Dhaulagiri at Dawn from the Kali Gandaki River Gorge. Image by author.

Buddha Grass

Just Another Day in the Himalaya

By W Goodwin

We’re covering ground along a challenging trail, not so much walking as striding, sometimes even scrambling. It’s been a pretty good day so far and it’s not even noon.

We began this day, our fourth day on the trail since departing from the western Nepal village of Pokhara, by slipping out of our down-filled bags at first light. Even though our legs were sore and our bodies feeling the altitude, we were amped. We arose in the predawn darkness hoping to find the cloud cover of the past three days had evaporated during the night. Unwilling to lose a second of any predawn view of the mountains, we stumbled across the dirt floor of our primitive “guest house” and hurry out into the cold mountain air without putting on our boots. Excitement adds to our shivering as we discover the vast Himalayan sky bears not a trace of the cloud cover of the previous days.

At slightly over ten thousand feet high, we’re still immersed in darkness. Two miles above us, however, the peaks were already in the bright sun. Dark at ten thousand feet, dawn at twenty-two thousand…

Visible to us for the first time since we left Pokhara, several of the world’s highest mountain peaks surrounded us. Dhaulagiri, her eastern face brightly in the morning sun, astonished us with her sheer mass. Stiff from the cold, we…