In the fall of 1992 I traveled to Nepal with a friend of mine to visit the Himalayas, Kathmandu, and the other wonders of Nepal. As I look back on that journey, I realize that I wasn't prepared for the contrast that their civilization presented me. I hadn't studied about the country or the culture before I left. I only knew that it was a place of immense mystery, and that intrigued me. It intrigued me enough that I made a second journey in 1995 to a remote region in the northeast, but that is another story.
Having been raised in Colorado with the benefits of the Rockies in my back yard, I already loved mountains. Skiing, climbing the "Fourteeners" (14,000-foot peaks), fishing, and hunting has been major parts of my life. So trekking into the famed Annapurna Sanctuary appeared to me, on the surface, to be only another hike in the mountains. Oh sure, I knew that this was the place of the highest peaks in the world. Mt. Everest, Annapurna, Kanchenjunga, and K-2 were all familiar names to me, but I felt that once you'd seen one high peak you'd seen them all. I was wrong.
The four-day trek to the Annapurna Base Camp gave me a new reverence for these peaks. The local culture was steeped in the tradition that the Gods resided in and were the mountains. While sitting at night talking with our guide Tashi Lama and porter Ghanu, my friend Celisa and I became deeply aware of the esteem that the mountains gained from the Nepali. Hindu, Buddhist, Moslem, and Christian religions all functioned in this tiny country side by side with the enduring mysticism of the Himalayas.
Shown are four of the nearly three thousand photos taken on the two trips. Over the next couple of months I'll be submitting a few more. While the base camp toilet and area map may not seem glorious photo subjects, they gave us more than a couple of chuckles while serving us well, nonetheless. The eagle followed us for an entire afternoon and gave me many wonderful pictures, this one with DhalGiri in the background. Annapurna South loomed way above the clouds and was covered by snow slides on the days we were passing by it. They could be heard minutes after they had already subsided, echoing in the canyons below.
The base camps for both Annapurna and Machupuchare were within a mile of each other and were over 14,000 feet. The peaks around us ranged from 24,000 to 27,000 feet and formed a huge horseshoe-shaped basin with a glacier in the bottom, whose meltwater fed many of the rivers flowing into India. The views were spectacular and so was the spirituality.
You can't come to a place of such great majesty and not be touched by the grace of it all. God just jumped out at you from every turn of the eye. The sheer beauty of the peaks and valleys was sometimes overwhelming and yet very calming at the same time. Indeed, a place of the Gods.