c u on top - satyabrata dam

I am often asked the steepest mountain or face I have ever climbed. This post is the answer. I doubt if I would ever climb anything steeper. No, it has nothing to do with my age or fitness level or my desire to stay alive… the reason is much simpler, more rudimentary. There simply is no steeper mountain face in the world than the West face of Mt Thor. It also ranks among my most technical and intrepid climbs, though at the time it did not appear so. More than half of the ascent had to be aided and I was paired with one of the masters of aid climbing. My buddy and partner in several such crimes, the Ukrainian gymnast, Natalia, or Nat as I called her. Watching her zoom up those mindboggling rocks and thin fissures of ice with the grace of a ballerina and strength of a wild beast, while she accomplished smooth gear placements in invisible cracks without missing a breath I have often wondered if she was the cousin of Spider Man. Now read on. Trying to clip the quickdraw through a red color...

Drop the name ‘Sorang Valley’ amidst a gathering of even the most seasoned Himalayan climbers and chances are they would find it hard to place. Such are the places that attract me most. Located north of the Sutluj River in the Kinnaur Valley of Himachal, Sorang valley does not have any high peaks but there are many untrodden trails criss-crossing the thick forests. I had just reached the Parvati Valley from Spiti and now planned to exit through the rarely visited Kamba Khango Pass that would lead me into the heart of the Sorang Valley. I had contour maps of the area, few days ration and confident that I would find my way on to the other side to the small shepherd settlement of Sorang Dogri in two days. From there I would ascend to the tiny hamlet of Nyugalsari and find a bus to take me to Shimla. From Kamba Khango Pass the trail disappeared and all I had to do was to lose height through the thick forest of pine. It was a full moon night in early April with the ground sheathed in heavy ...

My life is replete with ‘I Should not be alive’ situations. Still, I am alive and none the worse for the ordeal. As you can observe this post is part 1 and if my memory does not fail me in my next ‘fall’ then you would have more such stories of epic survivals. You would notice a deliberate suppression of names including that of the mountain since this expedition went on to become a highly controversial one with the blame game being thrown all around terminating the careers of some brilliant mountaineers and good human beings. If any of the participants of that expedition reads this then let me make it clear that I have absolutely nothing against anyone. I risked my life on my own and whatever happened then or since are the outcome of my own actions. For those, who have been climbing long enough and would be able to identify the expedition and the climbers involved, may I request you to hold your peace and tongue. Mountains teach us not to hate or to hold on to grudges, it teaches us to...

An old saying goes that you can take the man out of the mountain but not the mountain out of the man. Mountains or for that matter any spectacle of nature, alters and transforms man indelibly. For those of us who go to the mountains repeatedly there is an inescapable charm and allure to those lofty summits that is hard to explain but easy to grasp. They transform us from what we are, from what we do to what we aspire to be. Trust me, it does, you do change and touched by the majestic peaks once you would never be the same again. Something deep within, far from prying eyes, would alter forever. Though this transformation is purely a personal experience unseen and unheard by anyone else, it is easy to see how the mountains transform you from the outside. It is visually appealing and repulsive too at times. Posted are few pictures of mine that show exactly this. The outward transformation of self when one has just touched heaven and returned to earth. They speak for themselves and I will ...

As I stepped off the road my feet sank perceptibly into the soft snow. It was the December of 83, I was about to turn nineteen and on my one of the earliest forays into the greater Himalaya. I wanted to seek solitude, a decent climb and my inner self; not necessarily in that order. It had been an unusually heavy winter with snow line starting well below Manali and coating everything within sight in a sweeping uninterrupted sheet of pure white. My quest lay above Manali, deep into the Beas Valley. All the villages and road side joints, bustling in the summer with tourist and odd-stuff sellers were now deserted. The road just ahead of Manali, that wound up towards the Rohtang Pass was submerged under heavy snow. No vehicular movement was possible neither deemed necessary. Buried deep within the snow, lurked empty gaps and dangers of which I had no clue and I wished to go alone. I wound up slowly along the road and then at a point left the curbs and plunged deep into the forest. On my bac...

I first set my eyes on the spindly thin boy of nineteen way back in 1998. He was an oddity in that august gathering of mountaineers. Our international team had assembled at Leh, en route to a high and dangerous peak in one of the remotest corners of the East Karakoram that we intended to climb via a new route. We were a bunch of highly seasoned climbers drawn from four countries, including two super-stars from the European Alps. Our Sherpas were from Darjeeling, each one a veteran with at least a dozen peaks of 7000 m plus under his belt. Even our cook had climbed four peaks of notoriety. It was a dangerous expedition and we had assembled one of the best teams of that year in the Himalaya. As we, the climbers and the bosses, were introduced to our staff, I noticed this shy, diminutive (barely reaching 150 cm) boy with bright eyes crouched behind the senior Sherpas. The head Sherpa did not even bother to introduce him to us, merely waving at his direction, ‘he is a helper, from my villa...

My friend Dagfinnur called me, ‘Hey, Satya, you will be meeting the President tomorrow morning at 11.30 am. I will pick you up at 11.’ ‘President’, I said, ‘the Alpine Club President?’ ‘No, Satya, the President of the country.’ ‘How much time do I have with him?’ I asked the most stupid question possible at the moment. Similar to asking an organizer who had invited me for a talk to know how much time I had on the dais. ‘Twenty minutes, may be, tops thirty, if you are lucky. He is an extremely busy man.’ Dagfinnur cut the line. I ended up spending almost an hour with Mr. Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson while pocketing (come on, what do you think about me!), eating a plate of really nice sandwich and biscuits washed with the aroma of the finest Oolong (Upper Fagu, if I am not mistaken) tea. This is the story. It was one of my very rare speechless moments. I took nearly a minute to recover my vocal and mental chords. Well, Satya, I said to no one in particular, you are moving in to high places fin...

As an extreme mountaineer cum skier cum adventurer with almost my entire lifetime spent in cold places, the two questions that I most often face are: 1. Why do you climb? 2. How cold is it up there (Everest, South or North Pole, Greenland, Alaska, etc) I am still rather fuzzy about the first question since I do not understand this perennial urge deep within to go climbing with or without reason so I would like to answer the second one. What is cold all about! I won't go into the science of 'COLD' or 'ICE' but just my own understanding. The feeling of cold simply put is the act of your body losing heat to the surrounding atmosphere. The effect of losing body heat is also linked with the wind speed at the moment. So to understand cold, we also have to understand, 'Wind Chill Factor'. For the same absolute temperature, the rate of losing heat (in effect the feeling of being cold) would increase with the increase in wind speed. For practical purposes, when we cl...