, to everyone’s surprise, it started to snow; so they decided to leave the device and come back to finish the job in the spring. They duly returned the following year to find the contraption had been swept away in a landslide, along with its plutonium-238 fuel rod—which could continue to despoil one of the sources of the Ganga with radiation for the next 850 years.
The sanctuary has been closed to civilian climbers ever since, on the orders of successive Indian governments. The purpose of the 2000 expedition was to consider the feasibility of reopening it; but their positive report has not borne fruit. The scandal also explains why Thomson’s book was not released in India when it was first published in 2004. One shares his hope that its tardy appearance now will at last focus minds in New Delhi on a problem that cannot be ignored just because it is lying somewhere under a blanket of snow.