The Glacier and Shooter McGavin

Here's just a few photos from the Annapurna Trek so far. This first one is of Myself, Sina, Casey and Irena crossng one of the many wire bridges along the trek. We met these two hoolgans along with Livio (thanks to him for these photos) on the arduous bus ride from Kathmandu to the start of the trek. They're still putting up with us as a matter of fact!

I mentioned in the last post that I would be back with more stories. I'm not much of a story teller so I'll say agan to read Casey's blog for more details and better use of adjectves. Here now though will be a short recounting of what was possibly my favorite day on the Annapurna Circuit although technically the day was spent entirely off the trail. We took a day off to acclimatize at a small village called Manang. It was one of the more lively of the small villages we passed through and in fact boasted no less than four movie houses but more on that later. For our day "off" a few of us decided to hike up to a viewpoint that looked across to a glacier working it's way down from the Annapurnas. It was a bit of a climb and a rewarding view but being only near to a glacier seems like a tease to me and we opted to find a route to the base of it. Our guides who hiked up to the viewpoint with us seemed to dissapear shortly after we decide to push on despite the lack of any real trail. I ended up further ahead of Livio, Sina, Irena, and our new friend Nora and I suspected that they had turned back to town. That suspicion was based on the fact that I was traversing along some rather steep scree slopes, around large icefalls, through small birch forests and all with no trail to follow. There was just occasonal glimpses of the glacier ahead to keep me going the right direction. I finally worked my way there in a fashion that was going against numerous basic concepts of safety in the backcountry. Once I arrived it was pretty incredible. Sheer walls of ice standing at least 50 feet high directly above. I took some photos and started to head back to town by following the small river that was fed by the ice melt. About 15 minutes down spotted the rest of my expedition working their way up the river bed as well. I joined up with them as it started to snow and we walked back up to the base of the glacier. The picture above is of myself, nora, sina, and irena being dwarfed by the massive ice flow. We eventually worked our way back to town in a steadily growing snow fall and it was probably the second most tiring day of the whole trek.
Now back to the movie theatres of Manang. This same evening we went to one of these theaters to watch "Into Thin Air", the tragic book turned into an even more tragic made for TV movie featuring the actor who played Shooter McGavin in Happy Gilmore as the lead. The theater was a small slanted room with wooden benches lined with yak fur. There was a wood stove in the center of the room and you had the option to order popcorn which was brought out to you in a small silver bowl during the movie. It was rather surreal.
After that it was back to our guesthouse for dinner and lots of games of cards with the rest of our crew. It was a good day.