RSSSNOW LEOPARD REVISITED: Retracing the route of a biological, spiritual quest
Story and photos by DENNIS WEBB
Expect nothing.”
So a spiritual mentor advised author Peter Matthiessen before he set out 38 years ago to accompany renowned biologist George Schaller to the Dolpo region of Nepal.
Their journey became the subject of an acclaimed travel book, “The Snow Leopard.” It’s a beautiful account of Matthiessen’s quest to see a remote corner of the world and the snow leopard that lived there, while simultaneously exploring the spiritual questions rattling around his own mind. The book’s magic comes in how Matthiessen reconciles the hopes, perhaps even insuppressible expectations, of his trip with the realities of what he does and doesn’t encounter.
Last year, I had the opportunity to be a part of a trekking group that retraced the heart of the route Matthiessen and Schaller followed in northwest Nepal. We were brought together by a shared admiration for “The Snow Leopard” and a curiosity about the landscape, culture and wildlife Matthiessen described, and what might have changed in nearly four decades of time.
To varying degrees, it also seemed, several of us also were on individual quests — to celebrate the return of good health after cancer or a car wreck, to consider career options, to mull Buddhism in a Buddhist environment as Matthiessen did.
My focus was more on the trip itself. While looking forward to a unique travel opportunity, I also had an interest in it going smoothly, as I was representing my friend, Andy Crisconi, owner of Aspen-based One World Trekking, who organized our trip.
It turned out we were in good hands thanks to our local guides and support crew. About all they couldn’t do was deal with my nervousness about being weeks out of contact with my healthy-enough-but-aging parents. And while all was well with them at trip’s end, subsequent events would show my paranoia hadn’t been unwarranted.
SCHALLER’S SCIENCE
Matthiessen and Schaller went to Dolpo with the goal of reaching the tiny but religiously important settlement of Shey, where the local lama prohibited hunting. Schaller figured that would make it a good place to study blue sheep, and hopefully also spot its predator, the snow leopard.
Schaller hoped his and Matthiessen’s observations would help determine if the blue sheep was more sheep or goat (he ultimately deemed it more the latter, and likely a descendant of ancestral goats).
Schaller also went to Dolpo with the idea of doing wildlife survey work that could lead to forming a reserve. And in fact, his work culminated in the creation in 1984 of what today is the largest national park in Nepal.
A scenic highlight of the park is Phoksumdo Lake. At some 12,000 feet in elevation and three miles long, it’s hemmed in by steep mountains. A cliff-hanging trail around part of it, improved in recent years but harrowingly described by Matthiessen, is the setting for a memorable nail-biting scene in the Oscar-nominated 1999 French film “Himalaya.” The movie was filmed in Dolpo using as actors talented local residents, some of whom we met on our trip.
The lake’s most striking feature is the turquoise color resulting from its glacial waters. That color carries over to the Suli Gad River below it, about which Matthiessen mused, “I wonder if anywhere on earth than there is a river more beautiful than the upper Suli Gad in early fall.” In part he was entranced by the river’s waterfall below the lake, which at 1,000 feet is the highest falls in Nepal.
Just hiking to the lake took us a few days of following the Suli Gad. Following Matthiessen’s Dolpo route took some three weeks and involved sometimes camping above 15,000 feet, and climbing over several passes of 16,000 feet or higher as we crossed the Himalayas to reach and return from the more arid Tibetan Plateau.
We traveled in September; Matthiessen and Schaller visited later in the fall, causing them concern about crossing such high passes in snow. Adding to Dolpo’s inaccessibility over the decades is its location on the Tibetan border. After the Chinese invaded Tibet, rebels staged out of parts of northern Nepal, turning Dolpo and other regions into politically sensitive areas that at times were closed to outsiders. One Dolpo closure occurred within a year of Schaller and Matthiessen’s visit.
DOLPO TODAY
Commercial trekking trips in Dolpo now are starting to grow in popularity. Visitors to the Upper Dolpo region near the border can witness a Tibetan-oriented culture that Matthiessen and Schaller compared to stepping back a century in time.
Monasteries abound in a region marked by a mix of Buddhism and an older religion known as B’on. Families can be seen in fields harvesting barley and other crops by hand. Goods are transported on ancient trade routes on foot or by leading trains of yaks or other animals.
But signs of modern times are increasing, such as small solar panels to light rudimentary homes at night, some residents in western wear, and occasional litter even in places such as the pilgrimage route around Crystal Mountain by Shey.
In the slightly more developed Lower Dolpo, even Buddhist monks can be seen holding cellphones to their ears. There was no cell service in Upper Dolpo, but in the village of Saldang, just a day’s walk from the Tibetan border, the parts of a communications tower sat last fall, waiting to be erected.
Such signs disturb some western visitors, the way they also are bothered by a road being built around much of Nepal’s famed Annapurna Circuit trekking route.
Despite the cultural shifts such developments represent — and their potential threat to tourism — it’s hard to begrudge the locals access to easier transportation or communication.
Viewing Saldang’s coming communications revolution from the perspective of my friend’s trekking company, I envisioned the ability to quickly reach the outside world in an emergency. Or, thinking of my situation, it could allow a trekker to learn if a parent had had an unforeseen health problem requiring an immediate return home.
While that turned out not to be the case for me, in fact I did find myself coping with the unexpected loss of my dad just two months later.
Suddenly I found myself more closely relating to Matthiessen in “The Snow Leopard,” when as a middle-aged man he pondered his wife’s recent death and his own mortality. Inspecting his brown, wrinkled hands, he wrote that he saw “the old hands of my father. Simultaneously, I am myself, the child I was, the old man I will be.”
“IT’S QUITE ENOUGH!”
Matthiessen never saw the snow leopard. Schaller got a fleeting glimpse of one near Phoksumdo Lake after Matthiessen already had headed home earlier by another route.
We saw tracks and scat that we liked to think may have belonged to the elusive creature. But we had expected nothing when it came to the prospect of seeing one, and weren’t disappointed.
In that respect, maybe I’d learned something from the lessons about leopards, and life, and loss that Matthiessen learns and shares in “The Snow Leopard.”
At one point, the lama of the Crystal Monastery at Shey embraces the fact that his lame legs have kept him for eight years in an isolated place that he may never leave:
“Of course I am happy here! It’s wonderful! Especially when I have no choice!”
Applying the logic to his trip, Matthiessen then thinks back on all that he — like we — had seen, from blue sheep to Crystal Mountain, and concludes, “it’s quite enough!”
Zen-like, he then thinks to himself:
“Have you seen the snow leopard?”
“No. Isn’t that wonderful?”
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