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Annapurna: Room Without a View
| Article
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11719 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1994 |
5,165 Words |
| Author
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Richard Bangs, with Pamela Roberson
Richard Bangs and Pamela Roberson have worked on assignments
on six continents. They are coauthors most recently of Island
Gods. Bangs is the founder of SOBEK Expeditions, an
international travel-adventure company that has become part of
the California-based Mt. Travel-SOBEK. His Riding the Dragon's
Back won the Lowell Thomas Award for the best travel book of
1989. Roberson is a fine arts and locations photographer who
specializes in minority cultures and wilderness areas.
Currently, Bangs and Roberson are working on a new book,
Mountain Gods. |
"She who is filled with food."
--Sanskrit translation of Annapurna
Alone in a North Face tent, half of me still owned by sleep, I hear the low, distant sound of a mountain chanting. As consciousness comes, the sound seeps closer, then fades into the round depth of a Buddhist descant . . . it is Ngati Sherpa in the canvas tent next door saying his morning prayers.
As the black vulture flies, I am less than a mile from its gate, the entrance to the Annapurna Sanctuary, the four-by-two-mile oocyte-shaped alpine basin surrounded by nine icy summits higher than twenty-one thousand feet. It should be an easy matter to penetrate this portal, but the air vibrates with uncertainty.
By no design, I am traveling with a female contingent led by thirty-three-year-old Maureen Decoursey. We're on the seventh day of our trek up into the Annapurna Himal. In 1978, the throne room of the mountain goddess Annapurna was the objective of the first American women's expedition to an eight-thousand-meter peak. On October 15, after a long and perilous climb, Vera Komarkova and Irene Miller succeeded in reaching the summit. Tragically, two members of the expedition, Alison Chadwick-Onyszkiewicx and Vera Watson, disappeared on the mountain two days later, and their bodies now lie enshrined with the goddess in the soft snows up ahead. We are stepping up a slippery trail that rises six thousand feet in five miles, alongside white water and between walls never more than a half-mile apart or less than three thousand feet high.
The weather has been unseasonable and unreasonable. It's been raining for days, and we've resorted to looking at postcards to catch the grandstand views supposedly out our tent doors. Now that we've reached a level of altitude, it's snowing. For the last several hours we've passed a river of trekkers retreating down the trail, shaking heads and warning in a dozen accents that avalanches ahead make it impossible to continue.
Now at Hinku Cave, as we stop for thrice-brewed milk tea and hard-boiled eggs, Maureen looks worried. She is hunched in solemn conversation with our sirdar, Ngati, a veteran of three Everest expeditions, including one with the legendary British mountaineer Chris Bonnington. His flat, Apache face is leathery and lined from years in the mountains, and it telegraphs intensity with the moment. Finally, Maureen turns to us and
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