c u on top - satyabrata dam

  View from Toral Pass towards Chamba It is said that it takes ignorance to make mistakes and courage to admit that you did. Well, I guess I have plenty of the former if not necessarily the latter. I could have remained quiet or simply not put on records my mistakes, yet I am here since I have always prided upon my ignorance be it in matters of the world or of the mountains. Without ignorance we won’t seek to learn and without mistakes we would never learn. Once someone said that show me a person who has never made mistakes in his life and I will show you a person who has never tried to learn. Mistakes must be made; else our learning would only be bookish, rather than experiential. And with that spirit let me begin. May I add that before you read this post, please step back and read my post on Toral that precedes this one.   Crossing Toral Pass from Kangra into Chamba is an arduous adventure by any standards and should be undertaken only in a group with a guide and adequat...

  Add caption As October was coming to its conclusion, I decided to do one more Dhauladhar Pass before the festive month of November set in. This time we opted for Toral Pass, as my friend Ravinder had requested. This pass had been crossed by his shepherd forefathers and he had never been there so he wanted to visit the footsteps of his ancestors. Nearly 10 years back I had gone to Toral Pass from Kangra side and had returned back to Kangra therefore I presumed that I at least knew the first half of our journey. Once again we decided to do this pass unguided, just the two of us. And this subsequently proved to be an immense tactical error much to our chagrin. Despite our combined experience of over 50 years, we got stuck at one place, totally lost, which I completely attribute to our own errors of judgment and perhaps a good amount of complacency on my part. I will elaborate upon this as a lesson learnt not only for myself (even after a climbing career spanning 45 years and pretty ...