Cloudy weather is innately reminiscent, irrespective of whether one is under its wrath or safely sheltered from it… ‘it doesn’t rain like it used to’, the lament underscores many a small talk, it’s evidence in the lowlands is karma one presumes, as is the opposite in the highlands where gushes of water become those of mud and slush, in disdain to the unnecessary infringements…

Another year where the weather gods guffaw over the naivety of meteorologist, another early monsoon turning into a jamboree of heat waves and dust storms… trying to keep up the weekly mileage despite a circadian rhythm disrupted by soccer, a brooding, overcast evening sky for a change had me quickly lace up and head out for a run…

Within a few minutes I was dripping wet, revelling in the petrichor and cussing loudly at cars leaving dirty water trails in their wake, yet these days it doesn’t last, the ‘when it rains it pours’, and it wasn’t even half an hour before the clouds had emptied all their wares… as with any long run, the mind started drifting, and as the raindrops stung a bit on the face, emboldened by the wind, I started thinking of days in the high mountains when cloudy skies threaten to pour down the whole day but never do…

It’d been an incessant drizzle throughout the previous day, as we started from Billing and wound our way to the first camp at Plachek, nothing strikingly wet but nothing dry either… one of those quintessential monsoon days… the next morning was dry but still overcast, the gorge was narrow and a sullen shade of green that even in the sunniest of days would refuse to brighten up, so all we could hope was for a reprieve as we climbed and the valley opened up…

The valley did open up, but the weather didn’t, still mopey as we traversed a few landslides and a couple of snow bridges and started to gain altitude… there was so much water around in all forms yet these mountains were gluttonous, refusing to let go of the clouds… we were above the treeline and the open country was spooking us as there was very little shelter to be expected the whole day in case the clouds open up…

Morning turned to afternoon and the misty palls kept coming and going, a couple of startling drizzles but our luck was holding out as we scampered up, bumping into bumblebees and stumbling into flowers galore… the shepherd camp at Panihartu hosted us for lunch as we waited for the weather to clear but it refused to do so…

There’s no lilting on a trail when one has got high passes to cross so we duly wound our way up, and after almost eight hours of being buttoned up, tinges of blue in the sky began their dominance as we started camping at the base of Thamsar pass, and within fifteen minutes the clouds were scampering away in a hurry, shooed down the river as vagabond mist, like the mountains had just been gargling… one wished one had the indifference of the canine lazing in the grass…

We’d have our share of rain later on the trail, but for now, we’d been bluffed… cloudy weather is a mixture of trepidation and hope, one muses, if the sun breaks through or the stars come out, one can rest easy, if they start pouring, one crouches inside hoping the end is nigh…  

Musings on a cloudy day, the Bada Bhangal trail, Himachal Pradesh