The jeep taxi dropped me at my starting point, the confluence of the Indus and Astore rivers in the Northern Areas of Pakistan-administered Kashmir. It is a tumultuous landscape, where three of the world’s greatest mountain ranges – the Himalayas, the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush – collide. The result is a labyrinth of peaks and valleys, a terrain wrenched by earthquakes, glaciers, and ceaseless erosion. Beyond the rivers that surged at my feet, the valley rose into hills and those hills climbed further into some of the highest peaks on earth: Nanga Parbat, K2, Gasherbrum, Masherbrum, Broad Peak. It was a big landscape, a setting that could eat away at your confidence.
I lifted my pack from where the jeep’s twelve-year-old ticket collector had flung it to the ground. Dust pirouetted in miniature tornadoes around my feet. Using one knee and both hands I swung the pack up and onto my back. I felt its weight settle evenly between my shoulders. Its top-heavy pressure weighted my lungs and tightened the muscles in my chest and stomach. I adjusted the straps until it balanced on the ridge of my spine. I gently shook the load back and forth until the backpack wrapped me like a turtle shell, heavy but snug. The pack was my household – bedroom, kitchen, dining room – so I needed it to be comfortable.
I put one foot in front of the other, focusing on the rocks beneath my feet and the tightness in my muscles. I gasped, struggling for oxygen in the altitude-rarified air. A wind brushed my cheeks, dry from the mountains, wet from the rivers. The raw, early afternoon sun brought out a sweat that hung under my arms and spread across my chest. I was anxious about what lay ahead, but within minutes apprehension was overwhelmed by the joy of movement. I was walking, performing a simple action with a clear mind. I was where I wanted to be – at the beginning. The beginning of a fourmonth, 2,700-kilometre solo trek through the Western and Central Himalayas.
There are events in life that consume you. This walk and my brother Gareth’s death are such occurrences for me, and with the clarity of retrospect I realize just how intimately they are connected. I know now it was Gareth who brought me to the Himalayas.
On a cold January night my little brother drowned in Elk Lake, British Columbia.
He had gone there that afternoon to train with the University of Victoria rowing team. Two eighteen-metre, eight-man-plus-coxswain rowing shells set out onto the water. It was breezy but there was nothing threatening about the conditions. Then around five p.m. a sudden ferocious storm blew up off the Pacific Ocean to the southwest. The crews in the two shells pulled madly on the oars to make it to shore but quickly one of them was swamped by the rising waves. The motorized coach boat picked up that first crew, but the four-and-a-half-metre, aluminum-hulled runabout was hopelessly overloaded and it too was swamped near the lake’s edge. The rowers struggled onto dry land through vicious surf. It was now 5:30 p.m. and winter darkness had fallen.
On the lake Gareth’s boat had taken on water and was sinking. The nine-man crew was holding onto the broken, upturned hull and being washed over by two-metre waves. The lake was four degrees Celsius. It took three-quarters of an hour for hypothermia to take my brother. I’m told it’s a peaceful way to die. In the cold and chaos of the storm he slipped, unseen by his struggling crewmates, from the wreckage. I still think about his perfect, lean body floating inert on the furious surface of the lake and then quietly dropping, like an autumn leaf, to the lake floor.
The following day would have been Gareth’s birthday. He was with us only hours short of nineteen years. He was a gentle, good-hearted soul, someone you could wish no harm towards and I was blessed to have him in my life. I can’t think about him without seeing his big-toothed, face-consuming smile. He was the kind of person who fit in anywhere because he found the fun in every situation, not brimming with confidence – at eighteen years old he hadn’t hit his stride yet – but someone who made you feel welcome. He was nearly two metres tall, a thin, gangly kid still growing into his body, but there was an emergent stability about him; you could feel the confidence of manhood rising. He was handsome with a narrow classically proportioned face, blue eyes sparkling with energy, and a lean strength in his frame.
I was his older brother, four years difference, and for most of my teenage years he was the little brother with too many questions and too many requests to tag along. Sometimes I treated him harshly, scolding words and cold shoulders and in that there’s regret for me, but Gareth has taught me many lessons, the first of which is that remorse can be the catalyst for great change.
Losing Gareth was something more distressing than I could ever have imagined. Two years of aimless wandering consumed me following his death. Cross-country ski racing, which for years had been my passion, held no attraction. At university I drifted and my studies suffered. Relationships dissipated before anything solid could develop. I had little interest in my own future, never mind one involving someone else. Without the structure that training for ski racing had given me I slid into apathy. I needed a focus and slowly the dreams of my childhood resurfaced.
I have always had a fascination with the Himalayas, and had devoured Chris Bonington’s, Doug Scott’s and Reinhold Messner’s mountaineering books with awe. The Himalayas were my dream mountains. The aftermath of Gareth’s death was all dreams and nightmares.
I went to the Himalayas for a single season’s trekking, but that transformed into eight years amongst those magnificent peaks. By the time I started my solo trek I had already spent five seasons in the Himalayas. My time was split between forestry work in Northern Canada from April until August and autumns and winters in the mountains of South Asia. While in India and Nepal I worked occasionally as a trekking guide, but since I made enough money from forestry most of my time was spent hiking alone, studying Buddhism and learning Hindi and Tibetan languages.
Over those years, the Himalayas developed as my sanctuary and in a quiet way walking became the means through which I could fathom my loss. Walking induces clarity; its pace and simplicity engenders contemplation. In the conscious motion of my footsteps was heightened awareness. Walking became my filter – the goodness I experienced in the Himalayas came to me from the ground up.
But after five years I saw that immersion was the only means by which I could integrate the decency I had found in the mountains. So I decided to connect the pieces of the Himalayas’ cultural and geographic jigsaw puzzle in one long, uninterrupted, solo trek. I planned a walk that would take me from the Indus River in the west to the Mahakali River in the east, from Northern Pakistan through India to the western border of Nepal.
It would be a trip through seasons, landscapes and religions. Over the course of 2,700 kilometres I would meet Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and animists; traverse jungle, desert and high alpine areas; climb to over 5,000 metres; and descend into rain forest-shrouded canyons. But most importantly the walk would let me be one-on-one with the people who make those mountains so magical.