Kangchenjunga

With frictions between Alistair and Rose increasing and becoming bored with married life, an opportunity for another Himalayan adventure presented itself to Alistair Crowley.

Dr. Jules-Jacques Guillermond, a French explorer, approached Crowley with the idea of climbing Kanchenjunga, the third highest peak in the world, and claim a record for scaling a mountain never successfully ascended.

Jules Guillermond is on the left in this picture that was taken during the Kanchenjunga expedition.

Without taking the necessary time to plan and provision for the trip, on May 12, 1905, Crowley hastily boarded a ship for Calcutta.

The team grouped at Darjeeling in northern India and on August 8, set out for base camp.

One of the porters died on a treacherous series of steps cut into the ice by Crowley.

Pierre Armand privately resigned himself to the fact that the expedition would result in failure.

This is a picture taken during the Kanchenjunga expedition and Aleister Crowley is seated at center with a beard.

We three started to bring this guy down.

And it's quite technical, you know, because 50 meters below the summit of Kanchenjunga, the trend is not that easy.

And it's quite hard to bring it down.

So we three brought him down probably around 100 meters.

Far down birds called one another.

At last fell a white light on the Kanchenjunga range.

Then Mokalu appeared with an immense halo of opal back of his head.

the lower ranges as high as mont blanc put on their vesture of milk-white glory shapes and colors of stone and tree leaped into sight orchids trembled with morning dew now the sun like a lion leaped on the shoulder of the sky and the snow bastioned horizons bled with scarlet fire gond and rajah who had been awake already stood up then the latter a well-trained priest chanted the sanskrit vedic prayer to savitar the sun o thou blossom of eastern silence take thy ancient way untrodden of men go on thy dustless path of mystery reach thou the golden throne of god and be our advocate before his silence and his compassionate speechlessness the prayer frightened the eagles unaccustomed to human voices but ere they were excited to fury our little ritual was over and we hid ourselves under the stunted pine the eagles left without any breakfast looked out and scanned the sky for a sign of their parent they gazed below where flocks of parrots and jays flew small as humming-birds wild geese came trailing across the snowy peaks where they had spent the night on their journey southward soon they too grew small as beetles and melted into space hour after hour passed yet no sight of the big eagle the full-fledged eaglets felt hungrier and hungrier and began to fret in their nest we heard a quarrel going on in the interior of the eyrie which grew in intensity and noise till one of them left home in disgust and began to climb the cliff he went higher and higher up and up he walked without using his wings by now it was past midday we had luncheon yet still there was no sight of the parent birds we judged that the eagle left in the nest was the sister for she looked smaller than the other eaglet she sat facing the wind peering into the distance but she too grew downhearted strange though it may sound i have yet to see a himalayan eagle which does not sit facing the wind from the time of its birth until it learns to fly as a sailor boy might sit looking at the sea until he takes to navigating it about two in the afternoon that eagle grew tired of waiting in the nest she set out in quest of her brother who was now perching on the top of a cliff far above he too was facing the wind as his sister came up his eyes brightened he was glad not to be alone and the sight of her saved him from the melancholy thought of flying for food no eagle child have i seen being taught to fly by its parents that is why younglings will not open their wings until driven by hunger the parent eagles know this very well and that is why when their babies grow up and the time has come they leave them and go away the little sister laboriously climbed till she reached her brother's side but alas there was no room for two instead of balancing themselves on their perch the sister's weight knocked her brother almost over instantly he opened his wings wide the wind bore him up he stretched out his talons but too late to reach the ground He was at least two feet up in the air already, so he flapped his wings and rose a little higher.

So these things are still taking place, business as usual.

These include the Everest region, the Annapurna Circuit, Mustang, the Dolpo region, Kanchenjunga.

These are all open Manaslu, Dhalagiri, eastern Nepal expeditions.

They remain on schedule for the autumn season.

We know today it is referred to as Sagar Martha.

And on another point, as recently as the 1980s and 1990s, climbers Climbing Kanchenjunga in the eastern part of Nepal, western India, would stop just short, just a few feet or a few meters from the summit because the requests of the locals were, please don't stand on the summit of our god Kanchenjunga.

And so Phil Ursler, for instance, great American mountaineer who climbed Everest, one of the great American mountaineers of that era, stopped just short of the summit of Kanchenjunga out of respect for the people who lived for hundreds if not thousands of years in the shadow of Kanchenjunga.

That mountain was sacred and there are some things that are not for men to claim.

And so the world is moving in a different place now.

I asked him about the hardest thing he had ever done.

The hardest thing that I think I have ever done is the rescue of Kanchenjunga.

Normally people go and sleep at camp one and then they go to camp two, they sleep over there.

They go to camp three, they sleep over there.

The next day they go to camp four and they kind of start summit push probably around 5 or 6 p.m. on Kanchenjunga because the summit push is very long.

They do that but I wasn't doing any of that.

I was straight into the summit push in one go and I still remember you know because I used to take those snow and put under my armpit because I was falling asleep and at one point I was just shouting so loud and we went up there and we summited Kanchenjunga and on the way down literally 50 meters below the summit we found a climber, Indian climber.

He was out of his oxygen and he was basically left by his guide, by his team.

And then Everest Base Camp gets around 50,000 people a year.

So again, I was comparing it with when I did Kanchanjunga Circuit back in 2020, and that gets less than 2,000 trekkers a year.

And arguably it's a more spectacular trek, so I think if I was comparing between the two, I, I enjoyed Kanchanjunga more.

It was more spectacular.

It was quieter.

It's not somewhere where, you know, most people have heard of, but Kanchanjunga's the third-highest mountain on the planet, so it's quite impressive kinda landscape.

But it is definitely a harder trek, and yeah, probably the, as...

Manaslu would probably be a better kind of first trek for people coming to Nepal.

Actually, there are three reasons behind this.

I'm, I'm born and brought up in Kurseong, and from Kurseong, the Kanchenjunga mountain is visible from my, from my window.

Always seeing that Kanchenjunga was an inspiration for me, standing tall, standing white, inspiring people.

The tourism is blooming.

We're admiring.

So that brought me the attention towards Kanchenjunga landscape per se.

And the second one is when I was working, I was studying in class 10 and 9, I was interested more on geography.

One teacher came in class 8 and 9 and 10, and the way he taught biology also brought a lot of changes to me to bring interest towards nature, biodiversity, animals.

Like the great yogis of the Himalayas that meditate on the world to try and hold the balance.

There's some great historical, the Kanchenjunga mountain peaks used to be a 45,000 foot mountain, the largest mountain on earth that ever existed.

And when it blew in a volcanic eruption millions of years ago, it created a valley in the middle of these mountain peaks, Kanchenjunga, just outside of Darjeeling, India, in the Himalayas.

And this is where all of the great seers would go because of this intense energy.

It's one of those diamond energies of the earth, one of those meridians, those nadis of the earth.