soliloquies in the outdoors
…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 …
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 …
Mulling over moraines, treks across western Himalaya…
Reminiscences from Bhyundar Khal, a high altitude Himalayan trek in Uttarakhand connecting the Valley of Flowers to Gamshali village near Tibetan border
Musings on Himalayan meadows…
Musings on the mountain sun, trekking in the Himalaya
Musings on cloudy weather, a day spent hiking the traditional pastoral lands of the Dhauladhars in Himachal Pradesh
musings on log bridges in the Himalayan backcountry…
‘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, …
there are walks in the mountains while hiking that one underestimates, naïve enough not to pay heed to the illusions of a simple way up wild gorges… the day elongates proportionally with the trail, disaggregated into phases that seem like days unto themselves, each phase anchored to its own particular memory… there’s a brief period …