Because the Himalayas in the vicinity of Nanda Devi are subject to monsoonal rains, there are a lot of streams, rivers, and waterfalls throughout this region. And the unfortunate coincidence of the timing of my trip with the worst monsoon in the last 10 years meant that the streams, rivers and waterfalls were not only active, they had in some places completely destroyed the trails passing through the Himalayas from India into Nepal. So there were a lot of bridges on the trail crossing the streams and waterfalls. (Does it make you wonder how a bridge can cross a waterfall? I’ll fill you in on that later on.) Some of the bridges were more or less permanent and some of them were makeshift to accommodate the extremely destructive monsoon of that season. Permanent or makeshift, they all had one thing in common, they were very dangerous to cross.
They were all constructed the same way. The base of the bridge was constructed from two long tree trunk logs that were placed on boulders or rock piles and laid over the water. These tree trunk support beams looked a bit like railroad tracks. The trunks were actually extended by lashing one trunk to another in order to get the distance required to stretch across the rivers. Once the two trunks “tracks” were laid down, then sticks and branches were laid perpendicularly across them like railroad ties on a railroad track except that they were on top of the track rather than below it. Finally, to cement these sticks into place (no, they were not tied or nailed), on top of the sticks and branches there was a layer of the earth (yes, dirt – or mud every time it was raining). The bridges were about 2 feet wide, just barely wide enough for one person to walk on at a time, and they sometimes spanned a distance of up to 30 feet over the water. Occasionally, they would extend out to a boulder in the middle of the river, and then another bridge would be constructed from there to the other side of the river. By this means they could cross rivers that were up to 50 or 60 feet wide.
You can imagine with this kind of construction and distance covered, there was a lot of spring and movement to the bridges when you walked on them. And of course, there were no guardrails, no ropes, – no safety devices of any kind. Most of the time the water below them was so steep and rough that river runners would class the water as “falls” (which is exactly what you didn’t want to do while crossing the bridge). If you’ve ever seen videos of kayakers going through whitewater so rough that the kayak literally drops down over falls as they descend from one level to another, that’s what these rivers were like. They were very picturesque to see, and they were potentially deadly. I have a few pictures of some of them I will try to post on the site.
At high elevations I’m a fairly slow hiker – altitude affects me pretty strongly though I don’t get “altitude sickness” like some people do. I just slow down to match my oxygen needs with my breathing capacity. This usually starts to happen to me at about 9000 feet, and we passed that elevation on the first day hiking up into the Himalayas, so for most of the trip I was hiking slowly and near the end of the group of hikers. As I mentioned previously, when you hike all day on these kind of trails and everyone in the group has their own hiking pace, then the whole group just gets strung out on the trail like cars on an open highway all going at different speeds. You’re with the entire group in the morning when you leave and in the evening when you arrived at the camp, but during the day you only ever see a few people from your group. There are occasionally locals that you meet (mostly hiking the opposite way you are going – into India from Nepal) and of course there are occasional tiny villages that you pass through. On several days I found myself crossing pass with a young girl from our group named Kathy. If I remember right, she was only 17. She was on the trip alone, and though the hiking was difficult and at times dangerous, she had a surprisingly good attitude about the entire trip. She was very happy and enjoying herself. Our paces frequently matched and so on several days we hiked together for an hour or two. I managed to get her to take a few pictures of me standing on bridges, and I think I have a few of her doing the same thing! She was one of the trekkies, not on the trip as part of the geology class, but there because she was interested in trekking through the Himalayas. I asked her why she had come on the trip, and I got one of the most unusual answers that you can imagine – certainly not what I was expecting.
She had a brain tumor. Her father, it turned out, was a brain surgeon. He had taken her to other specialists that he knew, and they were all in agreement; the tumor was inoperable. They could not operate to remove it. She had received several rounds of radiation therapy that reduce the tumor, but it continued to grow back. There was nothing they could do. Her father asked her if there was anything she wanted to have or to do, and she replied that she wanted to go trekking in the Himalayas. So her father signed her into this UC extension class probably thinking that if she was going as part of a university class with other Americans she would be pretty safe. Obviously he had not seen the bridges.
I asked her if it hurt, and she said she had headaches every day – some days were worse than others. But you couldn’t tell it from her attitude, or from her smile, or from the joy that she seemed to radiate as she hiked through those incredible mountains. She was truly happy. I marveled at her and at her attitude. There are some people who would have let that kind of difficult circumstance get them down. She could’ve been depressed daily. She could have been on pain meds that would have dulled the pain and her awareness and her attitude. She could’ve sat at home somewhere waiting to die. But here she was halfway around the world hiking through the highest mountains on earth – and she was happy.
I knew her about eight or nine years ago on that remarkable trip through India. I don’t know what happened to her – whether or not she survived. But I think about her sometimes now even today. When things aren’t going that well for me, and it’s easy for me to feel bad about life and look down, I think about her and her insatiable love of beauty and nature and hiking and life – and yes, even for picturesque and grotesquely dangerous bridges. And when I think of her I realize I don’t really have it bad ever, and it reminds me to look up again. No matter what happens in my life, it will always be better than what happened in her life. And if she could face her life with enthusiasm and joy and happiness, then what right have I got to do otherwise?
Next week: the worst bridge of all!