Shipton's Lost Valley

by Martin Moran

Part I: Shipton's Lost Valley

All of a sudden the fog rolled away from us and we found ourselves looking down into the immense depths of a cloud-filled valley at our feet. The glacier descended in a steep icefall for about a thousand feet, then flattened out into a fairly level stretch of ice before it heeled over for its final colossal plunge into the gloom of the gorge six thousand feet below us. Eric Shipton (Nanda Devi 1935).

Ever since my first reading 15 years ago I had been enthralled by Shiptons account of his crossing of the Badrinath-Kedarnath watershed with Bill Tilman and three Sherpas in 1934. Their lightweight attempt to prove a direct link between these two great Hindu shrines over the mountains of the Chaukhamba range captured all I had ever regarded as romantic and daring in mountain exploration. The commitment to cross an unknown and heavily glaciated 18,000 ft pass in rank monsoon weather had an epic denouncement when they became trapped without food in dense bamboo forest on the far side. Their ensuring battle for survival, fording dangerously swollen torrents and competing with black bears for the supply of edible bamboo shoots was, to me, a model of courage and endeavor against the odds.

Yet this adventure was overshadowed by the opening of the route into the Nanda Devi sanctuary, which was the central achievement of Shipton and Tilmans 1934 Garhwal Himalayan campaign. The lovely ice spire of Nilkanth apart, there are no compelling mountains along the route of the Badrinath watershed crossing.

A personal dream to relive Shipton and Tilmans journey now seemed to have moved into the realms of the possible. The sense of history, the promise of genuine adventure and the chance to explore a pristine wilderness of exceptional ecological diversity; all these seemed, to me, irresistible lures. For where else in the Himalayan can you find a piece of country so untouched?

Yet my search for a team took a while to bear fruit. Few mountaineers want to abandon summit goals for a thrash in a jungle Eventually I was joined by John Harvey, an ex-guiding client who loved the rough life of Himalayan travel, Welsh carving enthusiasts Pete Francis and Ben Lovett and mountain guide Brede Arkless. Then three months before departure came a bolt from the blue, a call from John Shipton, Erics son. He had heard we were going; could he come along and support us? After a teaching career in several countries, John had become a contented bulb grower in rural south-west Wales. But now the bug of mountain exploration had finally bitten him. In Johns words:

I only began to study my fathers journeys in earnest in the last two years, having studiously steered my own path. But one story has always remained fixed in my memory as an image of his special form of mountaineering, gleaned not from reading his books which until recently I had managed to avoid doing, but from memories of his conversations over dinner during childhood. The climbing of a difficult col, and seeing very for below what appeared to be a paradisiacal valley, which appeared to offer rest and a gentle route back to civilisation but which turned out to be a hopelessly difficult and impenetrable jungle has become a sort of personal legend.