Tag: landscapes

Mountains

Mountains – mosaics, and mirrors…

Mountains - Valley of Flowers, Uttarakhand, India

In a sense, mountains are essentially ruins… tectonic crash and bangs that leave undulations big and small in their wake… lofty spires, breathing ice and snow… rock and water locked in a tussle, one trying to remain in stasis, the other insistent on making everything flow… tucked in between these geological forces are millennia… of …

Mountains

Pangi – notes from a hidden hinterland

Pangi valley, Himachal Pradesh

…When it rains, it pours… …Raindrops keep falling on my head… …Rain on your parade… …Why does it always rain on me… There we were, all primed up for Panpatia Col in the third week of September, supposedly having given the monsoons a wide berth… but then came a spell of rain that battered most …

Mountains

Come September…

Bhyundar Khal Trek, September 2022

September – a time of astronomical transitions and a last chance to take a long sojourn in the high mountains… for winters, save some initial sighs on never ending carpets of snow, make up for rather dull trudges… with the monsoons retreating – albeit with lesser and lesser predictability in the Anthropocene – one can …

Mountains

Where ice turns to water…

Nichnai glacier covered in ice, Kashmir, India

There’s a distinctive dynamic to these places, where ice turns to water up in the high mountains… as if the elements take a deep breath and all is still, a burble here and there, an avalanche or a rockfall in the distance… the elements go about their business in an eerie silence, and every small …

Mountains, Nature

on placid whites – winter hike to Chenap valley…

Chenap Valley, Uttarakhand, India

‘twas perchance that we got to know of Chenap valley, which we did as our original plans went awry at the last moment… tucked in ‘twixt religious fervours, highways and hydropower more hedonistic that utilitarian, and the never-ending scrapes of JCB for last-mile connectivity, ‘tis purported to be a quieter alternative to Valley of Flowers, …

Mountains

On servile shepherds of the mountains…

Shepherds, like cowboys, are a romanticized lot, maybe it stems from the fact that it remains one of the oldest subsistence activities of the civilized homo sapien, something that has stood the test of time and remain unscathed, come war or peace… it is quite baffling that an occupation so resilient has been looked down …

Mountains

On hill farmer…

The farmer belongs to the romanticized sect of imagination, weaving his craft across the terra firma in symphonies attached firmly to the cycles of the sun, from days to seasons to generations… a lilting lore of never-ending toil, pain and suffering, of mute courage and resolve that seeks benediction from the land… agriculture is perhaps …