Trip Reports

Stok Kangri - 29 Jul to 19 Aug '06

Trekking towards Stok Kangri base camp, with the mountain in the background

Written by Leader Stuart McNeil, September 2006

The monsoon this season crept further north than normal into Ladakh bringing heavy rainfall and leading to swollen, fast flowing streams high up on the mountains, which soon turned to angry rivers lower down. This brought about logistical problems in terms of the river crossings which became progressively more difficult with under surface debris and boulders being projected downriver. It's fine if you are a long legged horse crossing these sort of fast flowing rivers but for the short legged mules it was very alarming! And there were a few refusals.

Ultimately we had to retreat two days short of our final destination at Chilling. The group did really well and what should have been a short day, ended up being quite long going back over the 4,950m Konsa La that we had crossed the day before. On our eventual return to Leh we learnt that the capital had been cut off for five days because of collapsed bridges being swept away by the rivers on all the major routes into the city.

After a few days rest and having dried all our clothing out we set off directly to Stok village to start our approach to Stok Kangri and the build up to summit day. This turned out to have no problems at all mainly because the weather had settled down a lot, although we did have a few afternoon snow showers. We set off from advanced base camp at 0300 hours with everyone reaching the summit by 0900 hours having encountered deep soft snow on the lower slopes and then donning crampons and roping up for the final interesting summit ridge.

We were all back down in base camp for lunch at 1300 hours and all agreed that the challenging conditions added to the sense of achievement.

Summiteers included:Anouk, Alan (on their honeymoon), Kevin, Stuart. Remo Staff: Nema, Uden, Kami & Jumik and finally ginger the dog from nearby Stok village!

Stuart McNeil, expedition leader « Previous report | Next report »

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