So you might be getting the picture now. One false step crossing this landslide and you were a goner. That much was plainly obvious to me when I first stopped and assessed it. It was going to be a really tricky crossing, and not one I really wanted to do with a 45 pound pack on my back.
The group had kind of bunched up at the landslide, I presume they were at least sensing the hazard of the situation, and that made them pause. I ask where the lead geologist was and they said that he had already crossed the landslide and gone on ahead. I presumed that this meant that he thought it was a negotiable trail and that he was scouting ahead as fast as he could to see if there were any more trail hazards. (It turns out there were a lot more!) On hearing this news, I realized that we were going to have to cross the landslide. A group of us started to cross. In front of me was luckless Debbie, and in front of her was the young lawyer who came here to do some trekking. He was born and raised in San Francisco, but his parents were from Pakistan and he spoke perfect Hindi. The three of us were spaced fairly close together as we began to cross the scree slope. At some points the trail was fairly wide (maybe 8 inches) and at some points the scree had come down almost covering the trail and you had to be extremely careful picking your way across it.
We were somewhere about halfway across the landslide, when suddenly luckless Debbie screamed as her right foot slid out from under her off of the trail and she started to go down. At that point everything seemed to happen as if in an instant– I didn’t think, I just acted out of reflex. I reached out and grabbed the back of her backpack as she was falling. At the same time I let myself dropped to my knees as she went down and I brace my left hand on the ground and my knees firmly on the trail. I remember trying to lean uphill as fast as I could and then the full weight of her backpack and her body hit me. I was braced and ready but it still yanked me downhill. She just kept sliding pulling me down until my face was almost on the ground, but I didn’t let go. She finally stopped, suspended only by her two arms in the backpack loops, and the backpack suspended only by me stretch out on the trail nearly prostrate. And there we stayed; as she tried to move on the slope to get back onto the trail the rocks just slid out from under her. My hand on her backpack was the only thing keeping her from sliding to her death, I knew that, and she knew it, and I was absolutely determined not to let go. I remember the terrified look in her eyes as she looked up at me and wordlessly pleaded for me to help her; to not let her fall. The young lawyer in front of us turned and saw what had happened. He undid his backpack, swung it around, and put it on the trail in front of him. Then he turned around, knelt down on the trail, and reached his hand down towards Debbie. After considerable maneuvering, she managed to grab his hand. And the two of us together drug her up the scree slope and back onto the trail again.
She was pretty shaken up. She just sat on the trail shaking and sobbing. I felt something tickling my hand and I look down. There was blood trickling down my arm; I had sliced my arm up on the sharp rocks while I was holding onto her backpack. I finally took my backpack off and leaned it on the trail behind me and began to look through it for something I could stop the bleeding with. I decided on a sock, and I took it out and press it on my arm to stop the bleeding. I remember thinking something about the possibility of infection there in India. And I remember hearing the young lawyer blurting out the usual fair to the young girl as I tried to stop the bleeding, “are you all right? You’re safe now. You don’t have to be afraid anymore.” But she was afraid. She was sobbing and shaking and terrified. She had just very nearly slid down a landslide and off a cliff to her death. She never got over the fear of that event during the whole trip. She eventually got up, put her backpack back on, and the three of us finished carefully working our way across the rest of the landslide. But by that night she was nauseous and she was throwing up. For the rest of the trip she was nauseous and sick. It was the fear; I understood it because I felt it too. I think all of us did.
The head geologist had started us out on the trip one day early. We were supposed to wait one more day for one last trekkie to fly in from Denver I think, but since everybody was there except this one person, we just left him. The head geologist left instructions at the hotel for him to get a Jeep and follow us to the trekking resort as soon as he got in. Then he could “catch us up” on the trail. After two nights on the trail he caught up with us, and I could tell by looking at him and his gear that he was really well experienced in mountain climbing and backpacking. I ask him what he thought of the trail along the way catching up to us, and he summed it up by answering me with just one word: “Treacherous”.