Cyclocrossing Zoji-La – 25 years ago

Exhilarating morning ride near Sonamarg, Kashmir.
Zoji-la is still two days away. (Late Sept, 1988)

“TURN BACK. It’s no place for cyclists,” bellows the truck driver inching his vehicle down the freshly bulldozed road leading from Zoji-La to Kashmir valley. The grim faces of other drivers in that convoy convey a similar warning.
     “It is a frozen hell,” insists a lone motorist sandwiched between two trucks.
     All the trucks have thick frost on their roofs. The exhausted drivers look as if they have just been  thawed. They were all stranded in Ladakh (also known as the Little Tibet) for the past one week. For four days blizzard raged, trapping them without food and assistance. Only on the fourth day rescue efforts could start. It took three days’ non-stop effort for Beacon, the highly efficient border roads wing of Indian army, to clear the 180 kilometer stretch from Zoji La till Fotu-La in the heart of Ladakh’s Buddhist country. Naturally those coming out are appalled at the sight of  cyclists going in.(But they don't know the power and flexibility of the bicycle!)

The reassuring Beacon sign.

        We  glance at each other before pushing ahead. Four civil servants from Department of Food, New Delhi, my team mates KL Sharma, Suresh, Jagdish and I have been cycling along mostly tribal areas of Indian Himalayas on our way to Leh. By now we are indeed hardened enough for tough cycling; but "avalanche prone frozen hells" are something new. None of has ever encountered ice except in refrigerators.
     The road ahead of us now is an uneven track gouged out by bulldozers just yesterday. A week ago massive landslides ripped off long stretches of the road which had slid into the valley several hundred feet below. In these stretches new gradients had been cut with army efficiency, but these are again in the danger of being smothered by fresh falls from the slopes and cliffs above. Impossible to pedal. We get down and push.
     Far below us Sind River gushes and tumbles on its way to meet the Jhelum (which iself is a tributary of the mighty Indus) near Sringar, where we had spent a boring, rained-out week. [This is 1988. Kashmir is still superficially peaceful. First kidnapping will be in 1989.]  The dirt road to the Hindu pilgrimage center Amarnath follows the river upstream. As we proceed, the surrounding coniferous forest of kail and pine starts thinning, reminding us that we are leaving Kashmir valley.

Army convoy moving towards Zoji La. These impressive-looking cliffs consist
of such soft rocks that they can be broken off with hands and crumbled in palms.
(photo source: Ministry of Defence, Govt. of India)

      Four steep hairpin bends, each a kilometer apart, take us to the notorious Captain Bend, where there is a stone memorial to a British army captain who died here. The Captain’s ghost haunts the place. Those who slow down and bow towards his memorial are spared. On skeptics like us, the captain wreaks his vengeance by appearing in uniform at the next bend and directing the driver to the deep gorge to the right. The possessed driver presses the accelerator and plunge to his doom. Quite original as far as ghost stories go.
     After the Captain Bend comes another hairpin, flanked on the left by a lofty wall of seemingly solid black rock. I yank at a piece. To my astonishment, it snaps off like rotten wood. It also feels as light as softwood. When pressed hard, it crumbles into dark grey powder in my palms. So this is the “mighty” Himalayas, a big heap of dirt! My friends and I stare up at this vast pseudo-rock face, towering a hundred feet above us. Dark grey stalactites hang down from its craggy top, as if about to crash down on us. We are unable to move as a clattering convoy of army trucks and bulldozers keep us stuck to the cliff bottom. 
     Ahead is India Gate, the witness of a tragedy in November 1986 when the pass was about to close for winter. That day (as we heard from Captain Narang of Beacon) the last convoy of military and civilian vehicles were moving out. The leading truck developed mechanical problems and stopped, holding up the convoy. It started snowing heavily and soon an avalanche thundered down. Dozens of vehicles, their drivers and passengers were swept down into a frozen grave. We can still see from above remnants of the ill fated vehicles scattered in the valley, which, incidentally, doesn’t look deep. The snow would have smothered them to death.
      Two more kilometers of mild climb along a slushy track, and we are at Zoji-la. (La in Tibetan means mountain pass.) The pass proper is a straight and flat stretch over a kilometer long, flanked on both sides by slopes clothed in snow. The southern (our right) slope rises rather abruptly from the cobbled causeway along which we are moving. A shallow valley of snow separates the causeway from the northern slope. It looks quite innocent and quiet. But we have been warned not to stay because the pass can be quickly smothered by avalanche in a few minutes in case of heavy snowfall on the southern slope.

     At 11,650 feet, Zoji-la is the lowest point in the part of the Himalayas separating Ladakh and Kashmir. It lies roughly straight in a southeast–northwest direction, permitting the  south-western monsoons winds to blow right through. Funneling through the narrow confines of the pass, the wind velocity intensifies – the reason why Zoji-la is so menacing in a storm.

     The Beacon's Colonel who reluctantly permitted us to move ahead, had extracted a promise from us to keep going till Gumri, the first safe point after the pass. “Your department wrote to us  and I am responsible for you. But if you do get stuck in Zoji-La in a blizzard only God can save you,” the Colonel had told us. But when we see snow all around us for the first time in our lives we forget all that and have a full hour of fun in the snow, right in the middle of the pass.
     Then a wind starts. With diabolic suddenness dark cumulus clouds appear from nowhere; within minutes it is snowing. Our first experience of live snowfall. We look around. No living or mechanical thing is in sight. The down convoy had gone hours ago and the up convoy has not yet started coming.
     “Maybe they won’t send it today now that the weather has packed up,” says Sharma, the only married person in our group and so understanda

Dangerous pastime at Zoji la.

bly cautious. We all panic. There is only one thing to do – jump on our saddles and pedal for our lives. In order to cross the pass early we had started at dawn without proper breakfast – a mistake. The hunger and the effort of cycling on a bouncy cobbled surface in a rarified atmosphere, exhaust us quickly. But the wind helps us on by pushing us from behind and luckily it doesn't get too strong. But the snowfall continues.
     After a while the situation improves. The road road has taken a down turn. The surfacing also becomes better. While freewheeling down the slope we notice with relief that the mountains on either side of the pass are gradually receding to a distance. No danger from avalanches now.
     The terrain widens into a plain. Through the falling snow we see the outline the Beacon Camp, Gumri. We prop our cycles against a wall of snow, barge into one of the barracks, show our IDs, and say without formalities, “Hello, we’re starving. Do you have some food?”
     The soldiers grin at the four cycle loonies and hurry to alert the camp officer. We are escorted to the office of Major Bharadwaj, a relaxed looking individual. The lunch is sumptuous, served by liveried orderlies. Man! Army life is good!  By 3 pm an early tea is announced in our honor and we are joined also by the camp doctor, a young man from Tamil Nadu. We are evidently honored guests as indicated by the gold bordered bone China tea service. We keep drinking cups after cups of tea under the benign gaze of Major Bharadwaj. The Major tells us about the day the blizzard started – September 23.
     “It was so sudden. We were safe here, but outside it was terrible. The first time in my experience the blizzard was so strong and unexpected. Luckily we were able to rescue all trapped people. Not like 1986." Even the Major cannot help but grimacing as he recalls that ghastly accident two years ago when dozens of vehicles were swept away by an avalanche near India Gate.
     Major Bharadwaj’s men have rescued two American cyclists last week. A man and a woman. The Beacon rescue team found them near India Gate huddled inside their tent in shock. We would be meeting them soon.
     “They were lucky they didn’t get frostbite,” adds the camp doctor who gives us strips of tablets for for possible high altitude problems. We will be going higher and higher in the next few days. Our next pass will be Namik-la at 12,000 feet and then Fotu-la at 13,200 feet. They are days away.
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Into Ladakh, the Little Tibet

We are invited to stay at Gumri but we had always dreamed of spending a night at Dras (reputed to be the second coldest inhabited place in the world. We get back to the bikes. They have disappeared under a blanket of fresh powdery snow. Unfamiliar with snow, we are surprised to see that it is not wet and easily brushes off. We resume pedaling. The road is well surfaced now. There are only a few smooth hairpin bends, down which we zoom. Down to our left is Gumri Nallah, a stream completely covered with ice. The sky is overcast and dark. Even though it is only four in the afternoon,
     There is hardly any vegetation anywhere to be seen. Only some moss-like growth clinging to the bare surface of the black rocks projecting here and there out of the snow. Within a few kilometers we cross the Gumri Nallah via a small iron bridge. Beneath the snow there are some specks of green. Cultivated fields, the harvest lost.
     Sure enough there is a village nearby – Matayen. It is a cluster of small mud houses. Flat roofs are not meant to take heavy snow. But we find very little snow on these roof tops. Evidently the villagers have been busy clearing the snow as fast as it accumulated.
     There is hardly anyone about in the streets. Then we meet a youngster – Muhammad, who confirms that the village is indeed inhabited. The totally unexpected blizzard and snow have just destroyed their crops and damaged their houses. It is going to be a bad winter and Muhammad is hoping that some help be provided by the army. But then army itself is going to be hard pressed for supplies this winter as all supplies will have to be  brought in from outside Ladakh in about one month. The pass will close in November in any case.
     As we stand talking more boys arrive. They stand around quietly as we try to cheer them up. What is crucial for them right now is survival through the winter, not making conversation.
     We continue to follow Gumri Nallah along a practically straight road gently sloping down. We are at about 10,500 feet now, 1,000 feet below Zoji-la. It is dazzling white everywhere, though there is no sun. There are high rocky outcrops on either side of the road, their sheer dark brown faces partly free from snow giving them eerie majesty.
     The telegraph poles  along the road have been completely laid flat by the blizzard, all in the same direction – east. Their wires are scattered everywhere, some on the road. They can be dangerous, as we find within a few minutes. A military truck which had passed us just half an hour ago has skidded on a bunch of cables and has slid into the shallow Gumri Nallah. 
 

    Gumri Nallah has been gathering tributaries and by now it has become a respectable river. Sure enough, from here our map labels it “Dras River”. It will join River Suru and eventually into the Indus, like all rivers in Ladakh.
     By 6 pm we reach Dras. We don’t feel it is any colder than Gumri, though. Maybe we are getting used to cold and ice. Dras is of strategic importance because it is the first real plain ground after Zoji la. All the Indian military and paramilitary forces have their permanent camps here.
     We go into Beacon’s camp and they are awaiting our arrival. The camp is much smaller than the one in Gumri and the camp in charge JCO Gopali is waiting for us. Strong and stout, he hails from Lucknow, but has been working in Zoji-la area for the past several years. He claims to know every inch of the pass. He does have the gift of gab in abundance. His account of the 1986 tragedy is much more blood curdling than the matter-of-fact narration of Captain Narang and Major Bharadwaj.
     It is October 1^st today. Tomorrow is Gandhi Jayanti. According to our original plan we were supposed to reach Leh tomorrow. At this rate we'll make it only by 6^th. That is fine though -- havent made this far? Gopali tells us that the rest of Ladakh won't be a problem except for the risk of altitude sickness at the highest pass, Fotu-la. 
     The diesel bukhari (stove) in our room burns throughout the night, making us forget that we are in the second coldest inhabited place in the world.

 

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This work by Sajjeev Antony is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
All photographs (except the one credited to Ministry of Defence) above are the joint property of Sajjeev Antony, K. L.Sharma, Suresh Kumar and Jagdish.


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Cyclocrossing Jalori Pass -- 25 years ago

“IDHAR ROKO!” SAID THE HIMACHAL POLICEMAN, thumping his lathi on the ground, as if he wanted us to stop our bicycles precisely there. Annoyed, we continued pedaling up the steep slope leading to Jalori Pass. There was a commotion behind and I glanced back. The cop had pounced upon the cyclist at the rear end. The four of us were duly herded to the nearby police post.
     The in-charge of the police post of that little Himachal Pradesh town Ani, eyed us critically. Glancing at my team mates I wondered what he must be thinking of us – after three weeks’ cycling in remote Himalayan terrain, we looked like unkempt bandits.  I hurriedly introduced my team – Jagdish, Sharma and Suresh – and feebly joked that we were not terrorists planning to blow up Jalori pass but employees of the Department of Food, Government of India, on a bicycle expedition from Delhi to Leh. 

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MY JOKE ELICITED no smile from the in-charge. He drily retorted that Mother Nature had blown up the pass better than any terrorist could. Torrential rains had just washed away the approach road to the pass that it was dangerous to attempt crossing even on foot, let alone with laden bikes. “So be sensible,” he said, “And take the national highway.”

     He was asking us to re-cross the River Sutlej, return  to the ski resort of Narkanda and from there to Shimla, the capital of Himachal Pradesh. From there we would have to go to Bilaspur and then Mandi, along a highway. Unthinkable. Also there was the time pressure. It was mid-September. Unless we reached Kashmir valley by the end of the month we might be too late for Ladakh. We made up our minds – it’s Jalori or bust.
     It took some patient explaining, flashing of IDs and official letters before the in-charge finally gave in, washing our potential blood off his hands. We waved cheerfully the curious crowd that had gathered outside the police post and pedaled away fast. We had to get out of Ani before the police changed their minds. In this hurry we forgot to buy emergency rations – which we would regret shortly.

blood off his hands.
     The 15-speed gears were proving their worth, enabling us to pedal up the rough slope at a steady 7 kmph. We saw several snakes crossing our path, possibly disturbed by the landslides, but we were wearing tough, ankle high snow-boots and no snake would reach through those.

    At each hairpin bend the road started getting worse and steeper. Even though the intermittent kilometer stones announced that we were cruising along what was left of “State Highway 11”,  even in Ani the road was covered in loose soil. As we climbed the soil gave way to loose gravel and then to little boulders, forcing us to get down and push. [Now, from Google maps it seems that SH 11 has been surfaced all through and has become a real road, and I would love to pedal it up again.]
     Families trooped out of their little slate roofed wooden houses to watch the four lunatics from Delhi. Children stared at us hypnotized, evidently seeing bicycles for the first time. We stopped at a school and gave them a talk about India. But the kids were more interested in our bikes so Jagdish got them in a circle and explained the gear system to them. Laughing teenagers pitched in to push our bikes up, so energetically that we had to break into dignified trots to keep up. Though slender and famished, these boys are amazingly tough.
     Often people of one village would accompany us to the next giving us plenty of chance to exchange news. Naturally much of our conversation centered on the life in the mountains.
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 LIKE THE OTHER PARTS of the Himalayas we had already passed through, the heavy monsoon of 1988 had taken its toll. [Monsoons returned to the Himalayas with similar ferocity  in 2013 with great losses to life and property. There was another similarity between the two years --- both 1987 and 2012 were drought years.]
     The Himalayas are extremely vulnerable to weather, being the youngest mountain ranges in the world. The force that created them in the first place – the tectonic movement – is still at work. In spite of the millions of tons of rock and earth crumbling down from their unstable slopes, the Himalayas are growing taller each year, levered up by none other than the Indian peninsula, which keeps wedging deeper underneath the Tibetan plateau. This natural instability is worsened by human interference. Deforestation was an ongoing process wherever we went.

    We were getting tired and hungry and irritable so we consumed our supplies and made tea and had a song and dance session before proceeding further. Then we came to our first serious landslide spot. Leaving the bikes we went to inspect it. Some fifty feet of the road had slid right off, leaving a neat 60 degree slope. Mercifully it had not rained for the past few days so we were able to gauge crude footholds, shore them up with stones, and carried the bikes and luggage across. It was hazardous – one slip and the next halt would be in the nallah two hundred feet below.
     Then came a broken bridge spanning a rough-and-tumble stream. More obstacles followed, making us increasingly skilled in landslide management. Crossing of the bridge got us completely exhausted. The next village, the locals sitting there said, was Khanag, and that would be the only place where we could expect food and accommodation. The landslides had depressed the morale of the local people. The higher we went the sadder they looked. Apparently for a week no food supplies could be transported and there was food shortage in the area.

    Finally Khanag Village came into view, perched about which was the PWD guesthouse. But there was no food available in the rest house or in the village. Oops. We felt so foolish not to have even the basic foodstuff with us. We were carrying food everywhere we cycled but hadn’t needed them. But now we needed food and nothing was there, not even a packet of biscuits!
     To top matters the chowkidar of the rest house was not there. Only the gardener was present. We showed him our IDs and explained we were central government servants. Could we spend the night in his resthouse? The gardener, who had never heard about the government in New Delhi, wanted to know if our central government came under the state of Himachal Pradesh. We had to admit it didn’t. It took the local schoolmaster to explain things to him and he reluctantly let us in.
     Once we were inside, the gardener became very friendly. Realizing we were hungry, eh fetched us his subsistence food stock – a dozen or so small potatoes.
     Then came the good news. In view of the rare nature of our visit, the local tea shop man had agreed to make dinner for us. The dal-roti we had in that little  teashop with plenty of stimulating conversation with the assembled Khanagites was one of the gastronomic milestones of our expedition. The dinner was on the village despite our protests.
     Back in the rest house, as I drifted off to sleep that night, an authoritative voice same from the verandah – Sharma was educating the gardener on center-state relations in India.
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NEXT MORNING WE bade goodbye to the newly enlightened gardener and got ready for the final push. From Khanag is it only 1,500 feet climb to Jalori top. The scenery became increasingly lovely. A dense growth of pine and deodar gave shade throughout, chilling us whenever we stopped for a breather. By noon we ambled up the last hairpin bend and reached the top of Jalori pass.
     The place was bit of an anticlimax. Most passes are. We were at 10,500 feet but there was no indication of that. What could be seen was a gentle grassy mound, sloping to the north and the south. Two green hillocks flanked the east and the west. But for the conifers and the nip in the air, the place could have been in central Kerala.
     Jalori top was surprisingly inhabited. There was a temple and nearby two dhabas served frugal fare to travelers walking their way between the valleys of the great rivers Beas and Sutlej. The people told us that from April to July the pass was sort of motorable, but not from the Sutlej side which had been completely broken down for years. Once the rains start the road falls of in chunks. And by the time the repairs are complete it would be winter, and everything gets buried under  snow.
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 THE NATIVES recalled with nostalgia when only a few years back (in the late 1970s) Jalori pass had risen to prominence as the most adventurous stretch in Himalayan Car Rally. By the mid-1980s the road had become so bad that the rally had been diverted to a different route.
     The northern slope of the pass was reasonably intact. The view was spectacular, the distant snowcaps of Lahaul-Spiti partly framing the northern horizon. As we freewheeled down, a heavy downpour caught us unexpectedly, before we got a chance to don our raincoats.
     In spite of the chill we felt great, knowing we had made it.

Ani to Jalori Pass from Google Earth:The distance which took us almost two days was merely 30 km! Now it seems motorable and can be reached in less than an hour.

 

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This work by Sajjeev Antony is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
All photographs appear here are the joint property of Sajjeev Antony, K. L.Sharma, Suresh Kumar and Jagdish.