The yak and the yeti part III: notes from the Annapurna Circuit

I don't remember ever being this excited to go to school.

A blessing from the lama - for a price.

Sure, he's lived in this cave for 42 years ...

...but he has a hell of a view (our hike to him started from near that lake).

TREK DIARY DAY 7: Into thin air (Humde to Manang, 11,145 ft to 11,682 ft.)

HUMDE - My beard is coming along nicely and just in time as the temperature is plunging with each climb, the blue-white hanging glaciers of the high Himalaya getting ever closer. Sick of the parade of boring food we've been eating for a week, I make breakfast a chocolate pancake and vow to eat sweets all day. In the thinning air, apparently I am regressing back to elementary school.

As we make the short, lonely climb toward Manang, a stiff cold wind tears through the mountains unabated and the vegetation falls away as we cross into the yak elevations and never-summer valleys of the high Himalaya. If I had to name a favorite domesticated animal, it would have to be the stubborn, shaggy, sullen-looking stalwart of some of the most brutal terrain and winters on earth (they're good eating, too). The yak looks like a creature left marooned in an alien time period, more at home in the Ice Age, climbing higher and higher into the mountains to chase an endless winter.

Soon we pass Brugha, a Buddhist center, with stupas*, massive prayer wheels, and an imposing cliffside monastery. Next and final stop is Manang, which seems precariously perched in the shadow of the massive (and quickly melting) Gangapurna glacier to one side and a towering band of cliffs on the other. By this point in the afteroon the winds have reached hurricane levels. Prayer flags are flapping madly, threatening to tear apart, windows are rattling, doors flying open, and the sky thickening with clouds that seeem in a hurry.

After dropping our packs, we take shelter in a bakery. Lunch is an apple crumble that actually approximates apple crumble. I am euphoric.

This is the crucial acclimatization zone, where our bodies must adjust for the final push up the (nearly)18,000-foot Thorong La Pass or risk altitude sickness, so a group of us plans a 1,500 foot climb up to see a Buddhist lama, or holy man ("Climb high, sleep low" is the mountaineers mantra, as gaining elevation and then sleeping lower helps you adjust to the altitude).

Exhausted, out of breath from the elevation, and freezing, as my sweat has been turned to a frigid sheen by the winter winds, I stumble into the lama's cave. His weathered face has the impassive, impenetrable gaze I have come to know in Nepal, a country that would produce the world's greatest poker players if they ever took up the game.

He is 95 years old and has lived in this dank cave clinging to the side of a mountain above 13,000 feet for 42 years. He put a colorful twine necklace around my neck, said a prayer for my safe passage over the Thorong La, put some kind of cardboard box to my head, and thrust his donation box forward.

We had tea and I asked him questions through an elderly nun, who is his only companion. He answered but, again, I couldn't tell if he was thinking, "Please get the hell out of my cave" or "Thank you for showing interest in my life and work."

For all of the isolation, loneliness, and discomfort he must experience, his digs have one thing going for them: the most incredible front-yard view I've ever seen.

Back down in town, thoroughly wiped out, we all treat ourselves to a movie about people dying excruciating deaths in the Himalaya. It is the comically cheeseball made-for-tv movie version of Into Thin Air and we watch it in a basement theater on yak-hide benches, with the villagers who run the place serving tea and popcorn. This ranks as perhaps my best film experience of all time.

*A stupa is a mound-like structure containing Buddhist relics.

TREK DIARY DAY 8: Day of the Jackal (Manang to Yak Karka, 11,682 ft to 13,365 ft)

The views were stunning, the air crisp, as we confidently headed out in completely the wrong direction.

I know, Joe, way too much space up top.

The jackal.

MANANG - Breathing is now getting difficult, but there's plenty of excuses to stop and rest as the views change from serene to mind-blowing. A jackal runs through a horse pasture below us followed by a watchful vulture and a Nepali guide we run into incorrectly identifies it as a fox. I have learned quickly that local guides will always answer your question, and almost always incorrectly. He is one of maybe eight people we see in six hours of trekking that day.

We've spent the first 45 minutes of the day on a gorgeous, perilous trail full of landslides and sweeping vistas. Unfortunately we've been going the wrong way. Had we not run into another lost traveler who wised up, we may still be on the trail, admiring the scenery, wondering when we'll ever get to the next town.

We are greeted in Yak Karka by a dour hotel owner who yells at her customers before they are through the door and demands that we eat every meal at her place, but our friends are staying there and we like the company, so we stay. We make sure to eat lunch at a local rival's restaurant.

The night is the coldest yet (as it will be every night until the pass) and the sullen woman refuses repeated requests to start a fire in the dining room's wood stove. I shiver over my yak burger and Connie digs in to a lasagna disaster that ranks as the most unappealing meal of the trip.

TREK DIARY DAY 9: The Cooler (Yak Karka to Thorong Phedi, 13,365 ft to 14,982 ft)

I challenge you to come up with a cooler domesticated animal than the yak.

A bad omen...

...and a frigid, snowy night.

YAK KARKA - Wildlife has been sparse and I'm anxious to see blue sheep, bighorn-like wild sheep that live at dizzying elevations, are prey to the mystical snow leopard, and play a leading role in the brilliant book on the Himalaya named after said predator.

A Nepali guide assures me 'No one sees blue sheep on this trail.' Thirty minutes later, a fellow trekker we've befriended spots a large herd across the valley. Farther down the trail another herd, much closer this time, sends rocks hurtling down the trail toward us in an area infamous for landslides. No one ever sees blue sheep on this trail.

The sheep are a welcome bit of life in a grimly beautiful landscape of gray scree and the remains of mountainsides ripped apart by avalanches of rock. Our chatty group gets progressively silent as we climb and the oxygen is stripped from the air. The next stop is the last before our final push for the pass and we are nervous. Altitude sickness is on the brain, so to speak.

We pull into Thorong Phedi, a fortress-like dark stone enclave clinging to a windswept cliffside. One of the first things we see is an Israeli girl, barely able to walk, being carried to a helicopter for a medical evacuation. She had severe altitude sickness.

A chilly, overcast day, turns into a frigid, snowy night. This is summer here, but the fat flakes are coming down hard. A few of us shiver over a game of poker and I lose 70 rupees. One of our new friends gets diarrhea and starts puking but insists it's food and not altitude. He won't be talked out of the pass.

Bed time is 8 and no one sleeps well.