Wilderness Wanderings:
In the mountains of the River Eternal

By Rupin Dang

The valley of the Ganga. The temple at Gangotri. And the glacial source at Gaumukh. Together, they form one of the most significant landmarks of the Indian subcontinent, not only geographically but spiritually and historically as well. To me, even more important is the wealth of mountaineering possibilities that abound here, a veritable Switzerland multiplied by ten, right here in the heart of the Indian Himalaya.

Each year, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims make their way into this valley. Most of them bus it up to Gangotri, stopping over en route at the other places of religious significance, Haridwar and Rishikesh at the edge of the foothills, and higher up in the mountains, at Uttarkashi, where they break journey for the first night. From Uttarkashi, the buses and cars wind their wet the Ganga at d villages, and through the valley of Harsil. The Ganga valley widens out just upstream of this quaint old mountain township, and Harsil has several valleys and torrents emptying into the Ganga within the distance of a few kilometers. The Deodar forests of Harsil compete closely with the fine stands of the Himalayan Cedar at Gangotri and immediately downstream. The Jalandri Gadh (Gadh  is Garhwali for stream) enters the valley just near the town and the army cantonment, while the Sian Gadh empties itself a little further downstream. Harsil town itself has, in its nineteenth century ambiance, something of the wild west, this timelessness being tempered with the gentleness of the Garhwali spirit.

The pilgrims don't stop at Harsil, and continue along the old pilgrim trail (now a tarred motor road!) to Gangotri which is the final destination for most of them. Some of the more devout and leisurely pilgrims and tourists do the entire Devbhumi  circuit, which includes pilgrimages to each of the other Char Dham destinations of Uttarakhand, the remaining ones being Yamunotri at the source of the Yamuna river, Kedarnath at the source of the Mandakini, and Badrinath at the source of the Alaknanda. The main torrent of the Ganga is the Bhagirathi, which once confluenced with the Alaknanda at Devprayag leads to the formation of the full-fledged Ganga.

Pilgrims at Gangotri pay their respects at the appropriately-sober temple (unlike the garrishly-coloured temple at Badrinath) which was built by Aman Singh Thapa, a Gorkha commander in the first decade of the nineteenth century. At about the same time, two British officers, Captains Hodgson and Herbert, discovered in 1818 that the source of the Ganga was Gaumukh, and not Mansarovar in Tibet as was earlier assumed. Gaumukh, at an altitude of 13, 800 feet, is located some twenty kilometers upstream of the temple of Gangotri. At the time of the Vedas, Gangotri is said to have been the source of the river, and hence the snout of the glacier. One cannot exactly blame the greenhouse effect and global warming for the retreat of the glacier for this has been happening since ancient times. I attribute this to the general warming up of the planet over the centuries as a late reaction to the last ice age; this is part of a Himalaya-wide phenomenon of glacial retreat.

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