Across the Himalayan Axis

I had promised to try to write a summary of the workshop on cosmological perturbations post Planck that took place in Helsinki in the first week of June, but although the talks were all interesting, I didn't feel very inspired to write much about them. Plus life has been intervening, so I'll have to leave you to read Shaun's accounts at the Trenches of Discovery instead.

I also recently put a new paper on the arXiv; despite promising to write about my own papers when I put them out, I'm going to have to postpone an account of this one until next week. This is because I am spending the next week at a rather unique workshop in the Austrian Alps. (This is one of the perks of being a physicist, I suppose!)

Therefore today's post is going to be about mountaineering instead. It is an account I wrote of a trek I did with my father and sister almost exactly seven years ago: we crossed the main Himalayan mountain range from south to north over a mountain pass known as the Kang La (meaning 'pass of ice' in the local Tibetan dialect, I believe), and then crossed back again from north to south over another pass as part of a big loop. In doing so we also crossed from the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh into Zanskar, a province of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, and then back again.

The account below was first written as a report for the A.C. Irvine Travel Fund, who partly funded this trip, and it has been available via a link on their website for several years. At the time, the Kang La was a very infrequently-used pass, in quite a remote area and only suitable for strong hikers with high-altitude mountain experience. But in the seven years since my trip it has seen quite a rise in popularity — I sometimes flatter myself that my account had something to do with raising the profile of the area!

Anyway, the account itself follows after the break. There is also a sketch map of the area I drew myself (it's hard to obtain decent cartographical maps of the area, and illegal to possess them in India due to the proximity to the border), and a few photographs to illustrate the scenery ...

One year on

It has been a long month-and-a-bit since I last had the time to write a proper post here. Primarily this is because I am not very good at doing more than one thing at a time – at least while attempting to do those things properly – and I have been working on some real research papers, which I thought I should try to do properly. As a result science communication, and blogging in general, has had to wait. But I will get back in the swing of things very soon: there are some interesting new results, some interesting rehashes of old arguments about inflation, and one of my own papers that I will write about over the next couple of weeks.

One of the many things that I omitted to mention during this little break was the fact that Blank On The Map had its first anniversary a couple of weeks ago. All in all, I would say it has been quite a satisfying year of blogging, and, at least relative to my prior expectations, a reasonably successful one too. Blogger doesn't provide me with many detailed statistics, but it does tell me that despite the low recent rate of new postings, there have been roughly 23,000 clicks over the last twelve months. A sizeable portion of of this traffic came from one link on Peter Woit's blog (boy he must have a huge number of readers!) – though the majority appear to arrive via Google search, either by accident or design.

Anyway, to all those who have arrived here at some point over the last year, welcome! I hope you found what you were looking for, and enjoyed what you read. This explains what this blog is about. In case you haven't worked your way through the archives, here is a short selection of some highlights from the last year:

• Steven Weinberg and the 'Crisis of Big Science'
• An explanation of a dark matter controversy
• A question of probability
• The dog who climbed a mountain
• The Structure of a Scientific Revolution
• Explaining Planck by analogy

I should also use this post to try to get some feedback from (all three) regular readers. Do you think I should post more often? Less often? More posts about cosmology and fewer about mountaineering and other stuff in general? Or the other way round? Let me know through the comments box. Constructive criticism of the writing style or any other aspect of this blog will also be well received, though I can't promise to change ...

The dog who climbed a mountain

Three years ago today I took this photograph of a dog on the summit of a Himalayan peak, nearly 6000 metres above sea level.

Dog on the summit of Hanuman Tibba (5932 m) in the Indian Himalayas. 

It wasn't the easiest peak in the world, he was just a pretty amazing dog. Below the fold you can read the story of how he made it there — and as you will see, there was another powerful reason, apart from the dog, that keeps the day quite fresh in my memory.

This piece was first written in 2009 as a report for trustees of the A.C. Irvine Travel Fund, who helped finance my trip, and was later published in the Oxford Mountaineering Journal. It does contain some strong language, for which I apologise.

The Shining Mountain

At this sort of time every year I find my thoughts turning to the mountains, and today for no particular reason I wanted to write a little about a particular favourite of mine. There are a few peaks around that are sometimes claimed to be the most beautiful, inspiring or aesthetically pleasing in some way — the Matterhorn and Ama Dablam are ones that are mentioned very often — but for me, nothing quite matches up to Changabang in the Garhwal Himalaya.

Instead of attempting to describe the mountain myself, let me quote from the description in a book called Scottish Himalayan Expedition, written by the mountaineer and author W. H. Murray in 1950. By all accounts, Murray was a wonderful man with a deep love of mountains, and an ability to express that love in the written word that I've never found with any other writer. This little paragraph itself is one of the main reasons that Changabang features at the top of my personal list of favourite mountains:

The nearest of the great peaks, Rishi Kot, turned to us an edge like a cutlass but black as gun-metal, whereas Changabang, its neighbour, by day the most like a vast eye-tooth fang, both in shape and colour — for its rock was a milk-white granite — Changabang in the moonlight shone tenderly as though veiled in bridal lace; at ten miles' distance seemingly as fragile as an icicle; a product of earth and sky rare and fantastic, and of liveliness unparalleled, so that unawares one's pulse leapt and the heart gave thanks — that this mountain should be as it is.

Murray's description of the entire expedition sitting out in the freezing night air, wordlessly eating their dinner while staring transfixed at this glorious summit above them, has stayed with me ever since I first read it as a teenager. In fact the entire book is excellent; if you can find it anywhere, you should read it.

Murray and his companions would have been looking at Changabang from the south-west, its most spectacular profile. Here's a photograph of it from the same angle, taken by Doug Scott in 1974:

Bonington, Haston, Hankinson and Scott admiring Changabang, 1974. Photo by Doug Scott.

The ridge on the right drops down to Shipton's Col, named after the great mountaineer and explorer who first crossed it while mapping the Nanda Devi Sanctuary in 1936. (Shipton's connection with the name of this blog was explained here.) This photo is from the expedition by a team of British and Indian climbers who made the first ascent of Changabang in 1974, by the south-east face. I recently found Doug Scott's original report of the climb in the Alpine Journal online here. It contains several other beautiful black-and-white photographs of Changabang and the surrounding peaks. Here's yet another photograph with a slightly different view:

Dougal Haston in front of the West Wall. Photo by Doug Scott.

Towering above the climber, Dougal Haston — who, you'll notice, is carefully rehydrating himself in the medically recommended manner — is the famous West Wall of Changabang, with the left skyline dropping down to the Bagini Pass (apparently that's not the real Bagini Pass; see the correction in the comments below). Despite appearances, the West Wall is actually mostly too steep for any great quantities of snow to remain on it; its colour in the photo is due, as Murray noted, to the whiteness of the granite.

The West Wall played an important role in mountaineering history: in 1976, a two-man British team — Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker — made a dramatic and revolutionary ascent of it using 'big wall' techniques that no one had previously thought were possible in the high Himalaya. It took them 25 days. Part of their training for the route in England involved spending nights hanging in hammocks inside industrial meat freezers. Boardman's book about the ascent, The Shining Mountain, is one of the all-time classics of mountaineering literature — again, if you get your hands on it, read it. In some ways Boardman was not a dissimilar writer to Murray, his passion and the simple poetry of his language shining through (please excuse the pun) on every page. After their disappearance on Everest in 1982, the Boardman-Tasker prize has been awarded every year for outstanding mountain literature.

Viewed from the north, Changabang is in some ways less impressive, as at 6864 metres high it is somewhat lower than its immediate neighbour Kalanka (6931 m). This is what it looks like from the Bagini glacier:

Kalanka (L) and Changabang (R) from the north, the Bagini Pass on the right (not quite, see the comments below!). Photo: unknown.

Less impressive in some ways maybe, but from a mountaineer's perspective the grandeur of that sweeping vertical north face is awe-inspiring. Frank Smythe described it as "a peak that falls from crest to glacier in a wall that might have been sliced in a single cut of a knife." That north face was first climbed — Alpine-style, no less! — by Andy Cave and Brendan Murphy in 1997, though Murphy sadly died in an avalanche on the descent. In a neat symmetry, Andy Cave won the Boardman-Tasker award in 2005.

For the time being, I believe the northern perspective of Changabang is the only one available to mountaineers, since the Nanda Devi Sanctuary remains closed to expeditions (Though I may be wrong on this: it is possible that partial access to the Sanctuary has recently been allowed again, and it is also possible that Changabang can be seen from the southwest from some location outside the Sanctuary).

At some point in the future, I have promised myself a visit to Changabang. Not to climb it, which would be beyond my capabilities, but merely to see it for myself, from the Bagini glacier if the Sanctuary remains closed. Until then, I must content myself with other people's photographs, and Murray's words.