Last flight out of Ladakh: Chapter 6 - Enter Iceman

Last flight out of Ladakh: Chapter 6 - Enter Iceman

It was the group of 24th January, the one that had started before and had been the first one to cross the icy blue terrain that season who met him first. It was on their fourth day on the trek, and things had been going smoothly well as planned, they were supposed to reach Nerak village the next day and then hike up for the Lingshed village the days following. Their group leader Rahul, a man of heavy built and in his early thirties, had quit the corporate life to make a career out of his passion in adventure sports, and had joined IndiaTreks an year ago to gain experience and knowledge in that industry. Compared to the second group which had only nineteen trekkers, this one had twenty-three including the husband-wife dentist duo. Accompanied by close to thirty porters theirs was undoubtedly the biggest group that had trudged on the Chadar since a long time. To manage them effectively, Rahul had split the group into two interspacing slow and fast trekkers at regular gaps and placing porters and his assistants effectively. He regularly alternated between taking the lead and the sweep and ensuring all the team members were moving at a decent pace to reach the camp sites well in time. He also took great care to plan out the rations and their division among the porters, thought he relegated the food menu planning to the head cook and poked in the kitchen only if required.

Thanks to Rahul’s planning they would be reaching their campsite for the day by around two o’ clock in the afternoon, and since the cook and some of the porters carrying food had been much ahead, lunch would have been prepared or would be prepared soon after the entire group had arrived. They had taken an early breakfast and had started early before Eight o clock in the morning to make this possible. Thimpa, their local Zanskari trek leader was leading the group, and was closely followed by Arindam, Jyoti and Arun, the faster trekkers of the lot. They reached the campsite by ten minutes past two, and were welcomed by steaming hot tea. A scent of steaming soupy veg noodles was thick in the air. As they finished their tea and started scrambling to look for their tents and sleeping bags, their other team mates started filling in one by one. They took were served hot tea, and by quarter to three all of them were in the campsite, including the porters. Some had already pitched their tents, put their sleeping mats and woolen linings in, while the rest were in the process. Those that were done had formed a huddle around a small campfire and were talking odds and bits about their walk and pulling each other’s legs. Stanazin, the cook’s helper had just came out of the kitchen tent and was about to make a call that the lunch was ready when he heard a rumbling sound to his back, coming from  the cliffs high above.

Now before we get into the details of what exactly happened, we need to understand the geography of ‘Tibb’ campsite. Built on a bifurcation of a minor off-stream from the main Zaskar River, it had a trisection of a valleys. In terms of safe locations to pitch tents there were two – one, right at the intersection inside the mouth of the smaller valley, and the other one a little bit further down the valley alongside the river where there was a dry bank of silt. Also there was the huge cave, blackened by the years of usage by the Zanskaris as a shelter where they built huge fires and camped with families, perched right above the second campsite. The smaller valley is much deeper cut as it descends downwards from the level of the main river. The mud much loose, rocks much eroded. Locals have been known to take a path through it to arrive at highway connecting Leh-Kargil side, but not much public knowledge of it is available.

The rumbling sound that was coming made Stanzin jump away from the path instinctively and head clear away of the campsite. He had seen far too many landslides in his days and dashed as fast as he could, pushing other trekkers and asking them to run as fast as possible from the campsite. Huge boulders the sizes of an elephant’s head were rolling downward were dragging in a lot of mud and gravel from the top along with them, creating a cloud of reddish brown dust with in. What ensued was a frenzy of mad scramble; people running in all directions, some even went towards the riverside that was still flowing albeit a very small stream and the rest of it frozen, some headed back on the path they had come from earlier that day and the remaining went inside the valley. For the next two-three minutes there was dust everywhere and no one was able to see what happened exactly. As it settled people shouted across, somewhere someone was blowing a whistle, there was sound of ice breaking and someone falling in it and shouting for help before vanishing from the scene, sound of metal crampon spikes on rocks and on hard snow, and much more.

Rahul was running wildly in the dust cloud without caring for himself, he needed to help, that was his primary instinct. First he came to Ruby, who was lying on the ground with a huge boulder over her left leg that had broken in half and her femur bone was jutting out at a very odd angle. He tried pushing the stone away, only to see another one fall over her shoulder, hit her on the back of her head and splattered it like a tomato. He turned away and saw Ahilya who had fallen into a small ice crevice in the river and was trying to get up; she tried once and on the second try fell back in the river and got taken away in the flow. Rahul saw her madly trying to grasp the slippery ice puddled before she went under the full ice chadar with the river flow. He heard Thimpa’s whistle and saw him leading four trekkers away from the center of campsite to safety. He also heard Arindam calling out to him, asking to help Jyoti who was dead already. He then helped out Arindam out of the campsite and the dust cloud, and went in back again. What he saw was gut-wrenching, porters and trekkers had been battered apart, cracked and maimed and were struggling to free themselves from where they were stuck in. He tried helping as many as he could.

Two hours later, Rahul was standing on the second campsite, the one below the cave. Together with the porters and trekkers who were unharmed, he had erected seven tents, which housed the fourteen trekkers who were hurt badly. Some with minor injuries had been patched up together, those with more severe breakage had been tended to as much they could be. Nine trekkers and eleven porters were missing. Rahul was discussing with Thimpa what could be a possible next step. The Nerak village was another fifteen kilometers, and it wouldn't be surely having medical facility to treat all the injured. Going back to Leh was impossible; it was more than fifty kilometers walk, followed by car drive of about forty more kilometers. They needed an evacuation, as many of the trekkers might not last the night in the condition they were. It was decided that Thimpa and three of the porters would make to the Nerak village in the dark, and use the only means of communication it had – a satellite phone booth and try getting an army helicopter evacuation. Thimpa and the porters left at quarter past six. The sky had darkened to a graying blue by then. Rahul took made one more round of each of the tents, tending to the injured as much he could. Then he went to the kitchen tent to see if any food could be prepared since the cook was missing too. He thought that if they could last this night, they should be able to get help by tomorrow morning; army is known to be very helpful.
Little did he know that the trekkers won’t last through the night. Even he won’t. Someone high atop the cliff opposite their campsite was watching them. Someone who had earlier started a landslide and had brought them to this plight. Someone who was planning a slaughter, a cold blood-bath.