True Summit by David Roberts Page B

the valley of the Kali Gandaki toward the mountain village of Tukucha, they had noticed a savage, narrow ravine entering on the right. The natives called this chasm the Miristi Khola. The valley looked too small to offer a highway into the hidden sanctuary of Annapurna, but the climbers were given pause by the huge volume of water plunging out of the gorge. It looked to the eye as though the Miristi Khola headed against a relatively minor massif called the Nilgiris; but that torrent suggested a massive glacier at its source. The unreliable map, moreover, indicated that the Miristi Khola led straight north of Annapurna to a pass labeled the Tilicho Col. Yet when the Sherpa sirdar Ang-Tharkey questioned the locals, no one had any knowledge of either the Tilicho Col or of any path leading up the gorge.
    The lower stretches of the chasm, in any event, looked impossible to traverse. Yet on April 27, Herzog sent Schatz, Couzy, and the team doctor, Jacques Oudot, along with Ang-Tharkey and several other Sherpas off on a foray to see if they could climb to the top of the long south ridge of the Nilgiris and peer over into the Miristi Khola from partway up its course. The steep slope leading up to the ridge was covered with jungle, but the reconnoiterers found a faint path through the trees and thickets, with cairns here and there and even disused terraces. Despite local ignorance of the Miristi Khola, evidently shepherds and farmers over the years had climbed high toward the Nilgiri ridge.
    At last the party topped out in a narrow notch in the ridge. The view that greeted them was provocative and confounding. Fully 3,000 feet below, the Miristi Khola plunged through cataracts. In the distance rose Annapurna, magnificent and daunting, but of the map’s purported Tilicho Col, they could see no vestige. It looked asthough the Miristi drained at least the west face of Annapurna, and possibly the north face, but all the men could see in the form of a climbing route was a precipitous arête of rock and ice. The Northwest Spur, as the team began calling this arête, looked as though it would present a formidable challenge were it in the Alps, let alone at altitudes above 18,000 feet in the Himalaya. What was more, the men could not tell whether the top of the spur linked up with the summit snowfields of Annapurna, or simply dead-ended in yet another high ridge the map had failed to record.
    Couzy and Schatz pushed on from the notch, traversing four miles along the steep southwest shoulder of the Nilgiris. A narrow, broken ledge offered the only possible nontechnical passage, and the exposure—that 3,000-foot drop to the raging river—was giddy in the extreme. Schatz and Couzy managed to work their way down to the river, cross it, and push on to the base of the gigantic Northwest Spur. But as to whether the ravine gave access to the broad ice-fields on the north face of Annapurna—which other team members had seen from the Dhaulagiri reconnaissance, and which seemed the most likely route for an attack on Annapurna—they could not say.
    Now, at the conclusion of the May 14 “council of war,” Herzog deputed Lachenal and Terray (guided by Schatz) to lead a committed probe with porters carrying loads along this improbable route. Terray was overjoyed by this call to action, after fruitless weeks trying to sort out the range’s topography. As he set out from Tukucha, he remembered later, “I struck up a Chasseur [light infantry] song and led off, twirling my ice-axe over my head like a drum-major’s baton.” That evening, the old comrades Lachenal and Terray lay in their tent, counting up, in their amiably competitive way, the number of climbs each had made in the Alps at the level of difficulty of the Grépon or harder. Terray enumerated 157, Lachenal 151.
    On May 16, the caravan reached the crossing of the Miristi Khola. Already frightened by the vertiginous slope they had traversed on the narrow