Mistakes I made on Toral and the Lessons I learned

 

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 adequate logistics and most importantly in the right season when there’s water along the way.

 

Knowing all of the above, I should have known better, yet I overlooked all of the above, when my friend Ravinder and I set upon this trail by ourselves. That was my first mistake. I had gone up to Toral Pass top from the Kangra side nearly a decade back and had returned to Kangra, and while my often oxygen-deprived brain suffers from short term memory, I thought I would remember the trail I had taken ten years back. And without any knowledge of the other side into Chamba I had thought that once across it would be an easy trail to follow to Kuvarsi, the trail end village. This was my second mistake. We should have taken a guide who knew the trail well. And in absence of a guide, I should have procured a large scale contour map of the area, which I didn’t.

 

The third glaring mistake I made was choosing so late a season. These Dhauladhar mountain passes should be crossed ideally between late May to late September or early October at the most. I am not talking about winter crossings, since that is an altogether different kind of hike. During the season there are local shepherds, Gaddis, crossing these passes so it is easy to find someone who could show you the right path. Plus the trail is well tread by them and their flocks. Also water is aplenty. There are trickles and streams flowing from every crack and nalas. And you won’t ever run out of water sources.

 

On day 1, once we left the precincts of Salig Village, it was easy to follow the trail as I recalled rather foggily some of the features, like the two wooden bridges and a place where I had to wade through a wide stream. But once after that crossing my memory completely failed me. To cut a long story short, we lost the day 1 intended trail and spent over 3 hours trying to find it, which we didn’t eventually. So we took an alternative trail that took us on a longer, circuitous route and we barely climbed any ground on day 1. But we managed to find a camping place and water point and found a new way to reach the pass. So we did learn something from my mistake.

 

On day 2, we continued on this new path, following some faded shepherd’s trail, climbing towards the general direction of the path that I had done before. Due to the lack of water source we had to camp well below our intended camping ground of day 2. This added nearly 300m of ascent to our day 3.

 

On day 3, we had to fill up all our bottles as we were sure there won’t be any water till we crossed the pass, nearly 1600m above. The day turned out to be long, thankfully my memory returned at all the confusing points, and we made it to the top after nearly 5 and half hours of continuous climb. This day was fine. Our water reserve held as we conserved our consumption. The rock cairns that the shepherds had made through the boulder field on the other side helped us get down to the next camping ground. But alas it was completely dry. We had to descend another hour (500m approx) or so till we reached a nala and camped by its true left bank.

 

Day 4 became our comedy of errors. In retrospect, it could have been our tragedy of errors too. Whatever miniscule knowledge we had of this day, was gleaned from a vague description from a lone shepherd we had met on the Kangra side on day 1. The only thing we knew that we had to remain on the true left bank of the nala and towards the end where it starts to plunge down, we would find a tiny shepherd shelter, from where a faint trail would lead up and left, across two ridges after which we would see the ridge above Kuvarsi and from there we would have no obstacles at all in finding the trail that further joined the one coming down from Kundali Pass. What the shepherd had failed to state and we had failed to ask, were the water points along the way, the approximate time it would take and the trail condition. Mistake is ours and mine in particular since I should have asked all the pertinent questions. I won’t blame the shepherd for being minimalistic in his information sharing. We would never get the right or the complete answer if we do not ask the right or the complete question. I should have asked. Here I had broken one of my own outdoor rules: if you meet people on the trail, and even if you know the trail, ask them all details and latest updates about the trail to include possible water points and camping places, conspicuous landmarks, any objective hazards, etc.

 

Blissfully unaware of what day 4 entailed, we raced down along the stream, and on reaching the point where we would start to climb to the left, found a waterfall with some water. Ravinder, heeding his experience and my insistence, drank up bellyful plus filled up his bottles. And I didn’t. I only sipped one cup of water, leaving my bottle empty. This was the severest mistake I made of all. My outdoor rule, which I never break, is to drink as much water as I can and then fill up all my bottles at any water point, unless I was absolutely dead sure that I would find water points within striking distance. I broke this rule that day. Why did I do it, I am not sure, even now despite retrospection. But I feel it had do something with complacency, an emotion I am unfamiliar with.

 

Especially in the outdoors I am never complacent. When I explore solo or with others completely unknown regions and uncharted mountain territories around the globe, I take huge amounts of risk, knowingly and willingly putting myself into harm’s way and take all precautions and follow all outdoor rules to their fullest. Despite that accidents and mistakes do happen and have happened. People have died in my command, under my leadership, and these are in public domain. I do not deny them and I take full responsibility for the outcome of my actions. But even when I go to places that I have already been before and know inside out, I still take all precautions and follow all outdoor rules. Though I must admit that when I am by myself, I do stretch my limits a lot, pushing myself to see if and when would I break. Intentionally not carrying food, equipment or water or shelter. Just to see if I can survive. But such trips are different and I do them alone.

 

Yet on day 4 on Toral, I had Ravinder with me and I had no intention of trying my limits or testing mine or his survival capabilities. Still I did one of the basic beginner’s mistakes. I didn’t drink enough water and I left my bottle empty, presuming that there would be other water points along the way. As it turned out that day, the trail kept us guessing most of the way as it meandered up and down, twisting across chasms of slippery and exposed rocks, barely a human foot width often, steep drops and stiff climbs, and not a drop of water anywhere, bringing us finally after 5 hours to a place where it all ended abruptly. We reached a ridge, which showed a significant presence of shepherd flock and a solitary cave shelter, and on the other side we could see the ridge above Kuvarsi and also the trail that came down from Kundali Pass. The weather too was fine. Yet we couldn’t find any trail sign as how to get down on to the other side. We searched that day high and low, draining our already depleted water resource to barely minimal.

 

Finally by evening we had to admit that we were completely lost and beat. A first for both Ravinder and I. Ravinder, in his 18 years of climbing career has never been in such predicament. While, I, with my 45 years in the outdoor world, have been lost sometimes, both in the Himalaya and other mountain ranges, but never so completely, always finding a way out eventually. What factored in majorly was not our ability to search further but absence of life-preserving water. We had enough food to last at least two more days and then we could have stretched our reserve for another two certainly, yet without water we couldn’t cook or hydrate. A mere 300m descent to the other side lay between us and escape yet we couldn’t find a way to do it. Retracing all the way back to the Toral Pass and returning to Kangra was our last option, and both of us were unwilling to take that.

 

So that evening we opted for our penultimate option. To call for help. And in this regard both Ravinder and I have had enough experience. Neither of us have ever before asked for help for getting lost (ourselves), but to recover injured people, or dead bodies or due to self injuries or to look for other lost people. I have undertaken highly specialized SAR missions around the world and also in our highest mountains and so has Ravinder. He actually teaches people how to search and rescue in the mountains. I will write a separate post later to explain how one must ask for help. Here it is suffice to say that we got in touch with our friends in Kuvarsi by that evening who agreed to come for us next morning. That night we didn’t eat anything and drank water with a tea spoon, just enough to wet our lips. We barely had 50ml of water left. Around midnight we even scraped the frost from our tent outer that produced few tea spoon of fluid.

 

On day 5, our friend Chamel from Kuvarsi along with his friends Thoglia Ram and Ami Chand reached us. And we realized much to our relief and equal dismay that the trail was barely ten meters away from our cave shelter. It was so overgrown with tall grass and so deeply covered underneath fallen leaves that we just didn’t discover it the day before. Though it was a mistake that we couldn’t have not committed I feel what we should have done on day 4 was to continue probing the area where my instincts had dictated that our trail would lie. We should have probed more. We shouldn’t have stopped looking. But I feel in retrospect, why both Ravinder and I had given up was our lack of water. If we had adequate water reserve or a source nearby then we wouldn’t have stopped and given up. I am sure of that. I am not blaming the lack of water as our limitation. All I am trying to emphasis is the importance of water. Lack of it, sort of broke our resolve and we opted to call for help, because on that day we did have that option and by a miraculous stroke we had found a particular spot slightly above on the ridge from where our mobile phones worked. Which was both a good thing and not such a good thing in hindsight. Both of us are more than capable of surviving in the outdoors in the most extreme conditions, yet on that day we didn’t really reach our last reserve since our mobile phones worked. We have discussed it, if we hadn’t found mobile signal what would we have done. And we agreed that as a last ditch effort we would have simply abandoned all our extra load of tent, clothing, food and just plunged off into the forest slopes towards the direction of Kuvarsi and we would have continued to do so till we reached a water source or perished in the attempt.

 

As most people, who hike in the mountains, do so for the sheer pleasure and enjoyment and aren’t looking for survival situations, please take heed of the lessons that we learned from our Toral escapade. I made the mistakes and we both learned from them. And I wrote this post, so that you don’t have to make them. Not all of you are endowed as Ravinder and I in matters of mountains and survival. It’s better you learn from our mistakes. I have learnt my lesson and so should you from mine. Climb and hike safely and return alive, refreshed and hearty to tell us your story.

 

Hail the Mountain Gods.