This is the head of the Rumbak Valley; Stok La is the lowest point on the skyline. 'Lowest' means 4900 m. Rumbak itself is the small village in the middle distance and sits somewhere around 4000 m. Most of the elevation gain is a steep climb up the face of that ridge, via an interminable series of switchbacks. It's further than it looks in the photograph, and the trick is to just keep plodding along at whatever pace you can manage.
All content © 2014 Pete McGregor
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6 comments:
I love the pared back elegance and am certain that it is a steep climb - and feels interminable.
That upended range in the upper left. So much churned up land.
Kia ora Pete,
The starkness becomes beautiful, all the jagged edges and play of light. "Plodding" I get that...
EC, I did have the advantage of being used to long climbs in the Ruahine Range back in New Zealand, but this had the added difficulties of altitude and heat. Psychologically I might have been a little less daunted than some of the other trekkers who weren't used to interminable climbs.
Zhoen, I looked at the way some of the strata had been folded and twisted, and just couldn't imagine the kind of terrific forces that did that.
Kia ora Robb. Plodding has a lot of advantages at any altitude. Here, though it was the only option for visitors like me. I think I'd take a long time to adapt so I could move freely and comfortably at those altitudes.
Almost too vast to comprehend.
RR, perhaps surprisingly, it doesn't seem as vast when you're actually there. Certainly spectacular, but it's a different scale from, say, the Himalaya proper, which sometimes defies beliet. What does hit home is looking up at the mountains and realising what kind of effort, in the heat and thin air, would be needed to climb them.
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