Travelers' Tales India

by James O'Reilly

  —Peter Holt, In Clive’s Footsteps

  The Dharma of Heli-Skiing

  PETER SHELTON

  The author learns ascension-through-falling in the Indian Himalayas.

  Once there was a holy man named Narada, whose great learning impressed even the gods, even Vishnu who sleeps on a bed of cobras above the dark lake of infinity and whose dream is the universe as we know it.

  One day Vishnu came to Narada and offered him a single wish; Narada answered that he would like to understand the Maya, the illusion of the world as dreamed by Vishnu. “Very well,” said the god. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  So Vishnu and Narada began a trek that would take them across the whole of Hindustan: through the teeming streets of Calcutta, along the banks of the holy Ganges, into the stifling forests that belonged to the Bengal tiger, and out across the plains of Uttar Pradesh, which grew hotter and hotter until the grass disappeared and their feet trod the burning desert of Rajasthan.

  In the desert,Vishnu beckoned Narada to him. “My son, I’m thirsty. There is an oasis around this dune. Please go and fetch me some water.” So Narada went. He found the oasis, where springwater greened the fields of a small village. Seeking permission to draw from the well, he knocked on the door of the first hut. A young woman answered, and the moment Narada’s eyes met hers he forgot his mission, forgot everything from before.

  Narada stayed and married the beautiful young woman. They had two children. He was very happy, coaxing grain from the soil, working beside his loving wife, watching his children grow.

  Twelve years went by, and one day an unusually dark storm rolled in from the north. Thunder boomed, and rain came down in sheets. Narada tried to gather his family in his arms, but the flood hit too quickly and plunged them into an inky swirl that separated them all. In a frenzy, he dove and thrashed and cried the names of his wife and children, but in the dark, swirling water he could grasp nothing. Exhausted, heartsick, he gave in to the raging current, and the water took him, too.

  Narada awoke face down in the sand under a blinding hot sun. He heard a voice: “My son, where is the drink you promised me? It’s been half an hour.”

  Narada looked into Vishnu’s face. After a moment, the god said, “Now do you understand the power of my Maya?”

  --Hindu legend

  NONE OF IT—NEITHER THE IRONY NOR THE ECSTASY—WOULD BE possible without the helicopter. This raging machine clatters and roars over a vast Himalayan wilderness like something out of Apocalypse Now minus the Wagner, and when Boris Hangartner, the pilot for Himachal Helicopter Skiing, eases it in for a landing, floating it down like an iron dragonfly onto the lawn of the Manali Resorts Hotel, he invariably has an audience. This isn’t one of those twelve-passenger Bells, which perform so well in the lower altitudes of British Columbia. Here in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, where the elevations of the landing zones range from 7,000 to more than 17,000 feet, helicopters need to be smaller and more powerful. Hence ours is a five-seater French Aerospatiale Lama, which is tiny but it is also so potent that it holds the helicopter altitude record of 40,820 feet.

  Each day peasants in drab wool shawls and pillbox hats called topis gather along the hotel wall to watch Boris’s takeoffs and landings. They giggle and stare unabashed at the skiers inside, each dressed in fluorescent Gore-Tex suits and big, stiff, plastic boots. They point off toward the peaks with some concern, as if the skiers may not know about the evil spirits that wait up there.

  What is the helicopter doing here, they wonder, leased for $1,500 an hour in a land where rice in the priciest bazaar goes for three cents a kilo? This time, it was here to deliver me and eleven other pleasure seekers to places of sublime stillness and altitude from which we would descend in a state of charmed albeit capitalist-contrived nirvana. The helicopter was our magic carpet, a tool giddily suited to one of the most expensive and addictive pastimes of the late twentieth century: heli-skiing.

  It is astonishing, really, the delicacy of the thing. Time and again, Boris brought the beast in for a landing just inches from our crouching forms, the basket on the copter’s port skid lined up perfectly with our stacked skis for loading. Then there was the time our guide, Pablo (a.k.a. Paul Berntsen), dropped his radio somewhere in the middle of a run. Boris flew him up the tracks, nosing the Lama along the steep snowfield at walking speed. Finally, Pablo saw the radio; he jumped out, retrieved it, and scrambled back aboard the helicopter à la James Bond, while Boris, who dared not touch down, juggled gravity, wind, and the helicopter’s awesome torquing power just a few feet off the ground.

  Even at 15,000 feet, the Lama has the muscle to climb 1,500 vertical feet per minute. Not long after the dramatic radio retrieval, Chris Noble, the photographer in the group, spotted a delicate pinnacle across the valley cresting at about 14,000 feet with the hulking, glacier-hung summit of the sacred Deo Tibba in the background. “Great picture,” he said. “Can you ski it?”

  “Sure,” said Pablo, and in a blink we were there. Boris let us off on a 14,000-foot knife-edge ridge just back from a perfect, thirty-five-degree slope, a white dune unmarred by even a single rolling snowball. Then the Lama lifted and dove back to the valley floor for the second half of our party.

  Minutes later we were all together on the untracked snow. We had our skis on and pointed down the hill, and we watched as a golden patch of sunlight rolled our way. When it lit the snow at our feet, Chris gave the signal and we pushed off down the face, snow from one skier flying in the goggles of the skier behind him. Our skis were like a school of dolphins riding the bow wave of gravity, leaping above the surface and then plunging into foam, again and again.

  A cute Mountain Sickness occurs at high altitude and can be fatal. The lack of oxygen at high altitudes affects most people to some extent. Take it easy at first, increase your liquid intake and eat well. Even with acclimatisation you may still have trouble adjusting—headaches, nausea, dizziness, a dry cough, insomnia, breathlessness and loss of appetite are all signs to heed. If you reach a high altitude by trekking, acclimatisation takes place gradually and you are less likely to be affected than if you fly straight there.

  Mild altitude problems will generally abate after a day or so but if the symptoms persist or become worse the only treatment is to descend—even five hundred metres can help. Breathlessness, a dry, irritating cough (which may progress to the production of pink, frothy sputum), severe headache, loss of appetite, nausea, and sometimes vomiting are all danger signs.

  —Hugh Finlay, et al., India - a travel survival kit

  Down at the bottom, 3,000 feet and some 300 such turns later, Chris Olson, one of the founding partners of Himachal Helicopter Skiing, lay back in the snow and smiled. “If you didn’t know you were in India,” he asked, “where would you think you were?”

  India doesn’t exactly come to mind when heli-skiers daydream. More likely it’s British Columbia, where the sport began, up there in the Cariboos, the Bugaboos, and the Monashees. Or perhaps heli-skiers dream of New Zealand’s Harris Mountains. Or even Utah’s Wasatch Range. But India? “It’s true,” said Olson one night over a plate of spicy tandoori chicken. “People think there isn’t skiing in India, that it’s impossibly far away and unbearably poor.”

  India is far away, and it is poor. But India does have the Himalayas, the world’s highest mountains, an almost incomprehensibly huge line of peaks. As the Rockies dwarf the Appalachians and the Alps dwarf the Rockies, so the Himalayas, in both verticality and snowy surface, dwarf every other range on the planet. That’s why we came here: to ski the highest and longest runs in the heli-skiing pantheon and to do it first, before the rest of the money-to-burn crowd caught on.

  Heli-skiing is an addiction that can be satisfied only by long runs on endless slopes, a kind of tilted alpha-wave biofeedback on a grand canvas. But even after days of carving symmetrical, wavy lines on the snow, it is still never enough. The more you do it, the more you crave it. And the doctors and bankers and corporate
farmers who can afford to feed their heli-skiing habit have started running out of new mountains to ski. In British Columbia, despite the big ranges, most of the runs have already been named and tracked by well-heeled junkies. In the United States, liability laws and public-lands policy have meant that most heli-skiing takes place in daily operations run out of established ski areas. In Europe, wilderness regulations prohibit heli-skiing in most of the Alps, save a few high points in Italy. For the moment, that leaves only New Zealand, where weather and snow conditions are chancy at best, and the Caucasus, where a couple of maverick outfitters fly old Soviet military helicopters from bases in the nation of Georgia.

  And, obviously, it leaves India. Himachal Helicopter Skiing is not the first to fly in the Himalayas. That distinction belongs to Switzerland’s Sylvain Saudan, the self-proclaimed Skier of the Impossible, who launched his Himalaya Heliski operation in 1987 in Kashmir. Saudan pioneered extreme skiing in the 1960s and 1970s; he fell in love with the Himalayas after he’d jump-turned for six straight hours down the 23,396-foot Nun-Kun in central Kashmir in 1977, the first time anyone had skied a 7,000-meter peak from the summit.

  For the first three years of Saudan’s heli-skiing operation all went well, despite perennial border tensions with Pakistan. Since 1990, however, the U.S. government has issued travel advisories for Srinagar, capital of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, where separatist violence has sporadically erupted. But Saudan keeps skiing (with a military attaché ever present), thanks to a growing, largely European clientele that’s both hungry for virgin snow and tolerant of Third World adventure.

  Himachal Pradesh, where we went heli-skiing, is a benignly peaceful state. Still, that didn’t save Chris Noble, his wife, Marjie, and me from a bomb scare in New York before our Air India 747 even left the ground. “It’s not a good sign,” Chris deadpanned, “when you look out the window and you’re surrounded by Desert Storm vehicles.” Who were the terrorists? Tamil separatists? Sikh militants? Kashmiri Muslim extremists? When we were finally allowed back on board, the pilot told us only, “The delay is because of security of the aircraft.”

  Our second plane, which took us from New Delhi to Kulu, was a silver, twin-engine prop job that bore a striking resemblance to the one that crashed deep in the Himalayas in the 1937 Ronald Colman film Lost Horizon. Reality blurred in a fog of jet lag, culture shock, and free airport tea.

  “Goodmorningsir.” The flight attendant had shouted above the engine noise. “Teacoffeesir? Pleasesir?” She wore a turquoise-blue sari and a red tika, or “third eye,” on her forehead. A section of her soft, brown midriff showed through the swirls of silk even though, out the window, snow powdered the mountain ridges.

  In 1947 the British had conveniently forgotten to complete the separation of India and Pakistan all the way across the Himalaya to the Chinese border. In 1984 Indian troops suddenly occupied the forty-seven-mile Siachen Glacier, the longest in the Himalaya, in a region Pakistan had always administered.… The highest war in history was being fought at altitudes up to 20,500 feet. The situation was virtually unknown to the outside world because photographers and journalists were banned from the war zone by both sides.… After returning from the high camp, I wrote, “Men might as well shoot at each other on the moon as stand here on the pristine heights of the earth, gasping for breath with weapons in hand.”

  —Galen Rowell, Galen Rowell’s Vision: The Art of Adventure Photography

  “Teacoffeesir?” she asked again in that lilting English left over from the days of the Raj. She moved ahead to other members of our ski party: to Willi, the Austrian ski-edge manufacturer, and Rainer, the chain-smoking surgeon from Germany; then on to Jean-Eric and Albert, French heli-skiing buddies who work in Bangkok and Hong Kong. Then she moved to Karen, the Montana horsewoman, and Wendy, the bond trader from Salt Lake City.

  None of us knew what to expect in the Kulu Valley, a place whose ancient name, Kulantapith, means “the end of the habitable world.” What it looked like when we landed was a kind of paradise. Deep March snow blanketed the mountainsides above us, while down in the valley it was spring. Green barley and new wheat sprouted in farm terraces, which marched like green honeycombs up the hillsides. Pink plum and white apple blossoms painted the bottom-land. The Beas River, India’s fifth largest waterway (and reportedly loaded with the formidable, salmon-like mahseer) gurgled glacier-blue through white granite bedrock.

  On the hour-long taxi ride from Kulu up to our hotel in Manali, we braked for children herding sheep and dove time and again to the road’s left shoulder at the approach of a Tata, one of India’s ubiquitous spangled orange buses. Sharp-featured, dark-skinned men stared as our string of ski-laden taxis rolled past. Women in finely woven shawls flashed shy, veilless smiles.

  We passed low, smoky huts belonging to round-faced Tibetans who had fled their homeland in 1959 along with the Dalai Lama, who now lives just to the west in Dharamsala. We saw the squatters’ camps of Nepalese migrant workers and the finer two-story houses belonging to local Hindus.

  Our driver, Iqbal Sharma, told us that the town of Manali was a rich place for two reasons: “Because of the apples and because of the road.” The apples were a gift of the British, brought here about a hundred years ago when the viceroys made their summer capital at Simla, a hill station a couple of hours to the south. The road, however, is not the bounty of imperialism. It’s the result of a brief border dispute with China. In 1962, Chinese troops moved into a portion of Ladakh (a cultural and geographic extension of Tibet claimed by India), dealt the Indians a stinging defeat, and then claimed only a tiny section of the territory, apparently satisfied simply to humiliate their neighbors. Soon afterward, the Indian military carved this road to create a secure land route into the Himalayan border area. The road follows ancient trade routes, and though potholed and one-laned, it has meant increased, year-round access to the city.

  After checking into our hotel—a new glass and cut rock affair with a sign in each marbled bathroom that read HOT WATER TIMING: MORNING 6:30 A.M. TO 10:30 A.M. EVENING 6:30 P.M. TO 10:30 P.M.—we strolled through the nearby hot-springs village of Vashisht with Murli, a coach of the Indian national ski team. Murli told us that the Indian ski championships were held at the head of this canyon, outside the village of Solang, where cleared field and halting poma lift constitute one of the two “ski areas” in India. In fact, more than a few Manali children have taken to the sport. They build their own skis out of wooden planks, nailing old bandsaw blades on for edges. Twine lashed over their standard winter footwear, rubber galoshes, suffices for bindings. And they top their gear off with tree-branch poles.

  The only snow we saw in Vashisht was in remnant piles from a big storm the week before. The real snow, the stuff we had come to ski, was out of sight, up over the nearest forested hills, which narrowed the valley down to a neck-craning slit. Late afternoon sunlight beamed in through firs and cedars, illuminating handsome wooden houses on the hillsides with animals housed on the ground floor, people above. These houses had slate-covered roofs at exactly the same pitch as those of chalets at similar elevations in alpine countries; they also had wraparound balconies with ornately carved railings over which were draped brilliant red scarves, blue trousers, and pink bedspreads and towels.

  At the hot spring, tiny, pantless children splashed on the stone slab where steaming water poured from inside the mountain. The laughter of men and boys echoed from behind the carved stone walls of temple baths. Murli chatted with an old woman who formed cow dung into patties with her hands; later the dried patties would be burned as fuel. She grinned a near-toothless grin and greeted us, as everyone did, with the all-purpose namaste.

  The next morning at breakfast we met Olson’s Australian partner, Roddy Mackenzie, the strapping son of a wealthy Melbourne farmer. His great-grandfather had lived in India in the days of the Raj, and Roddy seemed a bit of a throwback himself, brusque and occasionally condescending. On the morning we met him, he was mumbling his impatience in
Hindi to the white-jacketed waiters who were slowly serving up hotcakes and lassi, a creamy yogurt and banana drink. He, more than anyone else at the table, should have known better. “If you could put a price on patience,” he told me in a more reflective moment, “India would be the richest nation on earth.”

  As a boy Roddy had accompanied his father to Nepal on a commercial trek. He remembered keeping a bunch of Nepalese kids enthralled for an hour outside his tent lighting matches. Then, in his late teens, an aborted adventure with a school chum had led him to Manali. They had planned to hike into Ladakh to “scrounge around in some caves” described by a distant relative in a diary kept during a three-year trek in the Himalayas. They’d ended up in Manali. “And I’ve been coming back ever since,” he said in his quiet, yet somehow agitated, Aussie drawl.

  On this first day, Roddy would not be skiing with us (neither would head guide Nick Craddock) but Olson would. Outwardly, Chris is Roddy’s opposite: the son of a Michigan investment manager, he’s a laid back, skinny, twenty-eight-year-old rock climber with a toothy grin. He got involved in the heli-skiing venture when a friend introduced him to Roddy, who in turn convinced him to put up $75,000 to have a helicopter dismantled and shipped from Switzerland for the first season in 1990. Since then, business has been sketchy at best: the Persian Gulf War, the recession, and Western preconceptions about skiing in India have all but conspired to keep business at a trickle. But Olson remains optimistic. “Just wait until you see where we’re going,” he said as we pushed back our chairs to dress.