Reaching the Valley—‘Rolling the Dice’

In 2022, we knew we would have to ascend the aforementioned mountainside to get to Skarchen for our expedition. Satellite images showed a challenging terrain, and with equipment and food for two weeks, we had 10 heavy loads to be carried. Since it was impossible for horses to go up the route, we employed three local farmers as porters and many Nepali construction workers from the village. One of the farmers knew the original route and guided us up the dangerous slopes from Hunder Dok. The Swiss have six classifications of mountain paths, and this certainly corresponded to the hardest— ‘T6: Difficult Alpine Trekking’. As one ascends, a prominent cube-shaped rock can be seen two- thirds of the way up the route. This giant boulder marks the point where the path, known as Pholong Cholo (Dice Boulder Path), becomes steeper, more granular, and exposed, with dangerous falls threatening anyone who loses their footing. Although our Nepali porters successfully carried the loads up the path, they’d clearly had enough and told us, “We won’t be coming back to help carry things down.” Fortunately, at the end of our expedition, the three local farmers did a sterling job in carrying extra heavy loads down the path.

In planning our return to Skarchen in 2024 to attempt new mountains, we knew that the mountainside route would still be the crux of the problematic way forward. We paid
one of the local farmers to re-build the path. After 20 days of hard labour, it was safer but still far from suitable for horses. We had no choice but to try and recruit porters yet again, and we arranged for four men from the town of Zanskar to carry our expedition equipment. However, when they looked up at the Pholong Cholo, their spontaneous reaction was: “We’re not going up there!” It didn’t help that there was an extreme weather warning for July and the risk of cloudbursts. Without willing and able porters, our expedition was about to end before it started! An evening of earnest persuasion followed, and we finally convinced our porters to reconsider.

The next morning, we all made the strenuous climb up past the ‘Dice’, following what was now a relatively well-defined path and, certainly, much safer than it was in 2022. Notwithstanding, our porters quickly decided that the path was classified as “never again”, for them, and once more, we were left without help to bring our tents and equipment down.

Exploratory Mountaineering

We’d finally reached the head of the Skarchen Valley, and we pitched our base camp in a pristine area— the ground here was covered with colourful wildflowers, with a green expanse of lichen enveloping the many rocks. Initially, we had planned to spend 10 days making a new ascent, but poor weather, some illness, and porter-related issues significantly reduced the time we had to explore and limited what we could attempt. One of the peaks we’d considered climbing turned out to be extremely dangerous. Another one looked more reasonable, although it was just below the ‘magic’ height of 6,000-metres. After much discussion, we decided to opt for the more reasonable option, rather than take the risk. This is a gamble one must take in exploratory mountaineering—you may be fortunate enough to make a first ascent, or you may end up spending a lot of time (and money) exploring without summiting anything!

The Ascent—Reaching New Heights!

Climbing a Himalayan peak nearly always requires setting up an intermediate camp close to the start of the route. After acclimatising for two days at the base camp, we left mid- morning and climbed for four hours into a short side valley. We found a good site for our Advanced Base Camp (ABC), just below the tongue of a glacier. From here, we had stunning views of 7,000-metre-high peaks in the East Karakoram mountains and enjoyed a lazy afternoon before our summit attempt.

The next morning, we needed to make an ultra-early start—one must summit and descend before the afternoon sun makes slopes prone to avalanches because of the melting snow. And so, we rose at 3 AM to a starlit sky, -2°C, and only a slight wind. Leaving our ABC in the pitch dark, we climbed loose, rocky ground with head torches. It was hard going but we were lucky to find a frozen snow gully. We fitted crampons (mountaineers’ climbing spikes) to our boots to help us climb quickly.

By dawn, we had reached the glacier at a height of 5,400 metres. Continuing upwards, we had a clear view of the summit. It looked close but, honestly, everything at this altitude is deceptive. Un-roped, we laboured up the snow and ice slopes, with the altitude making breathing increasingly difficult. Two hours later, we reached a whaleback ridge, where the angle of the slope steepened. For safety reasons, the four of us roped up and slowly made our way up the exhausting ridge, with regular stops to try to catch our breath. It turned into quite a slog, and we forced ourselves to continue, even though our lungs and limbs were urging us to stop. The last few metres of the ridge were quite narrow, and then, there was a seven-metre-high rock tower to climb. Finally, at 9 AM, we were delighted to have reached the 5,974-metre-high summit!

We raised prayer flags and our Ladakhi friends chanted to the mountain gods, following which we took several summit photographs and even made a 360° video (as proof of having reached the top). Almost too soon, it was time to begin our descent. It was 10:30 AM.

A Slippery Way Down

Now, the race was on to get back to ABC before the snow on the glacier began melting. We moved down quickly, again roped up for the exposed climbing section on the ridge because we had seen a crevasse on the ascent. The snow conditions were good, initially, with no danger of any avalanche. By 12 PM, however, when we reached the lower glacier, there had been significant ‘snowmelt’. This made the descent tiring and riskier. Nevertheless, we continued and managed to reach our ABC at 1:30 PM. And by the next morning, we were back at our base camp.

Safely down from the climb, however, did not mean we were safely down from the valley. We still had more than 800 vertical metres of a descent to Hunder Dok. And given that we didn’t have any porters, it took us several days to ferry all our equipment from the base camp and make the descent from Pholong Cholo. Going down is always much more difficult than climbing, and
it took over two hours of extreme concentration, to avoid any slips on the dicey path. And although the path was better than it was in 2022, we would now classify it as, “Probably, never again!”

As per tradition for first ascensionists, we had the right to name the peak we had just climbed— it’s a true privilege. We decided on the name Skarchen Kangri (Skarchen Snow Peak). It was our way to honour the once-lost valley.