The Hindu Business Line : A serpentine trail

The first time I heard of Dhakoba, it was part of work. In an interview, Surendra Chavan of Tata Motors, who ascended Mt Everest in 1998, spoke of climbing this hill’s intimidating rock face. So when Mumbai’s oldest mountaineering club, Girivihar, announced a three day-trek to the 4,148 ft high-Dhakoba and its neighbour, Durga Killa, one joined it. A minor detail was worrying — I hadn’t trekked for some time. These people trek hard. They had alread y commenced the trekking season and wanted to go up by a tough route and come down by a tougher route. Descents are difficult. Pushed beyond a point would I succumb to its not-so-elegant versions? It would be hugely embarrassing to slide down, or be unable to handle the vertigo or the granular scree that visits Sahyadri trails in the dry season. At the pre-hike meeting, they had a potential solution for it — something akin to the Karjat-Pune railway line where trains have engines at both ends!

Late October, eight of us with heavy loads on our back, trekked up the Darya Ghat trail from Ishtyechiwadi to the shoulder of Dhakoba. Failing to locate the local temple on the plateau above, we then walked on to Durga Killa for night halt. That 10 hour-trek brought us earlier than scheduled to our site of descent, the Khuntidar Ghat.

Direct and simple, like the outstretched tongue of a Hindu goddess it slipped off Durga Killa’s edge into the void; a short cut. My friends were excited. I was reminded of Shelby Tucker’s book on his walk across Burma with the Kachin Independence Army, “A shat khat”, my diary also notes, “is what the Kachins call a difficult deviation from an easy gradient.” I gazed at the trail. “Tomorrow,” it hissed, studying me with anticipation. An eagle soared blissfully in the void. If only one had wings.

Hill trails are blends of the same constituents. The easy ones meander at leisure over gentle gradients; take a pinch of the occasional gully for a quick height gain, relapse to a thoughtful ridge and on the whole, the experience will exhaust you well within scope of revival. For a decent trekker, that’s a nice way to stretch one’s legs.

The tougher trails dispense with gentle gradients and thoughtful ridges and head straight for a steep ridge or gully. They betray impatience and are, naturally, unkind to novices.

There are plenty of these stiff gullies in the Sahyadri, Darya Ghat being one of them. No room for thought on these paths; you just sink into a rhythmic ascent in a world shrunk gully-size. God knows what urgency drives man to refine this paradigm, but the Khuntidar model is a shorter version of the gully-short cut.

The trail, like a serpent slithering down from the top, made for the steep ridge below, bridging the gap between the top of the ridge and the top of the hill with zigzag lines on the rock wall. The relevant ridge from the Rampur side of Durga Killa rose to perhaps half the height of the rock wall. The serpent ruled the balance portion.

All hills on the Sidhagad-Nane Ghat stretch offer a panoramic view as they mark the plunge of the Desh plateau to the Konkan plain. I gazed at the void and imagined a perch on the rock wall. No, it wouldn’t be so tenuous, for most rock walls betray gentler gradients up close and no pathway would court the vertical.

This is a walk; a descent that bordered the realm of climbing. It was probably a similar, albeit graver, situation on UK’s Scafell that earned Samuel Taylor Coleridge the distinction of doing what the West considers, the first rock climb in August 1802.

Robert Macfarlane describes Coleridge’s edict, “Pick a mountain, any mountain. Climb to the top of it and then, instead of winding about till you find a track or other symptom of safety — instead of looking for the easy way down — wander on, and where it is first possible to descend, descend, and rely upon fortune for how far down this possibility will continue.”

Descents are hard. No wonder he got into trouble on that peak and was forced to climb down.Early next morning we eased ourselves into the short cut. The trail was extremely narrow at start with the rock wall on one side and the airiness of the void on the other. The rock faces were safer to tread.

They had man-made cuts and wooden pegs to hold while descending (hence the name Khuntidar Ghat). By the time the final ridge ended, our knees were jelly. For hours together, they had served as hinges for piston-legs. At Rampur, all of us, villagers included, strained to read the route. High on the rock face, like a suspended tear drop was the landslide we had crossed. But none could trace the full line of descent.

The serpent had simply vanished.

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