Yala Peak, Langtang, Nepal

Trip to Nepal 2010: Langtang and Yala Peak
I have just come back from Nepal, where I spent 3 and a half weeks (from mid march to early April) with two friends, Pete and Rory. The intention of the trip was to simply to see the country and the Himalayas, do some trekking, possibly do an easy 'trekking peak'. For me, it was my first time in Asia, let alone Nepal, and the longest time I've had off work since I came to London three and a half years ago!

The two main seasons to trek in Nepal are the post-Monsoon season (Oct, Nov), and the pre-Monsoon season (April, May). We went toward the end of winter (March), partly in an attempt to avoid the crowds of peak season, and partly because I had to get back to the UK in good time for an exam in June. Early planning involved looking at treks in the famous and well-visited Annapurna region. However, I read an article in a travel magazine that enthused visitors to consider alternative treks and indeed trekking areas outside the main two areas (Annapurna, Everest region)

This led to our selecting the Langtang Himal region (Himal is simply a reference to mountains with permanent snows). Langtang valley is a high alpine valley running East-West hard up to the Chinese/Tibetan border, due north from Kathmandu. Its people are very Tibetan in character, language and religion. The area has two main big mountains - the fearsome Langtang Lirung (7200m), and just over the border in Tibet, Shishapangma, one of the world's 14 8000m+ peaks. The rest of the range consists of peaks rising to around 6500m on the Nepal/China border, mainly north of the valley, and a subsidiary range of 5-6000m making up the southern arm of the valley. Langtang apparently sees 5,000 visitors a year, out of the perhaps 100,000 trekkers who visit Nepal per year.

We wanted a longish trek (over a week), some wild camping (getting away from 'trekking tea houses/guest houses'), and ideally an opportunity to go up an easy peak. Myself and my friend Pete were also very keen to ensure that our itinerary included adequate time to acclimatise properly. As it was our first time in Nepal, and it is impossible to carry enough stuff to wild camp for days without porters (without being double-hard), and as guides are mandated for trekking peaks, we decided to hire a full guide and porter crew. We arranged this through a Nepali guy who friends of Pete knew from a long distant gap year. We choose to do the standard Langtang trek (up to 3800m), then do Yala Peak, an easy 'trekking peak' (5500m), and then do a high mountain pass (Ganja La, 5100m), involving several days camping, to exit the valley and continue our trek into Nepal's 'middle hills' (the middle hills are the heartland of Nepal, running West-East, parallel, but to the South of the Himalayas, at a height of 1500-3000m asl, mostly populated by Indian and Hindu influenced peoples).

On flying into Nepal, we spent two days in Kathmandu seeing the sights (temples, etc). It was then time for the trek. Short of hiring a jeep to get there from Kathmandu (which our budget didn't allow), the only way to get to Langtang is to get a public bus (large Tata) from Kathmandu. The route is 140km, and takes maybe 9 hours! The road is only tarmaced for the first 50km or so. Tarmaced or not, the road follows the tortuous contours of Nepal's very hilly middle hills. The journey was a bit of an experience, with a few tourists jammed in with all and sundry, who got on and off at will, with about 20 people travelling on top on average! Our tall mate Rory (who didn't really fit in his seat) found this experience particularly unpleasant! Our road head start was called Syapbru Besi, at an height of around 1500m asl.

We got started the next day (Tues 16 March), with our two guides and three porters. Unfortunately, the start of the trek also coincided with me chalking up our first attack of 'Dehli belly'! The first two days involve rough paths and large amounts (1000m+ per day) of height gain, travelling through sub-tropical (inc monkeys and creepers) then temperate forests, up the deep and narrow lower Langtang valley. The first night's stop is at guest houses at 2500m - a perfect altitude for acclimatisation - as AMS is not likely to kick in at that height, but sleeping at the altitude really helps. On the second day, we started to get views of the mighty Langtang Lirung (7200m), which dominates the northern side of the middle valley. Toward the end of the second day, the forest thins out, and the valley flattens and opens out toward the East. The second night was spent at a guest house in Langtang village (3300m), the only settlement in the valley. This is a farming community of around 600 people, all 'Tamangs' - an essentially Tibetan people. Our guides and porters all hailed from the village, so they had the opportunity to go home, and we were invited into their homes. This was a great experience, sitting in a real Tibetan-style house, trying our guide's wives' garlic soup, various rice beers, and the never-to-be-forgotten Tibetan yak butter tea! Due to sleeping at 2500m the night before, we didn't feel the altitude at 3300m at all.

The next day was spent walking only about 6km and another 500m up, to aid acclimatisation. The destination was Kyanjin Gompa, the site of a Buddist monastry, and a collection of guest houses. It is the last settlement in the valley, and is at a height of around 3800m. We passed many chortens on the way. These are prayer monuments that one must always pass on the left (i.e. keep the monument on one's right). The monastary itself was simple and ancient, and very interesting. We bought prayer flags for the mountain summit, as placing prayer flags in high places is the custom in Himalayan Nepal. The views up the valley from Kyanjin Gompa were great, with Naya Kanga (5800m, one of the more technical trekking peaks) and Ganchenpo (a very astheticly pleasing mountain of 6300m) in full view, along with the dominant Langtang Lirung.

The next two days were spent resting at Kyanjin Gompa. One was a scheduled rest day, the second unscheduled due to Pete coming down with the same gut bug as me. As I was still nursing gut problems on the first day, I simply rested, while Pete and Rory tried to walk up to a 4700m view point. They got to around 4300m and the altitude kicked in for Pete, so they returned. On the night we arrived in Kyanjin Gompa (the end of day 3 of the trek), I decided that I had had enough of having to go to the loo 15 times a day (and at night!), so treated myself with some antibiotics I had acquired in the UK last summer, which sorted me out (they also worked for Pete). On the second rest day, I went for a half-day walk into a side valley between Langtang Lirung on my own, and, after negotiating a herd of yak on the path, got close up to one of the glaciers coming down from a mountain on the Tibet/Nepal border and had great views of the huge, steep, glaciated and unclimbed/unclimbable East/South East face of Langtang Lirung. I only saw two other trekkers the whole time I was in this side valley.

As with the rest of the Northern hemisphere, Nepal had a late and heavy winter this year. It was still snowing heavily up high when we entered Langtang valley in mid-March. Unfortunately, this meant that there was no way we were going to be able to cross the Ganja La pass, as our guides discovered from a party that had just unsuccessfully attempted it that it was choked with waist high soft snow. Some Americans had attempted Yala Peak several days before we were scheduled to make our attempt, and had failed due to a combination of insufficient acclimatisation and large amounts of new snow. However, while we were at Kyanjin Gompa, the seasons changed overnight, the sun came out, it got a lot warmer, and our guides were confident that enough snow would have melted from the Yala Peak approach to allow a successful ascent.

Eventually, we set off for Yala Peak base camp, which is situated in some high yak meadows (called 'Yala Kharka') further into and up high to the 'left' (north) side of the main Langtang valley, at an altitude of around 4800m. The path contoured round lower hills, and was reasonable. Going from 3800m to 4800m to sleep might have caused AMS to kick-in, however, the 2 full days at 3800m ensured that none of us had any symptoms that night (and we were able to walk to 4800m without being too breathless until the last couple of hundred metres of ascent). The base camp was next to some old herder's huts, and gave amazing evening views to the southern side and of the valley. We all pitched tents, and after a meal, settled down to an early night. This night's camp site represented the highest point above sea level that I had ever been to (outside a plane! - my previous high point had been a pass at nearly 4800m in the Peruvian Andes).

Myself and Pete had selected the Langtang/Ganja La trek as the main objective of the trip, and had seen the ascent of an easy trekking peak as an extra. Given this was to be our first time in the Himalayas, and at significant altitude, we had no desire to do anything harder than an alpine 'facile', and nothing too high (some so-called 'trekking peaks' in Nepal are full-on mountaineering propositions going up to a height of 6500m). We had found that it was nearly impossible to get any detailed information about Yala Peak and the routes up it. There is very little on the internet. Different maps and authorities put the mountain at between 5500m and over 5700m, and do not agree on its location. Certainly the Nepalese Mountaineering Association (NMA), which issues permits to climb peaks, puts the height at 5732m. Lonely Planet, which we trusted more than most, put Yala Peak on the South end of a ridge that ran from a South Easterly point North West toward the high 6500m range of mountains on the Nepal/Tibet border. Lonely planet stated that the high point of this ridge was a peak known as Tersko Peak (at around 5700m), one or two kms further along the ridge to the North from Yala Peak (5500m).

Myself and Pete knew that the mountain was given as being technically 'easy'. The impression I had acquired from the internet was that the peak might involve a little easy glacier crossing and perhaps some Scottish grade 1 style snow slopes. We knew the guides were to have a rope, and we had bought harnesses, crampons, ice axes, a few slings and an ice screw each. However, this is not quite how our route up the mountain turned out. I started to realise we would be doing something else when the two guides announced that they didn't have ice axes or crampons, and had not used them on around 8 previous successful ascents. From just above the base camp, that evening, we could see a distant high point, which our guides said was Yala Peak. We were looking at its South side, and it was mainly rock. To the left of the South Face, on essentially the mountain's South West face, we could see the edge of the mountain's large glacier (Yala glacier). All was to become clear later.

We woke up at 3.30am, geared up, and left just gone 4am, a proper alpine start. Later, we were to realise how important this is in the Himalayas. The stars were out, but no moon. The night was dark, and we followed our two guides up a path that soon turned into moderately angled snow slopes of maybe 25-30 degrees. This was not permanent snow, and was left over from the winter. In the freezing temps of pre-dawn, the snow was mercifully firm, as we were all finding the going very hard due to the altitude (we had acclimatised enough to avoid AMS, but not to be unaffected by the climb!) Rory was doing better than myself and Pete. We were already at a height at which the oxygen content of the air is half that at sea level. Regular breathing stops were vital. Nonetheless, there were some areas in which we broke through into deeper snow, which was hard work. In the dark, I was dimly aware of the exposure of the slope, which went on for several hundred metres, however, my boots were biting well, and given the moderate angle, didn't feel the need for an ice axe.

After these slopes, we topped out onto a non-technical rock ridge system lying south of Yala Peak (perhaps 5100m asl). At this point, there was light in the sky to the East, and Langtang Lirung caught the first light behind us. After a much needed breather, we continued, walking along the snowless easy rock ridge, then down steeply to a bowl nestled under the peak. We needed to cross the bowl to gain a flat area further up higher up but right under the summit. The bowl was angled at 40 degrees or so, and was relatively unpleasant. Where there was snow, it was deep and soft. Where it was rock, it was a steep angled, incredibly lose and angular boulder field. This was tough, and we had to be very careful not to knock rock onto each other. Eventually, we reached a short rock chimney which we scrambled up and through onto the flatter area above. By this time the sun was up, and the temperature was rising fast. At this point, we could see the summit straight ahead, a few hundred metres above us, up a serious rock cliff to our front. To our left stretched the large and relatively steeply angled Yala glacier. To our right there was an easy-angled snow traverse below the summit cliffs to a snow/rock ridge that would take us to the summit.

While the snow was getting softer by the minute in the morning sun (it was perhaps gone 8am by this point), it was initially sufficiently firm and angled down toward a nearby big drop for me to get my ice axe out, although Rory and Pete did not do the same. We skirted the edge of the glacier proper, traversed below the summit cliffs, and made our way up to the final right-bounding ridge. This is was mostly a steep walk up a broad bare rock ridge (which was also quite loose), which we walked up slowly as ever due to the altitude. However, right at the end, for the final maybe 40m of vertical height to the summit, the ridge abruptly turned into an alpine-style ridge. We scrambled carefully up an initial snowed-up chimney of 3-4m onto the ridge proper, which was pretty narrow, a little technical, steep, and partly snowed/iced up, with some dry hand holds. The ridge had the summit cliffs we had just traversed to the left, and the mountain's NE face to the right. This NE face was snowed up and dropped very steeply for probably 1000 metres to a glacier trough/valley far below. So the ridge was fairly exposed. Had it been dry (which it probably would be later in the Spring) the ridge would probably be equivalent to a British grade 2 scramble. Given its wintery nick, it was probably just about Scottish winter grade II. We scrambled our way up this section without protection (the snow was softening in the heat), and I went up a final 3 or 4 metres of so of a steepish and fairly exposed snow cone to the summit, kicking steps and using my ice axe, which gave me added security.

The summit has a main pole, and prayer flags fly from the pole to a another rock several metres away. Our guides attached our new prayer flags to the pole. The tattered state of the existing flags showed that they had been placed last year. Given the recent snow, our guides were confident that we were the first to summit Yala Peak that year. The summit area is triangle shaped with maybe 3-4 metres to a side, and consisted of boulders and snow when we were there. The summit is surrounded by steep drops. The views from the summit were amazing. We could see Langtang Lirung to the West. To the North was the 6500m border mountain of Yansa Tsenji. To the North East we could see into the high Shalbachum glacial valley, the beautiful and steep Morimoto Peak (6750m) and, in the background, the huge mass of Shishapangma, the only 8000m+ mountain entirely in Tibet, and the first I had ever seen. To the East we could see the moutains at the end of the Langtang valley, Langshisa Ri (6800m) and Ganchenpo, and to the South, Naya Kanga and the snowed-up Ganja La pass that was shut to us. One thing was clear though – many of the glaciers we were looking at had retreated strongly over the last few years. Our guides said that Nepal essentially had no winter for 4 years until the winter just gone.

Running roughly North/North West from Yala Peak was the rest of the ridge as described by Lonely Planet and marked on most maps. A km or two along it, the ridge rose to a slightly higher point, which was clearly Tsersko Peak, given as being around 5700m. The ridge to Tsersko Peak consisted of knife edge of (no doubt soft!) snow, interspersed with difficult and loose looking rock Islands, and looked like like a significant mountaineering proposition. All along the left (South East) side of the ridge, the Yala glacier drops fairly steeply for up to a km toward the yak pastures of Yala Kharka that lie behind the hill Tsersko Ri (5000m). My suspicion is that the entire massif, topped by Tsersko Peak, is sometimes referred to as 'Yala Peak'. I strongly suspect that the climbing permit issued by the NMA, which lists the peak as being 5732m high, refers to climbing on the whole massif.

I have little big mountain and glacier experience, however, I suspect that it would also be possible to do Yala Peak (as in the southerly summit at 5500m) by crossing the yak pastures, executing a glacier crossing over the Yala glacier to the ridge between Tsersko Peak and Yala Peak, and traversing along to the Yala Peak summit. However, looking at the glacier with my inexperienced eye, it looked like a fairly serious proposition. Its steepness has led to seracs, and it seemed quite crevassed. Certainly when we were there, as we were, shortly after a lot of new snow, the glacier was thoroughly 'wet'. Apart from the extra danger that this would introduce to a crossing, it would have no doubt been very hard going in such a lot of new soft snow. A glacier crossing and ridge traverse would likely be the only way to reach the summit of Tsersko Peak.

We had topped out around 9am, 5 hours after leaving base camp. Our guides said that this was a reasonable time, neither fast nor slow. We had certainly been maxed out by reaching the summit anyway! It was really quite hot by 9am on the summit. We left at 9.30am after food, drink, and many photos. While we had soloed up the final ridge and chimney, I was aware of its exposure and how treacherous the partly snowed up ground could be, and how tired we were already. We had a rope, and I knew before starting down that we would want to use it to protect the section - especially as Rory was not a climber as myself and Pete were. I carefully made my way down the final short snow slope to the ridge, with the exposure on this section the greater for facing a big drop after a few metres of snow, rather than the slope in front of you, as with the ascent. On reaching the ridge, I was confident enough to scramble carefully down the ridge, noting the exposure, until I got to the last possible sensible anchor before the snowed up chimney. I our guide got his rope out at that point, but I just wasn't sure what he was going to do with it (many guides in Nepal don't necessarily have many climbing skills we would take for granted, often relying on fixed rope techniques). As I had my harness on, and some slings, I tested a large boulder, slinged it, and clipped it into my belay loop. I then took the rope, tied an adjustable waist loop for Rory and Pete, and belayed each of them from a few metres above me, past my stance (where the ridge was narrowest, with a drop straight down the NE face), and down the awkward section. The security of the rope was appreciated. I then abseiled off my anchor (with a prusic as back-up) from the ridge and down the chimney. Our guides were clearly more confident than us, as they soloed down afterwards with my sling. I found the whole experience quite fun, and was happy to tick an abseil at nearly 5500m!

After that, at around 10am, we reversed the rest of our route, and discovered why people like to get off Himalayan routes early. The sun was merciless and the heat intense. The snow we came across was deep porridge sprinkled with boulders that we almost needed to swim through at times. It was very, very hard, and Rory found it particularly difficult, although we were not as breathless as we had been on the ascent. As we descended, there was a never ending cacophony of noise from the Yala glacier and the mountains beyond. Clearly the heat was dislodging ice, rock and anything else in a significant way. I would not have wanted to be anywhere near it. It took a few hours to get down, back to base camp in time for lunch. Myself and Pete agreed that Yala Peak deserves its apparent 'facile' grading. Certainly, by the route we did, it was a (hard) walk, with a short section of technical interest that would justify the carrying of a rope, even if a competent party did not use it in drier conditions. It was of just the right difficulty for us given our desire not to do anything too hard, and it allowed our none-climber friend Rory to join us.

At the end of the trek, we went off the beaten track to some nice mid-altitude Tamang villages. Later in the trip we saw more sights in Kathmandu, and spent a week near Pokhara. Pete did some more trekking near Annapurna, while myself and Rory went rafting. We ended up in a village with our Nepali friend and contact with great views of the Annapurnas.

Overall, I had a great time in Nepal. The trek was great, and Yala Peak a good introduction to the Himalayas and going to semi-significant height. The people in Nepal were amazing, and the place is simply fasinating. We are already planning our return...

James Ridgwell, April 2010.
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