There is a certain visual aesthetic that you find on Instagram, when researching Himalayan treks. There are the pictures in which nature reigns supreme: wide-lens shots of verdant valleys, frames capturing mountain ranges piercing through the clouds, close-ups of exotic flowers, and so on. There are the meticulously composed photographs with a human subject in the foreground – usually, an arm or a silhouette framed against the hills in the backdrop. Then, there are the group photos. In this category, humanity dominates; a restless, exuberant humanity. There are grins plastered on every face and many will be holding their arms aloft. Some may even be suspended in the air, their legs kicking back from the force of their jump. Everybody seems to be having the time of their lives and you cannot wait to be in their shoes. It is all, of course, a lie. The trekking experience Instagram sells you does not exist outside its curated feed. Having been on treks in the past, you know this. And yet, when these images slide onto the screen, you are captivated. You cannot help but swipe your way into a deluge of similar content and before long, you’ve registered for another trek. It is almost as if a cognitive blindness is at play as if the pictures trigger a unique form of selective amnesia where all your memories of the previous excursions are radiant and joyful. This happy forgetfulness continues till the first day of your trek. But the moment you heave your rucksack onto your back and start climbing an uphill trail, you begin to remember. Was your bag this heavy the last time as well? As the straps cut into your shoulders, you wonder how you will bear this burden for an entire week. When it begins to rain – and does not stop for the next three days – you recall the whimsies of mountain weather. Blue skies and sunshine can suddenly give way to long, dreary hours of dank mist. There is nothing you can do but keep walking. On the shores of a crystalline stream fed by glacial melt, you need to remove your shoes. As you gingerly step into the icy water and feel a thousand needles prick your bare feet, you have trouble believing you signed up to do this for fun. By evening the next day, things get worse. Bad weather has left you stranded at the first campsite and there is no guarantee if you’ll be able to proceed. As you sit huddled with the rest of the trekking group in a cramped tent – your clothes damp, feet aching, back sore – you wonder why you have subjected yourself to this ordeal. It is a question that has puzzled many before you. In 1923, when the world’s premier mountaineers were vying to be the first to scale Mount Everest, a journalist had asked George Mallory why he wanted to climb the highest peak on the planet. “Because it’s there,” he supposedly replied; words made immortal by their simplicity. Are you also, in your own modest way, driven by this inscrutable desire for adventure? You hesitate to make such a presumptuous claim. As you mull over the decisions that have led to you being trapped inside a leaky tent in the wilderness of Himachal Pradesh, you come close to giving up. You are ready to pack up and go back. Only thing is, you don’t want to be the first one to surrender. There is an innate, primal part of you that will not allow it. Is it pride? Is it determination and strength of will? Or is it shame and fear of indignity? You do not know, but truth be told, does it even matter? Once you have faced the fact that you will not – cannot – quit, it all becomes quite straightforward. The enormity of the task in front of you – climbing to the top of Friendship Peak, a 5,289 m-tall (roughly 17,350 feet) mountain in the Pir Panjal range of the Himalayas – is distilled into a simple task: placing one foot in front of the other. This is the credo that carries you to the Advanced Base Camp and when the rain finally relents to make a summit push seem possible, you begin to believe that it may carry you to your objective. You get accustomed to handling basic mountaineering equipment and learn how to wield an ice axe. You trudge through a field of boulders while wearing snow boots that envelop your feet like concrete. You clamber along a glacier and haul yourself up a near-vertical wall of ice. Roped to your companions, you follow the guide charting a path through crevasses with sheer drops on both sides. You do each of these things because there is no alternative, nowhere else to go but up. At the end of an 18-hour-long trek on summit day, when you are back at Base Camp, you try to examine your feelings as you nurse a mug of hot soup. Your motley trekking group of different personalities, some even from different countries, had been brought together by a single, shared purpose. Over the course of a week, you had laughed, danced, grimaced, winced, pulled together and willed each other to achieve that goal. There is exhaustion, sure, but also a glow of satisfaction. You can already sense the unpleasant, painful memories receding to the back of your mind. You tell your friend you will never do this again and he agrees whole-heartedly. Both of you know this to be a lie. Later, when people ask you about the trek, you will only have good things to say. The pictures from the trek will be gorgeous but inadequate; unable to convey the stunning vistas from the mountaintop, and the eerie feeling of being the only living beings in a place of forbidding beauty. And in some bizarre way, this shortcoming of the pictures will make you feel wistful, suffusing your memories of the trek with the honeyed hues of nostalgia. When enough time has passed, you will try, once again, to investigate the origins of your attraction to the mountains. You will attempt to understand the nature of this desire that makes you seek pain and suffering. You will run through the usual checklist – love for nature, visiting spectacular landscapes, search for solitude – but you will not find an answer that satisfies you. Perhaps, you will say to yourself, going on another trek will get you closer to the truth. Rohan Banerjee is a Mumbai-based lawyer and writer
