SECMOL Mountain Hike

Hiking Slowly and breathing deep we climb upwards, working to suck all possible oxygen molecules out of the sparse air. Looking up every few steps, but the summit does not seem to get any closer in a hurry, even though we have been hiking all morning. SECMOL hill sure looked smaller from ground level, but perhaps that is due to the fact that it is surrounded on three sides by snowy 8,000 footers. After some time we manage to make it up to the ridgeline and then we look up. And there, only two hundred or so meters away, are the prayer flags and the rock pile that mark the top, the summit. Scrambling and kicking loose rock careening hundreds of feet as we go, we scale the last few crags. Breathless, happy, and already bone-weary we sit down and finally take some time to notice the view. And what a view it is! To the east and north there is nothing but huge, white mountains with snow whipping around their peaks. To the west, sandy desert plains stretch on with a single lonely road dividing them, upon which there is but one lonely car. Far across the plains, towards what would be Tibet, mountains again shoot up out of the flat desert, as if some large being had stuck pointy rocks in the ground right where they thought the desert should end. To the south we can see the outskirts of Leh, as well as the Indus, snaking towards Pakistan. Down towards the base of SECMOL hill we see SECMOL campus itself, overlooking the snaking Indus. We think we can faintly hear the sounds of Nema ringing the bell, to call all the Ladakhis to tea. There are almost no trees in sight. The only ones are scraggly poplars that from here look more like grey wisps of Yak hair than anything else. We eat pistachios as Holly reads us an excerpt from Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, about the mountain climbing escapades of Kerouac and his friend Gary Snyder. We take some time to draw the landscape, throw snowballs and rocks as far as we can, and eat apricots.

But then the clouds start rolling in and it is time to start the descent back to ground level. Just as we are leaving we see a plane fly by below us. Funny, I didn’t think we were that high. It is starting to cool down, so we hurry to start climbing down. We scramble and slide down the mountain, until we are confident we won’t fall, and then we run and jump and leap. In a quarter of the time it took to climb the mountain we have almost descended it. The last hundred meters are steep and sandy. We whoop and yell and jump as far as we can until we reach flat ground. Back at ground level, and taking a second to rest we turn around. Towering what looks like thousands of feet above us leers SECMOL peak, where we were less than an hour previously. Almost simultaneously we voice the same thought, “Wow guys, we climbed that!”. Later as we lined up for dinner one thought was spread among us: Day well spent.

-VISpa, Cedar