Trip Stats
Trip Report
We left shortly after 6am, needing to get up to Mahri before the army set up the mountain checkpoint and turned us away. The drive up was fantastic, although quite nerve racking as we switched-backed our way up the mountain pass. We finally came to Mahri and could go no further, as there were still a couple meters of snow on the road. Gear in hand, we got onto the snow and began our skin up the valley. I was excited; it had been nearly a week since I had left Seattle and I was finally getting to tour the Himalayas. Starting at 10,300 ft the skin was nice, with some high level clouds affording protection from the powerful sun. Skinning up the canyon, we saw a steep chute leading up to Munsiary and decided to stop. Discussion ensued and Trevor and I decided to go farther up the canyon in search of a better means of reaching Munsiary. A the end of the canyon, we found a longer, albeit gentler chute going into Munsiary and by radio told Tyson and Pepe to come on up.
After some food, we began the slog up the chute, spread out as much as possible. Once Pepe was skinning, he got on the radio to tell us that the snow was sticking to his skins, and it was miserable. Pepe was right. The snow was sticking to my skins on every step and I didn’t have any Globstopper with me. After 10 minutes, there was a solid three to four inches of snow stuck to the bottom of my skins. I took my skis off a couple of times to knock away the snow, but eventually resigned myself to skinning with the extra weight. It was rough going up – with 40 pound packs at 13,000ft and four inches of snow stuck to the bottom of our skis.
Tyson decided he had had enough and we radioed up to Pepe, who told Trevor to come down. Tyson and I skied down together and Pepe and Trevor came down a few minutes later, enjoying the descent despite the heavy packs. We decided to set up camp in the canyon at 12,100ft, and began digging the pits for the Megamid. It started to snow lightly after dinner, and we piled into one Megamid and proceeded to lose to Pepe in Rummy. The following day, under partly sunny skies we left our camp and began the skin back up the chute. The snow was sticking to our skis once again, but without the heavy packs it wasn’t nearly as bad. I realized how off my guesses at distances and elevations were in the Himalayas. The scale was completely different than the Cascades, and I had to double my estimates for elevation gain and time.
The weather and visibility deteriorated and upon reaching the top of the chute, we had very little visibility. Pepe’s stomach was bothering him, a common aliment in India, and he and Tyson skied back down to the camp. Trevor and I decided to stick it out, hoping the weather would clear so we could explore the bowls of Munsiary. After 20 minutes of waiting, we put our skins on and slowly started skinning along the ridge to keep warm. Unsure if we should stay longer, the weather made the decision for us with a healthy dose of lightning. The ski down the upper half was not fun. There was four inches of new snow and zero visibility. We worked our way over to the 500 foot cliff wall and slowly made our way down, trying to keep sight of each other, but also staying far enough apart in case of a slide. The visibility improved half way down and we were able to get some decent turns in. Back at camp, we piled into our megamid again and resumed our card playing. We were all a bit nervous. It was snowing hard and we were at the end of canyon with numerous avalanche chutes littering our way out. During the course of the night, it continued to snow and we were treated to quite the lightning storm with some strong winds. We had to get up a couple of times to clear the snow off the megamid and I don’t think I slept more than a couple of hours, not fully trusting the megamid to hold up (the megamid did hold up and proved quite the worthy structure during my trip).
Shortly before 6am, I got out of the tent and happily looked at the clear skies and foot of new snow. I let everyone know and we broke down camp, intent on getting out before the sun made the avalanche conditions worse. We were on our way down the canyon before 8am, and the clouds had come in again. We made it out the canyon without incident, passing by some slides that had released the night before. We had one last dangerous section, a large exposed face to ski down. We found a side route that stayed off the face and as we skied down, the weather turned nasty once again. Back at Mahri, we found out that the road was closed past Gulmarg, 8km away. Unfortunately, the inclination of the road combined with the wet and heavy snow meant we had to skin down the road. We finally reached Gulmarg, completely soaked from the wet snow and caught a taxi down to the Iceland Hotel in Solang.
