Bikesh Deshar

Manaslu, it's beauty and desolation with the blessings and dangers to test the endurance and skills of adventurous climbers; but far better than climbing the killer mountain of the world, is going around its warm, fertile base, enjoying it's bounties like a bee circling around a bank of flowers. The distance is about a hundred miles and so, and will take some of the time, we hear so much about- a week or two- but the benefits will compensate for any number of weeks. Perhaps the profession of doing good may be full, everybody should be kind at least to himself. Take a good course of water and air, and in the eternal youth of Nature, you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you. Some have strange, morbid fears as soon as they find themselves with Nature, even in the kindest and wildest of her solitudes, like very sick children afraid of their mother—as if God were dead and the devil were king. Day 1. With the feeling of being into the wild nature for a while...

THERE is always something deeply exciting, not only in the wilderness of the forest in the mountains, which exert more or less influence over every mind, but in their varied wilderness as manifested by the change in season especially those of mountains in winter. The evergreen forest of the Phulchoki Mountain is indescribably impressive and sublime, but the native Himalayan high altitude oak trees seem to me the best interpreters of the mountain. They are mighty, ever in tune, singing and writing tree-music all their long century lives. Little, however, of these noble trees and their music will you see or hear in the strictly higher elevation of the mountain (above 2650 m). © Nirpesh Sharma I had long been looking from the city that never sleeps and at last, all draw-backs overcome, a friend of mine and I set forth on the second last day of December, 2021, on a 10 mile walk (Chapagaun-Phulchoki Summit) to the top of the valley, 2700 m above from the sea level. As it rained so heavily...