Himalayan Portfolios

THE LARGE FORMAT CHOICE

2012-01-25T18:24:00.000-08:00

CLIMB MAGAZINE

THE PHOTOGRAPHIC ISSUE February 2012

The best images from the world’s leading climbing photographers

Greenshires Publishing, Leicester, UK
http://www.climbmagazine.com/

This issue contains a collection of photographs that are mostly of spectacular ice and rock face ascents. There are also five articles by climbing photographers discussing their priorities and successes. From the early days of rock climbing climbers and photographers have interacted and shared their activities. David Pickford, the editor of the volume, remarks: Climbs and photographs enable us to imagine the world differently.

Although the work shown emphasizes the climbers, the world seen from a climb is beautifully illustrated by a near 180 degree panorama taken from Glyder Fach in the Ogwen Valley, North Wales by David Simmonite. There are wisps of cloud. There is the rich green of the treeless moorland. An ice-scooped tarn lies close to the edge of a hanging valley and a stony trail leads from the valley below, up from the exposed edge of the tarn and swings rightwards to rocky outcrops and a high shoulder as if it would skirt the exposure of the greater heights in making its way to another valley. In the far distance there is a trace of light that could be the sea.

Gearing Up by Tom Richardson
Cameras for Climbers, pp 68-71

In addition to the above pictures and essays, Tom Richardson, a mountaineer, photographer, trek leader and forthcoming author of a memoir Judgment Days, has provided a section on the different choices of cameras and equipment to be encountered in this rapidly changing world. By way of illustration, he devotes paragraphs to four persons: Tom himself, James Thacker, David Pickford and me. The last paragraph is as follows:

KEN
HANSON

A retired research biochemist, mountaineer, and published photographer, Ken’s choice of photographic equipment may not be to everyone’s taste, but there is no doubt that he can produce beautiful results. Ken began mountaineering when he retired and during a dozen trips to the Himalayas captured them using an old fashioned basic Toyo 4 x 5 view camera (ABOVE TOP) with a black fabric hood – the camera mounted on a sturdy wooden tripod. You can’t get much further away from today’s point and shoot cameras, but patience is a virtue in photography and Ken’s results are simply breathtaking. Check out the pictures in his book Himalayan Portfolios – Journeys of the Imagination to see the results for yourself. Link■

To read this was a great surprise!

ALSO, ANOTHER JOURNAL

VOLUME 30, # 1-2. Published October 2011

Limbu Woman, Taplejung District, Eastern Nepal. Kenneth Hanson

Photograph page 2 (facing the Editorial Page)

The Long Silence

2011-12-25T09:46:00.000-08:00

A Season for Communication

With all good wishes for Christmas and the New Year

Turkey and Iran

This blog has been seriously neglected for many months. The main reason has been travel to Eastern Turkey in July and to Iran in September. Trying to digest this visual, cultural and political material since we returned has been a major task. Months and millennia have passed by in a fine confusion. A major reflection on these travels must wait until a later blog. Here it is enough to say that the two countries display very different ways in which Islamic cultures are responding to the modern world. This experience extends the observations we made last year in Tajikistan on the Afghan border and my earlier experiences of Baltistan in Pakistan.

Greg Mortenson / Journey of Hope

A major concern of my last blog was the catastrophic attack on Greg Mortenson and the Central Asia Institute by CBS 60 Minutes. Although many of the derogatory items on that program were effectively challenged, the program was rerun without any changes a few months ago. The most important message at present is that the work of the CAI goes on and that a new edition of the annual report Journey of Hope V is being distributed. It is available On Line.

Greg has been recovering from heart surgery and was well enough in November to visit the Badakhshan region that overlaps Tajikistan and Afghanistan. He has written a report of this visit in Journey of Hope V. There is an enormous advantage in concentrating CAI efforts in this are because of its relative accessibility. It is also the one area where outside observers, even tourists, can see the results and if necessary criticize. Given the political situations in Pakistan only a few dedicated mountaineers are likely to visit new CAI developments in Baltistan. As to much of Afghanistan, there are few adventurous travelers to act as observers. However the CAI has at last recognized the need for a public data base recording its efforts and has provided a list of all the places it has provided assistance-Link.http://www.ikat.org/projects/ The need extends beyond schools. As Greg notes, Badakhshan has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world (6% of live births lead to the death of the mother.) Most importantly, the need for monitored continuity has been recognized. So many NGO project start off with an expensive flourish and then plans change and the school or clinic becomes an abandoned relic used to store fodder. Money easily gets diverted from its intended destination. Local forces try to extract protection money.

Greg has been advised by his legal advisors not to give promotional talks until various legal matters have been sorted out. I think this is very wise. It is very sad that Greg proved to be so naive in handling money matters; however, the general structure of the CAI had to change. The original concept of a few projects with personal involvement by Greg had been long outgrown. The new structure needs to find a role for Greg other than super fund raiser. The one clear negative in the present situation is that there are still only two others beside Greg on the Board of Directors. It is planned to expand this number.

Take a look at the Journey of Hope report.

Tajikistan and the High Pamirs

A new edition of this superb Guide by Robert Middleton and Huw Thomas has just been published. I will comment on this in a later blog.

Pamirs Web Site Link

Greg Mortenson and 60 Minutes

2011-05-04T11:13:00.000-07:00

The Vunarability of Greg Mortenson

Anyone likely to stumble on this blog has probably already heard about the CBS 60 Minutes’ attack on Greg Mortenson and the Central Asia Institute (CAI). As Greg was kind enough to write a foreword to my book Himalayan Portfolios; Journeys of the Imagination I owe it to him to try and provide my own perspective on this disaster.

The Foreword. My interest in Greg's work goes back to an encounter in 2001 with one of his earliest schools in Pakistan. The school was at Hushe, the jumping off point for my trek to the K2 area. In October of 2006 I asked Greg to write a foreword. At that time the CAI was beginning to grow but Three Cups of Tea had not yet hit the mass market. Greg immediately responded with enthusiasm and gave me an outline of his linkage to the mountain photography of Barry Bishop, the father of his wife, Tara. The foreword that emerged (after several months) combined the story of the building of the bridge across the Braldu River and the creation of the first school at Korphe with his photographic interest. My book contains a picture of the turbulent, churning, exploding waters of the Braldu River taken on my first Pakistan trip — 1994, the year before the bridge was built. In conclusion Greg described my book as “a tribute to the mountains we both cherish” and a “source of restoration and hope.”

Inside the government school at Hushe

The Impending Crash. I met Greg briefly in 2008 and then in New York at the 2009 Book Fair (an unbelievable zoo), and later that year talked to his staff at the Banff Mountain Book Festival. It was evident that to keep the fund raising going he has been ignoring health problems. There had been a recent stay in a hospital. I wrote urging him to not let the new book overwhelm him and to pace himself for the long term future. Others had made the same argument. But he was faced with the urgency of the times and the strange nature of the book selling business in which everything depends on a short seasonal time frame. Book selling was his basic way to solicit funds for the CAI. He did not let up on his unbelievably full schedule. I expected a crash. As it tuned out his deteriorating health was just a part of the disaster. As of now he is being stabilized in the expectation of heart surgery.

The heavy load of talk, travel and interviews must have left little time for long term planning. As I saw it, there was a need for an anthropological record of what had been achieved to aid future planning and an accessible data base of schools. Each school was a experiment in a new cultural context but based on the same premise (I wrote to him about that and cited the work of my friend Dick Salisbury who had created a data base of climbing expeditions in Nepal "Himalaya by the Numbers".) I worried about Greg’s move from the relative uniformity of Baltistan into the ethnic and cultural mix up of Afghanistan. His work must encounter constantly shifting political agendas, people who have reconstructed their past histories, and experts at diverting NGO funds to their own pockets. The CAI was changing into a bigger organization that could not be expected to work with the one-man-band approach that had been so successful in the beginning. Greg’s role needed to be redefined.

Greg's Finances. The 60 Minuite program makes a number of charges, including the claim that Greg’s finances and the money donated to the CAI have become mixed in a bewildering way. On this I have no information. Knowing his schedule, I can well believe that finances exploded in ways that were beyond the competence of the CAI and Greg to handle. The problems are like and unlike those that arise when a star college professor writes a highly successful text book or develops a patentable product. In such cases there are the precedents of custom plus a history of legal opinions and IRS rulings that provide guidelines as to where the money raised should go. In Greg’s case the mixture is unique. I can only express my firm belief in Greg’s dedication. I am totally unconvinced that personal gain was a motive. However, the characteristics that make for success in building schools in remote areas are probably not those appropriate for financial management. I can only hope that a panel of friends and experts will resolve this matter with the CAI and present their solution in a way that can be easily understood by the public.

Fictionalization: The other main charge against him was that to a significant extent he had faked the stories in the book. I was completely baffled. It was said that he had not even been in Korphe in 1993. This did not make sense. Before the bridge was built there was only a cable linked the village to the main trail to Askole. There was no possible reason why Greg or any Westerner would visit the village. The account given in the book explains his encounter. On his way back from K2, debilitated and utterly exhausted, he failed to take the turn to Askole. That is to say, he continued onwards instead of turning right to reach the bridge across the turbulent Braldu River and to follow the right side of the Braldu to Askole. (Korphe is on the left side of the Braldu.) Going the other way towards K2 the branch towards Korphe would be passed without attention by a traveler walking as part of a group. Having followed the main route from K2 to Askole myself, I can attest that for a lone walker this error was completely possible. I have made such trail errors many times. In 1994 on the way to the Biafo Glacier we continued on the Askole side of the river, but I remember the other side of the river in 2001 as being a flat plain with few distinguishing marks except for some large climbing boulders that were probably near the bridge. If the area floods in some years the trail probably gets wiped out from time to time so the present markings would not be a guide to the situation in 1993.

In an interview with David Heald, Editor of Outside Magazine, Greg has affirmed that this mistake over the trail did happen in 1993, but he admitted that he was only a few hours in Korphe, not overnight as it says in the book. This was enough to see the poverty of the place and to realize that the health and education of the villagers was of no interest to the government. If he had not observed this neglect, why would he have returned? However, the main events in the book concerning the promise to build a school took place the next year. He reached Askole by way of the cable, met up with his fellow climber and they both continued to Skardu and the K2 Motel and from there to the USA. He admits that he did not then return to Korphe that year as it says in the book, but the following year. I assume the account of building of the bridge to replace the cable in 1995, thanks to Horni’s funding, is essentially correct.

Why? Greg claims that the fictionalization was driven by the need for compression. I conjecture that there was a draft that gave the visit as brief and placed the promise to build a school in the next year but the narrative became so involved that the text was re-cut. Greg claims the essential facts were preserved. (The question as to who suggested the departures from the truth — whether the Viking-Penguin editor, his co-author Relin or Greg himself — is irrelevant.) Bio-Pics, such as Gandhi, do this sort of fixing all the time to provide a coherent story and no one worries. Travel books, from Marco Polo onwards, and autobiographies are often loose with the facts. But, as a scientist I have difficulties: I have a gut horror of invented data. News reporters claim to meet higher standards. Journalists may omit some facts as irrelevant and they tend to seek out representative cases and voices to give shape to their story, but if they fabricate the roof blows off. The authors invoked this standard for Three Cups of Tea when they presented the story as reported by Relin. Why did they then depart from the journalism standard?

The Message. A Pakstani novelist, Bapsi Sidhwa, has argued that Greg made the right choice: artistic truth trumps literal truth. As a landscape photographer I can understand this argument. A black and white photograph is by its nature a representation that requires considerable artistic judgment in printing. My interpretation, however, is a little different. I believe that Greg saw the book as a means of communicating a message rather than as a work of biographical art. This left him vulnerable to making a most unfortunate mistake. Extreme examples of the dramatization of a message are the New Testament gospels. They are inseparable from an evolving Jewish typology. The more powerful the typology, the more the temptation to manipulate. And Greg’s typology is powerful and urgent. If it were not so he would not have maintained his punishing schedule year after year. The grievous error was in not realizing that communicating the truth of the message depended on the truth of the narrative. The reason the book became a best seller is because the message that peace could be brought to a devastated world through the education of girls and women was accepted. The virulent response once the 60 Minutes program was aired is because, in part, people feel betrayed by the departure from the truth.

The question has been raised about the number of schools created and some failures and miscalculations have been cited, but there is plenty of evidence that schools do exist and that successes have been achieved. As Nicholas Kristof wrote in the New York Times. “The furor over Greg’s work breaks my heart.”….“But let us not forget that even if all the allegations turn out to be true, Greg has still built more schools and transformed more children’s lives than you or I ever will.”

Greg is not the first pioneer who has been damaged by his own idealism. As he tries to pick up the pieces after his surgery and work out a considered response to events I hope he will be able to follow his own words in the foreword to my book and turn to the mountains as “a source of restoration and hope.”

PS.

Sales Report. Three Cups of Tea, as of May 8, is #24 on the New York Times extended paperback non fiction list. It was #17. It would seem that the general public may have a better take on the crisis than the media commentators, most of whom have no direct experience of the complications of working in the villages of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Updates: There have been significant developments in the CAI during the last year. The ikat.com site of the CAI has provided an updated picture as a Journey of Hope supplement. One interesting development is the cooperation with other NGO aid agencies concerned with education, including the Agha Khan Development Foundation mentioned in my last Blog. Various setbacks are motioned and the site includes responses to recent criticisms.

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CBS 60 Minutes: Story
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhAb37yZ0o0&feature=youtu.be

Bozman Chronicle: Story
http://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/news/article_4d3125cc-67d7-11e0-b861-001cc4c002e0.html

Outside Magazine: Interview with Mortenson by Alex Heard, editor.
http://outsideonline.com/adventure/travel-ga-greg-mortenson-interview-sidwcmdev_155690.html?page=6

CNN: Interview with Alex Heard, Peter Bergan, Nikolas Kristof
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2011/04/18/exp.ac.mortenson.controversy.panel.cnn?iref=allsearch

New York Times: Story: Edward Wong on the Wakhan Corridor. “Two schools in Afghanistan, One Complicated Situation. “
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/24/weekinreview/24mortenson.html

Dawn: Article by Bapsi Sidhwa: “I stand by Three Cups of Tea” (Dawn is a Pakistan newspaper)
http://www.dawn.com/2011/05/01/i-stand-by-three-cups.html

New York Times: Op Ed: Nikolas Kristof. “Three Cups of Tea’ Spilled”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/opinion/21kristof.html

Mortenson’s Medical Condition: doctors report
http://www.ikat.org/wp-includes/documents/CAI5-2-11-Release.pdf

Shadows of the Great Game. Part 3

2010-11-03T13:33:00.000-07:00

FOLLOWING THE AFGHAN BORDER

Yellow Area: Wakhan Corridor set up in 1895 to separate Russian and British spheres of influence. Visited by Marco Polo in 1274.
Orange line: Our route, Pamir Highway and detour south.
Yellow line: Karakoram Highway.
A, Alichor; B, Bozai Gumbaz; F, Faizabad, I/I, Ishkashim/Ishkoshim; K, Kalaikhum; L, Langar; S, Sarhad (near Broghil Pass).

We made contact with the Wakhan Corridor when we followed the Pamir River to its confluence with the Wakhan River. At the point where the two rivers join to form the Pyanj River the elevation is about 9,500 ft above sea level. By the time the southernmost point in the river is reached the level is about 800 ft lower. For most of this section the river is broad and there are in many places islands used for grazing. This turning point is the end of the Wakhan corridor appendage to Afghanistan.The road follows the Pyanj River due north. As it flows north the river becomes more turbulent because the valley narrows and the level drops some 4,700 ft. Before the river swings to the southwest it takes a Z detour through a narrow gorge with near vertical walls. The photograph shows a trail along the Afghan side of the gorge. On the Tajik side the road in many places has been blasted out of the cliff face. At Kalaikhum (1,200m/3,934ft) we left the border and the river to climb over a high grassy plateau region and eventually reached our final destination Duschanbe.

In the wider valley before the northward turn the main drama is the view of the major peaks of the Hindu Kush. These define the Afghan-Pakistan border and appear as a line of white in Satalite phtographs. They are not much more than 12 miles away and several of the peaks are over 7,000 m. Of these Nashaq Peak (7429m/24580ft), first climbed in 1960, is the highest peak in Afganistan and the third highest in the Hindu Kush. The observed elevation from river level is about 15,800 ft. The slightly higher Tirich Mir (7,709m/25,292ft), whose importance goes back to the early days of Himalayan climbing, is further away and may not be visible, or if it is visible it appers as a lesser peak. On the Afghan side of the river the main peaks are Marx (6,732m) and Engels (6,507m).

The Bridge Not Crossed. At Ishkoshim on the Pyanj River there is a bridge and border crossing to Ishkashim in Afghanistan. The bridge was opened in 2006, thanks to the support of the Agha Kahn foundation. There is a major contrast between the two sides of the river. In Soviet times the Tajik side of the river was developed as a resort area, thanks to the presence of hot springs and the dramatic scenery. Hydropower supports local industry. The Afghan side has been a largely forgotten region. The better agricultural land is limited and in places there is only subsistence farming. Both sides of the river have a reputation for drug smuggling and there is also an illegal trade in gemstones such as rubies. On the Afghan side there is a road through the mountains to Faizabad, the capital of Badakhshan province. It is situated in the only major valley that crosses the main north-south mountain chain. This junction town was a military center during the Soviet occupation. A road to the east from Ishkashim provides access to the Corridor but it comes to an end at Sarhad (10,112 ft.) Up to this point the road passes small Tajik-speaking farming settlements. Beyond Sarhad there is a deep river gorge and a steep ascent. Transport of goods requires pack animals, notably yaks. Eventually a high rich grassland area is reached inhabited by Turkic speaking Kyrgyz herders living in Yurts. Here at about 12,500 ft is Bozai Gumbaz, a historic place of meeting. Although we only viewed the western end of the Wakhan Corridor, its importance in the Great Game, past and future, requires comment.

The Gibraltar of the Hindu Kush. In Part 1 in discussing the consulate at Kashgar I noted that in 1891 Francis Yonghusband, on his way back to Gilgit from a grim winter of diplomatic isolation in Kashgar, made a detour over the broad Wakhjir Pass (4,847m/15,836ft) and to his surprise encountered Russian Cossacks. He was informed that this was Russian territory and politely ordered to leave. Cables were sent back and forth between Simla and London. In London Lord Rosebery, shortly to become Foreign Secretary, declared: “Bozai Gumbaz is the Gibraltar of the Hindu Kush.” There was no backing down. Gurkha troops were sent to Bozai Gumbaz from Gilgit and Younghusband, with his added troops, sat out the crisis on the Wakhan side of the passes through the Hindu Kush to India. (See Patrick French, Younghusband. 1994; Chs 6, 7.)

The Cradle of Our Race. The next major player in the Great Game was Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India from 1898-1904. He hsd become deeply suspicious of Russia’s motives while traveled extensively on Russia railways and in Afghanistan. There was however diplomatic progress. In 1893 the Durand line was drawn to establish the border of Afghanistan with India (still a festering issue.) In1894 Curzon probed the boundary by crossing the Wakhjir Pass, with permission from Kabul. He probably wanted to find out what in practice Russia was doing, but he took the opportunity to investigate the source of the Oxus. A river “believed to have rocked the cradle of our race.” He settled as the source a glacier towards the Hindu Kush that feeds the upper Ab-i-Wakhan River. By this choice he discounted Lake Victoria on the Pamir River, mentioned above, and also the Chakmak lake area that feeds the Murghab River. His account in the Geographic Journal (Aug and Sept 1898) led to a gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society.

The Innermost Heart of Central Asia. In the Soviet era the Russians seem to have accepted the Wakhan boundaries, however the source of the Oxus was still of interest in the postwar World War II period. In 1948 the noted climber Bill Tilman left the British Consulate in Kashgar, after indulging in a little climbing with the outgoing consul Eric Shipton. He aimed to brighten up the travel to Gilgit by detouring from China into the Wakhan valley by the Wakhjir Pass and exit by a pass through the Hindu Kush. On the Oxus question he wrote: “Speaking as a Mountaineer, the only fit and proper birthplace for this mighty river of most ancient fame is the ice-cave…at the innermost heart of Central Asia.” Unfortunately he trusted in the remoteness of the area and did not worry about Afghan intransigence. He was arrested and imprisoned as a spy by the local authorities. He was eventually escorted to a high and inconvenient border pass and discharged into the newly created Pakistan – minus his notebooks and passport. (See W. H. Tilman. Two Mountains and a River. 1949. Ch 13,14, 15. Tillman is my source for the Curzon visit.)

Stones into Schools. Despite these endorsements Bozai Gumbaz, the Yurt settlement, had been off the political map until it was mentioned by Greg Mortenson at the end of Three Cups of Tea. Its symbolic importance forms the basic narrative of his second book Stones into Schools (2010), now in paperback. Some photographs of these schools are included in a recent New York Times article by Edward Wong. (Oct 28, 2010. Wakhan Corridor Journal.) In the new book Mortenson relates how a promise to the local Kahn was fulfilled. His organization The Central Asia Institute has managed to create 21 schools in the region between Faizabad and Sarhad. Bozai Gumbaz, however, was almost a ‘bridge too far.’ Eventually cement and rebars were driven by truck from Khorog by the Pamir Highway to Murgab and then overland to cross the Afghan border north of Bozai Gumbaz. From the trail end 43 local yaks were used to take the loads to the building site. Less weighty goods were brought from Sarhad. Experienced masons and carpenters that had crossed the Irshad Pass from Pakistan directed the building of the foundation by the local Kyrgyz. The impossible was finished, thanks to the local commitment and the vision of their leader Abdul Rashid Khan, on September 28, 2009.

The Next Chapter in the Great Game; Enter China. The players in the Great Game have changed. China has adopted the role played by Russia in the time of Lord Curzon. The Russians built railways; the Chinese have built roads and railways in the most forbidding terrains. Their ‘forward policy’ has been to reach out across borders, as in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. I have twice traveled the Karakoram Highway in Pakistan and in 2003 I descended the road to the Kathmandu valley that links the Tibetan plateau to Nepal. Internally the highway and rail linkages are being steadily expanded. The high altitude railway to Lhasa is an example and the main motivation is probably the shipment of minerals. A New York Times article by Andrew Jacobs (Kashgar Journal Nov 15, 2010) that describes the massive building program in Kashgar notes the intended extension of the railroad system to Kashgar. In 2008 China signed a $3 billion mining agreement with Afghanistan that grants them a 30 year lease on copper mining. The proposal is to build Afghanistan’s first railroad. It would, I assume, run through either the Panjir valley and over a high pass or via Faizerbad to reach the Wakhan Corridor and then over the mountains to Kashgar. Expect Bozai Gombaz to be an exotic railroad stopping point with a bright pink hotel resembling the one near the Rongbuck Monastery near to Everest.

Given such economic leverage, China can expect to be a major player in the future of Afghanistan. However it will not be the only economic player. 2008 India completed a road connecting the Iranian container port of Chahbahar to northern Afghanistan and Central Asia. (See Thomas Barfield. Afghanistan; a Cultural and Political History. 2010. Princeton UP. p 346, p 344 )

The Mes Aynak Mine. The copper that the China Metallurgical Group Corp plans to mine happens to be beneath a major Buddhist site 40 km to the southeast of Kabul. The site has seven stupas and a great numbers of statues. The complex was evidently a key center in the transmission of Buddhism between the first and seventh centuries CE, akin to Taxilla in Pakistan. The Chinese have given archeologist a three year window before they start to blow up the ruins. Because of political instability and low funding Archeologists estimate that it is at least a ten year task. An article in Science states that only Karzai can stop the destruction (Vol 329, 30 July 2010.)

Breakfast at Khorog
Our brief say at Khorog, the capital of the large eastern Gorno-Badakhshan egional, provided a morning when there was no immediate departure. It was a moment to review, to ask the question: What had we not expected? As tourists it was easy to see only the wonderful setting. There was a pleasant garden with a view across the river. To the left was the confluence with the Gunt Rriver, to the right the new suspension bridge to Afghanistan. But what were we not seeing?

Our first surprise; The Russian Influence: both Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are still firmly bound to Russia. The normal post-Regan narrative in the USA is that these former components of the USSR remembered the Soviets as oppressors. But the separation was in 1991 and the pain of most of those who suffered has died with them. The next generation remembers the Soviet period as providing work and economic stability. With separation the factories closed. Now large numbers have to travel to Russia to find employment and the remittances sent home are an essential part of their economies. Russian is still the necessary common language of the region. The USA ships almost half its essential military supplies to Afghanistan via air from Bishkek and by road from western Tajikistan, but, in general, it keeps as low a profile as possible and provides some cultural support.

The economic condition of Tajikistan has not been helped by the civil war that began in 1992 a year spurred on by Islamic beliefs and clan loyalties. The Pamir region starved in 1992-3 as the result of a blockade. Russian troops moved back to the Afghan border. A cease fire in 1996 and a peace agreement in June of 1997 left Tajikistan one of the poorest countries in the world. As might be expected, the drug trade flourishes.

Our second surprise; the Pamiri Culture: In all this turmoil the distinctive Pamiri culture has survived. The Pamiris, mainly Nizari-Ismaili Muslims, are located on both sides of the Pyanj River. The treaty establishing the Afghan-Russian border that was signed by Russia and Britain on February 25, 1895 left the Pamiri community divided. The cultural, ethnic and religious contacts between the two sides of the river were maintained until 1936 when the USSR closed the Tajik-Afghan border but contact has resumed in recent years. The culture on the Tajik side must have been influenced by the Russian presence.

This culture we glimpsed while visiting Langar, Yamg and Khorog, The above picture is of performer in a folk music event at Yamg. The hats are signatures of that particular village.

Permission to photograph women in many Muslim countries is normally refused but here everyone was delighted to be photographed — old and young, male and female. The above photo is of a holiday gathering at Langar. Head scarves for women seemed to be optional.

Women shopping at the Afghan market near the Khorog bridge. Afghan selling boots.

The Ismaili Muslims require some explanation as from the US perspective they have a very low profile. The Ismalis are a branch of Shia Islam that separated over a dispute about the choice of the seventh Imam in the family line from Mohammed. They are often known as Seveners and they were once the main branch. The Imam line for the other branch came to an end with the 12th Imam, hence they are known as Twelvers. For the Nizari-Ismailis the present Imam is the 49th: the Agha Kahn IV. The twelvers, now the majority, tend to be legalistic and text directed; they are often associated with large cities. The Nizari-Ismalis, Seveners, are more mystical and have linkages to the Sufi tradition. That has made them the particular target of traditionalist Suni Muslims. From the point of view of many Suni and Shia Muslims the Ismalis are at best deluded and at worst heretical. One can compare their situation to that of the Samaritans in the first century CE who had their own Torah and their own temple on Mount Gerizim in Samaria and claimed to be of the true Abrahmic line. The Ismailis do not go in for mosques; we saw none. We did see family devotional centers. In general the Ismailis have been pushed into the more remote areas. I encountered them in the Hunza valley in Pakistan.

The importance of family traditions was shown to us by a visit to the Mubarak Kadam Wakhani museum and center built inYamg by relatives. He is described as a Sufi Sage and mystic who lived from 1843-1903. The museum is built on family ground next to a small building that has been his work and study place. The above photograph shows to the left the custodian, the driving force in the enterprise, and his cousin who was there to read some of Mubarak’s poetry. In addition to the poetry, that reminded me a little of Rabindranath Tagore in its universalism (but it draws on mystic Shia Muslim traditions about Ali.) He wrote songs, commentaries on the Koran and devised a solar devotional calendar.

The Agha Kahn Foundation and the Agha Kahn Development Network have been of enormous importance to the Pamiri community. Money from the foundation helped keep the area from starvation during the civil war. The bridges at Iskashim and Khorog and Darwaz, built with the help of the Foundation, have allowed contact between the Pamiris on both sides of the river to be renewed. On the Tajik side schools and hospitals have been built. Khorog has been provided with a well tended tree-covered park next to the river. The contribution that impressed us most was the University of Central Asia that was started in 1994 and funded by the Foundation. We were shown the plans drawn up by an award winning Japanese architect, for an impressive larger Khorog campus. But the aims of the university is to be trans-national. The Network supports three branches: at Khorog in Tajikistan, at Naryin in Kyrgyzstan and at Tekeli in Kazakhstan. There are connections to Karakoram International University in Gilgit-Hunza, Pakistan, and a school in Faizerbad in Afghanistan (built with US aid.) The basic aim of this university movement is to address the problems of mountain communities. Childhood education is enormously important for all the reasons that Greg Mortenson has spelled out, but the danger is that the impact of rural education will be diminished because it serves to provide a means for the young to leave. Sustainable mountain communities need the commitment of the educated to local economic and environmental problems.

But what of the Afghan side of the river? How is the future of the mountainous Badakhshan Province tied to the fate of Afghanistan as a whole? The linkage of the University of Central Asian to Faizabad and the schools built by the Central Asia Institute suggests one possibility: an empowered Pamiri culture could help create a Badakhshan with some sort of responsible autonomy within Afghanistan. The Soviet regime, the Taliban and US policy have all emphasized a strong central controlling government— a typical nation state. The present centralized self-serving and corrupt Pashtun-dominated government in Kabul seems to be fatally flawed. Sooner or later it could collapse in all out war, or there could be a blending of the Pashtun with the Taliban. Given past brutality, there is no evident way such a combination can be reconciled with the Pamiri culture. A measure of separation seems essential. Perhaps education can help bring this about.

The present situation is by no means stable. While we were in Tajikistan a Taliban group killed 10 medical aid workers in the Badakhshan Mountains. The latest Journey of Hope from Greg Mortenson's organization reports on the way in which small bands of Taliban from Pakistan attacking the adjacent Nuristan region have created floods of refugees into Badakshan. If civil war breaks out when the US leaves that flood will only increase.

As to the place of education: A letter just received by my wife (Betty) from a former student from Pakistan described his summer visiting his family, wandering in the Hindu Kush, locating Sufi shrines and taking a university course. He writes: “The course on Allama Iqbal's Urdu poetry was a treat in its own.” … “Though things [in Pakistan] look really bad and sound even worse, I have my hopes pinned on the students studying in the universities. They are very passionate and want to see Pakistan prosper and they are willing to work hard and smart for it. I could sense the frustration these kids had with the current state of affairs. I understand that action is harder than just talking but a lot of students have taken the initiative to improve their worlds in their own way and I can see the rest following soon. Honestly it is hard to explain but it was very encouraging to spend a couple of months in the university.”

May we also be encouraged.

SOURCES

Edward Wong New York Times Oct 28, 2010 Wakhan Corridor Journal.

Andrew Jacob, Kashgar Journal, New York Times Nov 15, 2010. Kashgar Journal

Journey of Hope 2010, Vol IV. Jaskol and Ronnow. Just issued by the Central Asia Institute.

(This has phtographs of the Ishkashim school.)

Middleton Pamir Blog.

Thomas Barfield: Political Legitimacy in the Land of the Hindu Kush.Posted summary of Lecture May 23, 2010.

TRIP

Our trip was organized by MIR of Seattle, USA.

Our excellent guide was Yura Kim of Bukhara, Uzbekistan.

CURIOUS EVENT.
Betty and I attended the above Barfield Lecture at Yale in May. It had been enthusiastically organized by two students: Anna Kellar and Mari Oye. We talked to them afterwards. At Yamg on August 12 as we were waiting for lunch what should happen but that the same two enterprising students walked into the guest house. Tajikistan was providing them with the chance to use their Yale studied Farsi (the Tajik language is a form of Persian.) Anna's perspective on her trip is contained in her blog for August 2010. (Also, check out the watermellon song. )

Shadows of the Great Game, Part 2

2010-10-28T14:27:00.000-07:00

Pamir Highway:

Journey to the Tajik-Afghan border.

The Pamir Highway runs from Osh in Kyrgyzstan to Khorog in Tajikistan. Osh, close to the jigsaw-designed border with Uzbekistan, was the site of a politically manipulated conflict between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks earlier this year. Khorog, the capital of the autonomous Gorno-Badakhshan region that comprises eastern Tajikistan, is at the junction of the Gunt River and the Panj River. The latter defines the border with Afghanistan. We joined the Pamir Highway at Sary Tash in the Alay Valley of Kyrgyzstan having reached there from the Chinese border 50 miles away (the Irkeshtam pass.) The Russian built road from the border is a much eroded highway that is being reconstructed by Chinese road engineers (see Part I, previous blog). The road recapitulates the ancient Silk Road route that the Chinese followed to get heavenly horses from the Ferghana Valley.

Sari Tash, a junction village at the edge of the grassland, is at 10,400 ft; the Kyzel-Art Pass that is at the Tajik border is almost 4,000 ft higher (4,200m/14,042ft.) The road to the pass was in places challenging, as seen in the above photo. After the border rituals we transferred to a new pair of 4-wheel-drive vehicles and admired the distant representative herd of grazing yaks and the statue that marks the high point of the pass. I understood the statue to be a Marco Polo sheep. We passed a valley that is a sanctuary for such sheep the following day. We encoutered the horns of Marco Polo sheep (or ibex) at Zoroastrian fire shrines and in houses. However, we did not, in fact, see any Marco Polo sheep, though we may have eaten the flesh thereof. A commentator claims the statue is an ibex. We did not see any ibex. A picture on the web identifies the statue as a Marco Polo sheep. I look forward to further clarification of this important issue. From the pass we descended to the desolate ash-grey landscape of the Kara Kul Lake (12,841ft). This was formed by a meteor impact less than five million years ago. Lenin peak should have been visible in the distance but it was obscured by clouds. The lake is without an outlet. The outline of the 35 mile wide crater can be seen in satellite photographs. The desolation of the lake is matched by the desolation of the nearby settlement composed of the spaced white blocks that derive from its former role as a Russian military outposts close to the Chinese border. Many of the houses are unoccupied and it is hard to imagine that much goes on in the settelment beyond providing for passing travellers and border guards.

Wikipedia states that the lake was once named after Queen Victoria. Had she actually seen the lake she might not have been pleased that such an inhospitable place was named after her -- on the other hand it might have reminded her of Scotland. Presumably the locals ignored this and used its Kirgiz name.

The designation Lake Victoria is a puzzle. The noted mountaineer Bill Tillman, writing about the source of the Oxus in Two Mountians and a River, cites Captain John Wood's A Journey to the Source of the Oxus, and states that in 1838 he gave the name Victoria to lake Sir-i-col from which the Pamir River flows. However in Chapter XXI of the book Woods writes:

As “we had received the news of her gracious Majesty's accession to the throne, I was much tempted to apply the name of Victoria to this, if I may so term it, newly rediscovered lake; but on considering that by thus introducing a new name, however honoured, into our maps, great confusion in geography might arise, I deemed it better to retain the name of Sir-i-kol, the appellation given to it.by our guides.” Wood notes the lake fits Marco Polo's description, but the description could equally well fit the lake in the main Wakhan valley that is the source of the Murgab River. An editor's footnote in the 1872 edition reasons that as Sir i-col was a descriptor and not a name, future maps should use the name Lake Victoria. Lake Victoria in Africa was so named in 1858 by Speke who thought it was the source of the Nile (Stanley later confirmed it flowed into the White Nile.) My hypothesis is that the name Lake Victoria was used for the source of the Oxus on maps sometime after 1878. The Map given by Bill Tillman in Two Mountains and a River labels Sir-i-col Lake Victoria. Given the pressure of the Great Game, such an implied claim would be irresistible. Maps tend to be copied and at some point the name probably wandered to Kara Kul Lake which is much bigger. Clearly more research is called for.

To leave this basin a further high pass had to be crossed. The Ak Batel pass, was the highest on our route (4,655m /15,272 ft.) We made further wanderings through red tinged mountains until we reached the much lower town of Murgab (3,576 m /11,732 ft) where we stayed the night. Somewhere on the road to Murgab we crossed the thrust fault that separates the Northern Pamir and Central Pamir terrains. The fault is also a suture line. The Central Pamirs are being pushed under the Northern Pamirs, hence the Northern Pamirs are being pushed up from both north and south.

Murgab is an important junction point. According to Wikipedia it was once the highest town in the Soviet Union. It is situated on a river that rises in the eastern Wakhan corridor and ends up flowing westward to join the Panj river. Murgab was established as an advanced Russian military base as a part of the Great Game in 1893. The post helped establish the claim to the area and the Kulma Pass into China (4,363 m) was a potential route for a further Russian advance. In 2004 the Chinese established a restricted road link via this pass to the Karakoram Highway that is the linkage between Pakistan and Kashgar.

From Murgab we made a side trip on a dirt road to a near-desert valley with low rocky hills in order to see a petroglyph. We then crossed another pass and descended to the valley of the upper Gunt river. The Pamir Highway leaves and rejoins the Gunt River on its westward way to Khorog, where it joins the Pyanj River. but we turned south to cross a further range to reach the Afghan border (pass at 4344m.) To the south were the snow capped mountains of the Afghan Pamirs. The Pamir River defines the Afghan border that is the northern boundary of the bulge in the Wakhan corridor. We followed the river to its junction with the Wakhan River at which point their fusion become known as the Pyanj River. Both tributaries can be called the upper Oxus. At our first encounter the Pamir River was wandering through a near desert. It did not look as if crossing it by one means or another would be a serious problem.

An Afgan caravan
As the Panj river junction was approached the river narrowed and became more turbulent and grass was at last visible. We did not know it at the time (August 11, 2010), but the turbulence of the river reflected the delay in summer snow melting. The levels of all the rivers were exceedingly high. This delay was a substantial factor in creating the floods in Pakistan which were just starting to take place. We learned about them later. The notion that something might be abnormal came to us suddenly as we rounded a curve in the road into a side valley.

We had survived one tire blowout and one puncture but there before us was a raging stream of melt water that crossed the road and plunging into the valley below. I expected we would have to overnight in the car and wait for the melt water to go down. Dilshod, our Tajik guide and driver, seemed greatly cheered by the challenge. He plunged into the stream and started throwing around rocks to make a ramp. Others helped. His heroic charge through the torrent is shown at the beginning of my previous blog. An Australian motorcyclist generously helped us ford the river. He was one of a group of four that had managed to push their bikes through the stream. They had to spend an entire day taking one of the bikes to pieces in order to dry it out. We had only to dry out our sneakers.

After this diversion we descended to the village of Langar (elevation about 2900m/9,504ft.) This pleasant village is just past the confluence of the Pamir and Wakhan rivers. Afghanistan is on the far side of the Pyanj River formed by this junction. Above the river rise the snow capped mountains of the Hindu Kush that are a western extension of the Karakoram. The above photograph was taken from the bank of the Panj River looking East, the Afghan Pamirs are to the left.

An important Pamir web site by Robert Middleton : link.

Middleton is a co-author of Tajikistan and the High Pamirs.

Shadows of the Great Game-Part 1

2010-10-15T06:30:00.000-07:00

Bishkek to the Pamirs by way of Kashgar

Four factors promoted our interest in a trip to the Pamirs.
— When writing the essay for Himalayan Portfolios: Journeys of the Imagination I had become intrigued with the role the Pamirs played in the 19th century struggle between British India and Russia known as the Great Game. One major player in the drama was Francis Younghusband who later became a major force on the Everest Committee. The Great Game came to a provisional accomodation in 1893 when the boundary of Afganistan was drawn to leave a thin extension of Afghanistan, the Wakhan Corridor, as a buffer between the Russian and British spheres of influence.
— A second reason was the account by Greg Mortenson of his struggle to build a school near Bozai Gumbaz in the Whakan Corridor described in his recent Stones into Schools (now available in paperback.)
— A third reason was the result of looking at satellite images of the Afghan-Pakistan region. The one thing that stands out amidst the mountains is the hook of the Afghan boundary defined by upper ancient Oxus (see map in previous blog.) Why is this river so much more visible than the Indus? The sources of the Oxus have been assigned to a lake in the Little Pamirs that is drained by the Pamir River and to a glacier that feeds into the Whakan River. The two rivers join to form the turbulent Panj River that eventually, after more additions, becomes the Amu Darya that makes its way to the dead end of the Aral Sea.
— Lastly, it seemed that the culture and history of the region could have a great deal to do with future events in Afghanistan (Betty's department. Betty is my wife.)

Across Kyrgyzstan

Our road trip began in Bishek and took is south across Kyrgyzstan. The last part was through a high-altitude grassland smudged with occasional flocks of sheep and cattle and small gatherings of isolated yurts. We stayed at a yurt camp near the ancient fortress and caravansary of Tash Rabat that is separated from the wider grassland by the Dragon Mountains. Near the Chinese border there were snow capped peaks (the Celestial Mountains, Tien Shahn), but they were obscured by a haze of loess dust that was unrelated to the dust churned up by the enormous Chinese trucks that travel the highway. The highway was, no doubt, once paved. The process of crossing the border involved multiple check points each of which involving a ritual of multiple passport inspections. We were checked and rechecked both before and after passing through a winding section of no-mans-land. A long dusty descent invigorated by miles of road construction brought us to a final inspection, with photographs added to the file, and to Kashgar.

Kashgaria

In reading the narratives of British visitors to Kashgar the Chinese name for the region, Xinjiang, tends to be replaced by ‘Chinese Turkistan’ or ‘Tartary’, but Kashgar was its own center of power, hence the term Kashgaria. Local Uyghur nationalists call it Uyghurstan or Eastern Turkestan thus linking it with other Turkic regions rather than to China or Tibet. Silk Road traders came through Kashgar because it was the junction of the branches of the road that flowed to the north and south of the Taklamaken desert.

It is not easy on visiting Kashgar to imagine the old city with 50 foot high mud walls as it was in 1940 when the noted climber and writer Eric Shipton was sent there as British Consul General or in 1946 to 48 when he served a second term (in Mountains of Tartary.) His task on the second occasion was to hand over the Consulate to India and Pakistan; they were newly independent and unclear how they should deal with their new responsibility to look after the interests of wandering traders from Ladakh and Hunza. By October of 1949 the Chinese Communists had taken over from the Nationalists and the consulates in Kashgar had a new set of problems to deal with.

The Consulate building remains; it is now a restaurant. The massive willow tree that must have dominated the garden still stands. The former Russian consulate is also a restaurant.

Both consulates date back to the Great Game period. When Francis Younghusband in 1887 made his epic journey across China that led him to the north side of K2 and to Srinagar by way of a high Karakoram pass he was surprised to find a Russian Consulate in Kashgar. When he invited the Consul General to tea the consul arrived with 16 Cossack carrying Russian flags. Younghusband had a second notable encounter in 1891. He was sent to Kashgar and from there proceeded to Bozai Gumbaz in the Pamirs where he encountered a force of 30 Cossacks and an unambiguous declaration that this was Russian territory. This convinced all concerned that Russian expansion was a serious matter. The borders of Imperial Russia were close to Kashgaria, Chinese power was weak and the British territories were on the other side of high passes. (See Tournament of Shadows, Meyer and Brysac, 1999; Younghusband, Patrick French, 1994)

The rule of the Tsar gave way to the Soviets and the Soviets were intent on rearranging Central Asia. Peter Fleming (the literary uncle of James Bond) in “Report from Tartary” described the political situation when he arrived at the Consulate in 1935. He set out from Peking traveling to the south of the Taklamaken desert to reach Kashgar at a time when the situation in the province was almost totally unknown to the outside world. There were, in fact, a series of warring factions that included Manchurians, White Russians, Turkis and Tungans. The Soviets were deeply involved: there were Russian advisors in Kashgar and Umruchi and the national government exerted little control. Kashgar was run by a local warlord in cahoots with the Russian Consulate aided by the advisors and the warlord's secret police. When in 1940 Eric Shipton arriving for his first stint as a consul he found the Soviets equally present. It was wartime and it was uncertain whether the Soviets were friend or foe. The Chinese Republican government in Nanking was still very far away.

Later when the Chinese Communists came to power the Russian advisors seem to have gradually departed. There were various uprisings. There was a brief attempt to set up a Turkik Republic in Khotan, but the overall consequence seems to have been a steady influx of Han Chinese. The Great Leap Forward beginning in 1958 led to starvation in central China and this encouraged the Han migration into Xinjiang. In 1960 this pressure caused Uyghurs to flee to the Soviet Union. A major migration of Han Chinese started in 2,000 as an 'Open the West' campaign. The immigrants were deployed to ensure that they were a dominant force in each regional subdivision and along all major routs. The influx of Han Chinese has consolidated the native population under a Uyghur identity and brought together groups that were formerly diverse. They have learned to speak the same coded language. The Chinese recruited cadres of Uyghurs that would be loyal to the government.

There are crumbling bits of the city walls of Kashgar left, but the narrow lanes of the old city in front of the Id Kah Mosque were obliterated when the area was flattened by the Chinese administration to make a ceremonial plaza. This action promoted not ‘harmony’ but riots. When Colin Thuberon visted Kashgar in 2003 the plans for the clearing were on display (Shadow of the Silk Road.)Such tension between the native population and the immigrant Han Chinese came to the boil in Urumchi, the other major city of Xinjiang, in 2009. Rioting natives were met by vigilante Han mobs. The influx of Han Chinese has consolidated the native population under a Uighur identity brought together groups that were formerly diverse.

As result of these migration policies Kashgar has become a modern Chinese city with a major Han presence analogous to the dual community situation in Lhasa, Tibet. Kashgar does have some attractive older streets and these were not far from our Tarim Petroleum Hotel where we stayed. They were used as location sets in the filming of the Kite Runner. These older streets form a regular tourist area, though the activites are locally driven. However, we are still trying to puzzle out why someone was being paid to follow us around and take photographs of us taking photographs. The photograph shows our watcher pretending to be interested in photographing bread. Since returning I have been reading The Uyghurs, Strangers in Their own Land by Gardner Bovington (Columbia UP, 2010.) His discription of the Chinese divide-and-rule policy fully explains why no one, including our guide, was willing to comment on the present political situation. The parallels to Tibet are not accidental.

To the Pamirs

The next stage was to reenter Kyrgyzstan by the Irkestam Pass--further to the south than our departure route.. The loess haze had departed, an unusual event, and for 200 km we passed by a paved road through desert hills layered in shades of red, yellow and purple. At the pass we once more went through multiple checks before entering a 7 km no-mans-land where we studied the long line of trucks enduring to endless wait until our new land cruiser's arrived. Beyond the border we entered a new realm of high altitude pasture, the Alay valley.To the south a long line of snow capped peaks, the Trans-Alay range of the Northern Pamirs, arose abruptly from the grassland. Somewhere hiding in this vast landscape the Main Pamir Fault marks the line where the older basin rocks underthrust the northern Pamirs. This is also a suture line where the Northern Pamir terrain became attached to the Asian mainland. To the west along the border range is Lenin Peak (7,134 m /23,406 ft).

To this peak is attached an important example of the political reidentification made necessary by the break up of the Soviet Union. In Tajikistan Lenin Peak is now officially named after the Ismali physician and philosopher Ibn Sina, better known in the West as Avicenna (980-1037.) He belongs to the golden age of Islamic enlightenment. His vast achievements include an encyclopedia The Canon of Medicine, but he also contributed to astronomy, algebra, trigonometry and discussed the nature of experimental knowledge. In Dushambe he is represented by a statue. Most remarkably, the Russian built Opera House was featuring an opera about his life.

TO FOLLOW SHORTLY
Part 2: Journey to the Tajik-Afghan border.

Beyond the Karakoram

2010-07-11T13:45:00.000-07:00

The Pamir Highway

On the 1994 Snow Lake trip to Pakistan (see Himalayan Portfolios, pp 13-25) we descended the Hispar Glacier and then took a crazy jeep ride to Karimabad in the Hunza valley. Karimabad is on the Karakoram Highway that was created by Pakistan and China to link Islamabad to Kashgar. Kashgar is a major oasis on the edge of the Taklamaken desert and a nexus on the ancient Silk Road. As we had a day to spare, several of us hired a jeep to follow the Karakoram highway to the Kunjarab Pass that is the Pakistan-China border. The broad pass is cluttered with shops selling Chinese goods. There were lines of decorated Pakistani trucks and uniformly blue Chinese trucks all waiting to clear customs. Behind us, south, was the Karakoram, to the left, extending far into Afghanistan, was the Hindu Kush and ahead to the north was the road to Kashgar that passes through the eastern edge of the Pamirs. As conditions in Pakistan and Afghanistan have degenerated, this part of the Silk Road has seemed to be more and more unreachable.

This Blog is to say the unreachable should be reached by my wife (Betty) and I this August.

We expect to fly to Bishkek (B) the capital of Kyrgyzstan (KYR) where we hope to get a political briefing from one of Betty’s former students who is at the US Embassy. We then join the group trip --follow the red line on the map. Our first stage is to journey southward across Kyrgyzstan over the southern ranges of the Tien Shan Mountains and reach Kashgar in China. The major line of the Tien Shan sweeps to the north of Kashgar and the Taklamakan Desert. The boundary between the Tien Shan and the Pamirs, the Main Pamir Thrust Fault, is in southern Kyrgystan. Note the jigsaw arrangement of bondaries in this troubled area.

The second part of our journey is to reenter Kyrgystan by a more southerly pass and join the Pamir Highway at Sari Tash. The Highway enters Tajikistan (TAJ) a little to the east of the peak that continies to be named after Lenin but is also known as Independence (7,134m / 23,405ft). We continue south over various high passes until the road drops down to the valley of the Wakhan Corridor. To the south of the corridor is the Hindu Kush. This corridor, which stretches to the Chinese border, was created in 1896 to separate Russian and British spheres of influence by a thin strip of Afghanistan. The Wakhan River becomes the Pyanj River that becomes the Amu Darya River, the legendary Oxus. The Oxus drains into the dead-end Aral Sea. The Amu Darya river forms a northern boundary to Afghanistan. Our route takes us from the Afghan border to our final destination Dushanbe (D).

We will probably be unreachable until we return August 19. My immediate challenge is to pack.

A Geological Interlude

2010-06-01T11:18:00.000-07:00

The Strange Case of the Iapetus Suture

The conjunction of the Icelandic eruption with my visit to England (see my last Blog) caused me to wander again in tectonic realms.

My starting point was the matter of volcanic island arcs that are created by the tectonic subduction of oceanic plates. In Himalayan Portfolios I discussed the Kohistan-Ladakh arc that became the area between the greater Himalayan chain and the Karakoram. This topic awakened me to the presence of an arc nearer home. In my April Blog I mentioned the remains of an island arc which runs south to north in Connecticut to the east of the Connecticut valley where it is known as the Bronson Hill formation. It continues up through Massachussets, New Hampshire and northeast across Maine. This arc formed in the early to mid Ordovician period in what geologists call the Iapeatus Ocean. This was a time before there was any Atlantic Ocean and before a diversity of oddly composed continents assembled into the super continent Pangaea. The arc formed off the coast of Laurentia (later to become North America). Continuing plate motion thrust the arc against the mainland around 450 million years ago producing a substantial "Taconic" mountain range. (This is the simple account; the details of the process are exceedingly murky.) The Taconic mountain-building process was an early stage in the formation of the northern Appalachian Mountains. The Scottish Grampian mountain building process took place about this time (see below.)

Also in the Ordovician period, but thousands of miles away on the other side of the Iapetus Ocean, another subduction of the Ocean floor began the process that created the English Lake District. Between 460 and 450 million years ago subduction generated the Eykott Volcanic Group, and, later, the larger Borrowdale Volcanic Group. A large island caldera, similar to the Greek island of Santorini, may have repeatedly built up and then erupted. These volcanic islands eventually docked with the coast of a mini continent known to geologists as Avalonia. Lava flows and vast amounts of ash covered the area and the mountains created formed the core of the Lake District. This European end of Avalonia later became the underlying layers of England and Wales, southeast Ireland, most of the Isle of Man and part of Belgium. Not far away was another slightly larger continent: Baltica (Norway etc.)

The Suture: In the Ordovician period there were no land plants or land animals, but the island volcanoes must have made life very unpleasant for local trilobites and graptolites. These had distinct forms according to whether they resided on the Avalonian or Laurentian side of the Iapatus Ocean. Scotland along with New England was on the Laurention side of the ocean far away from Avalonia and Baltica (hence the Grampian and Taconic connection.) This public-domain map from Wikipedia shows the Iapetus Suture in red and the fosil distribution after the Iapetus Ocean closed about 400 million years ago in the late Silurian and Early Devonian.

The Iapetus closure generated the Acadian round of mountain building on both the Laurentian and Avalonian sides of the suture. [Getting the nomenclature straight for the various mountain building events and rest periods is quite difficult (see Figs 1 and 2, McKerrow, Niocaill & Dewey). The term Caladonian mountain bulidng has been applied in many different ways, somtimes as a part of the Acadian process. In Avalona in its independent period prior to the formation of the Borrowdale Volcanics there was (Late Cambrian and early Ordovician) a mountain building process associated with Penobscot in Maine and with North Wales.

The Split: The process of continental assembly continued into the Permian with the addition of Gondwana (Africa etc) to form Pangea. More mountain building took place in the central and southern Appalachians as a result (Alleghenean mountain building). When Pangea split up in the Triassic and Jurassic period there was a false start creating the Connecticut rift valley, but finally the split came to the east. The magma spewing ridge that created the Atlantic Ocean ignored the Iapetus suture. It sliced through Avalonia leaving part attached to Laurentia and left Scotland attached to England. It also created the Icelandic volcanoes -- which brings us full circle.

An Avalonian Trek. Connecticut hosts the end of the non European end of Avalonia. The start of the terrain seems to be the granitic gneiss at lighthouse point by New Haven harbor. A little down the rocky coast is the Stony Creek quarry that provided the granite for the base of the statue of Liberty. The Bedrock Geological Map of Connecticut shows that Avalonian rocks underthrust the gneiss fieldstone in the Eastern Highlands, however, a small area of Avalonian rocks is exposed in the middle of the Eastern region near Willimantic. A walk along the Avalonian terrain would begin in Connecticut, continue through Massachusetts, Maine, New Bruswick, Nova Scotia and southern Newfoundland. It would continue through southern Ireland. The suture line in passing between Ieland and the border between Scotland and England clips the western tip of the Isle of Man. Most of the island is Avalonia derived; the short costal strip of Laurentia is known as the Dalby group. The Avalonia trek could wind up in the Lake District and North Wales.

The Noble Cause: Having expounded the case for an independent Avalonia it remains to suggest that Avalonia, less fictional than Ruritana, is clearly in need of a national anthem. There are precedents. Any reasonable suggestion will be posted. It could begin: Rocks, rocks, rocks, rocks/ You gotta learn to take your knocks. / Take em, take em, in your stride/ With the old volcanic pride...

Adventure Travel

2010-05-20T07:24:00.000-07:00

An Exultation of Skylarks

My last Blog concerning the UK sales of Himalayan Portfolios was written hastily before I made a trip to England. I went to visit to my brother who lives in Kirkby Lonsdale, a small market town to the north of Lancaster in the Lune valley. This town is on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales and close to the Lake District. In early April it is lambing time. This picture was taken in a field a short distance from my brother's house.

The view from the back widows of the house is towards Middleton Fell, Barbon Fell and Gragareth on the far side of the Lune valley. Further to the distant right is Ingleborough whose distinctive flat top is a layer of millstone grit that sits above the more easily weathered Carboniferous limestone. All these fells are open moorland with occasional limestone outcrops, caves and potholes. The fells are crossed in places by long dry-stone walls. An occasional sheep farm can be found tucked into an upper valley positioned along a spring lines. The following picture of myself was taken at the trigonometric point on the top of Gragareth (627m / 2,057ft). This is the highest point in Lancashire. Few places that I know give such a sense of floating in the sky. We were accompanied by an exaltation of skylarks.
K E Visit

Seven of my view-camera trips to the Himalayas were taken with KE Adventure Travel. My visit provided a splendid opportunity to stop by their Lake Road office in Keswick (in the Lake District) and drop off a copy of Himalayan Portfolios. At the time of my first trip with KE to the Karakoram they were called Karakoram Experience. Since then they have greatly expanded into other areas, hence the name change.

I was lucky enough to find two of my former trek leaders in Keswick: Pete Royal (Rolwaling) and Jonathon Hughes (aka Frog: Gondoro La and K2 BC). Pete was working in the KE office and Frog in a local climbing gear shop. I also met the owner Kit Wilkinson. The upshot was a story about the book posted on their current news letter. As the news letter contents will change with time, the gist of their message will be added to the Reviews on my web site. They plan to keep the book in the office and before long two of my photographs should be hanging on their walls (Snow Lake, p23, and Kangchenjunga, p127). Stop by the office and say hello.

VEy ya Fyat-lah YOU-khut

On Thursday April 15, the day we hiked up Gragareth, the morning news announced the eruption of the Iceland volcano Eyja-fjalla–jokull. By the evening the ash plume had closed most UK airports. It was comforting to learn the name translates as Island-Mountain-Glacier. According to the New York Times it can be sounded out more or less as in the paragraph heading. There is a slight h sound before the initial E and a final glottal t. Begin with “Hey ya, fergot la, yoghurt” and practice.

Each morning brought further messages of doom. I was due to fly back by Iceland Air from Manchester on the Wednesday, April 21. Late Tuesday the ash cloud briefly diverted and next day my flight arrived at the strangely empty airport only three hours late. In Keflavik my continuing flight was waiting and I safely reached Boston. My luggage arrived 3 days later. Manchester airport closed again the next day.

UK SALES

2010-04-07T10:32:00.000-07:00

DARK SATANIC MILLS

In February of last year this blog announced that we now had a US distributor for Himalayan Portfolios. Independent Publishers Group (IPG), acts as the channel between the publisher on the one had and book sellers on the other. It warehouses the book, handles orders and billing, and arranges speedy delivery. Unfortunately, it has no warehousing in the UK. Purchases from the UK included the enormous extra cost of shipping from the US. (The standard postage is about $45.)

We now have a UK distributor
Gazelle Books
This organization warehouses the book in the UK, promotes the book in its catalog and arranges sales to book stores. It does not, however, sell directly to the public. The list price is given as $70.99, but this is substantially discounted by some booksellers such as Amazon.co.uk. To check out Gazelle, regular book stores or on-line book sellers the easiest way is to use the 13 digit ISBN number without hyphens in the sellers search engine:
9780979059704
(The first four numbers 978-0 are standard for English group books, the last number is a modulus check, the center 8 digits, 97905970, specify the publisher and the book.)

By a curious coincidence, Gazelle Book Services is located in White Cross Mill, Lancaster. At some point long ago, when I was in high school in Lancaster and the mill was still a textile mill, I visited the mill searching for a summer job. I found work in the lab at another and less ancient institution. The cotton mills inevitably bring to mind the lines of Blake’s lyric from the long poem Milton:

And was Jerusalem builded here,

Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Lancaster may get a reprieve. The satanic mills Blake had in mind may have been Oxford and Cambridge.

The Enigma of Perfection

2010-04-04T08:34:00.000-07:00

EASTER 2010

Bloodroot flower, roadside bank, Seagraves Road, Coventry, Connecticut, Easter Sunday.

The bloodroot flowers are sparsely scattered just below the stone-wall edging the road. They are confined to this one small area. Sanguinaria canadensis, a member of the poppy family, is highly toxic, though used in folk medicine.

Beyond the wall is a section of State Forest. The whole area consists of Hebron gneiss. This metamorphic rock shows marked layering as a result of the heat and pressure associated with its formation from the deposits laid down on the Iapetus Ocean floor. Tectonic processes created a volcanic island arc off the coast of Proto North America (Laurentia) in the Iapetus Ocean some 440 million years ago (mid to late Ordovician). The arc survives as the Bronson Hill formation. The local section of the arc is the hills at Bolton Notch to the west of Coventry. The tectonic process pushed the island arc onto the Laurentia coast and in the process turned the back-bay deposits of the Iapetus Ocean into a complex Taconic mountain range. The same sort of process occurred when the Kohistan-Ladakh island arc was pushed against the Eurasian coast to form the Karakoram metamorphic complex 70 million years ago (see Himlayan Portfolios p7. p181,p184.) Erosion from the Taconic mountains, with their island arc outer edge, discharged great quanities of silt into the Iapetus Ocean creating a new continental shelf. These Ordovician and Silurian deposits became the shist and later the gneiss of the Eastern Connecticut Highland Terrain. The Iapetus ocean closed when the micro continent of Avalonia was added to the east coast of North America prior to the formation of the Pangaea super continent.

A minor fault line runs through the forest creating sections of cliff that sometimes overhang. My favorite walk, starting from Seagraves road, is to follow deer trails in a haphazard manner just using the lay of the land as a guide and moving towards Coventry lake. A minor scramble up a cliff is an optional extra. The winter provides crisp snow that makes the deer trails easy to find. Soon the opening leaves will make these non-paths invisible and it will be advisable to follow the established trails. But now the woods have their own special music. Since the 15th of March the frogs in the swampy areas have been creating a joyous racket of chirps, trills, gulps and quacks.

New Year's Greetings

2010-02-27T08:31:00.000-08:00

Summoned by Yak Bells

An announcement that Canadians were down-loading the sound of cow bells to their cell phones has prompted me to revivify my yak bells. The Canadians were using the sound to support their contestants at the Vancouver Olympics. I needed the bells to celebrate the Tibetan New Year. The sound of the bells is forever associated in my mind with Nepal and the tinkling sound of passing yak trains.

Unfortunately my bells had been displaced from their customary place of honor after I noticed moth cocoons on the yak hair straps. Could the small moths that occasionally show up in my kitchen be the start of a Tibetan invasion? Could I be arrested by the enforcement brigade of the Department of Agriculture? In panic I sprayed the bells and their yak hair straps with insecticide and stored them in a plastic bag. But now the bells, have been released, shampooed, and called on to promote general happiness as we march forward into the Iron-Tiger Year.

February 15. The year began with the new moon of February 15. This year the start of the Tibetan lunar-solar calendar coincided with that of the Chinese and Vietnamese calendars. This might have been supposed to allow Tibetans and Chinese to celebrate together, but there has been little easing of tension in general. In Tibet monks and laypeople said prayers and threw tsampa in the air to mourn the killings of Tibetans in the 2008 protests that took place all over Tibet, accoding to a Tibetan web site based in south India. There is a further reason for tension. The Chinese takeover of Tibet began in 1959 when the Dalai Lama fled to India. The Tibetan calendar consists of a 60 year cycle. Five elements (Fire, Earth, Iron, Water, Wood) are coupled to the 12 zodiac animals (Hare, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Sheep, ape, Bird, Dog, Pig, Mouse, Bull, Tiger). The last Iron-Tiger year thus corresponds to the first full year of Chinese rule.

Jim Yardley in the New York Times reported on February 17 that the Chinese have been persuading Nepal to tighten its border with China and send back to China Tibetans who cross the border. Often they do so on their way to Dharamsala in India in search of an education or as a pilgrimage to visit the Dalai Lama. “Until 2008 roughly 2,500 to 3,000 Tibetans annually slipped across the border.” Last year it was down to 600. The Chinese have steadily worked for decades to establish Nepal as a client state and pry it away from Indian influence. Road building has been their major method of creating bonds, a technique that is reminiscent of the period of the Great Game.

DALAI LAMA in Dharamsala. Photo by Gaelen Hanson, 2009

February 18. Then came the low-key meeting in the White House between President Obama and the Dalai Lama. Let us pass over the stupidity of smuggling the Dalai Lama out the side door past the garbage bags. Pennance has been done: the Social Secretary has chosen to resign.

February 20. Nicholas Kristof in his New York Times Blog of Feb 20 has tried to explain why it was necessary for Obama to Meet the Dalai Lama and why Obama needs to explain to the Chinese people why they met. (The White House Blog was anything but forceful.)
“ The Dalai Lama is reviled by many ordinary Chinese, perhaps more so by the public than by the Chinese government, although this in part reflects propaganda critical of the Dalai Lama. The most important thing that needs to be conveyed is that it’s in China’s own interests that the world, China included, engage the Dalai Lama. China is making a catastrophically bad bet that after His Holiness dies, the Tibetan problem will be easier to solve. In fact, the reverse is true. The one thing most Tibetans agree on is their reverence for the Dalai Lama. If it weren’t for him, there would have been a much more violent resistance to Beijing, and Tibetans would have turned long ago to terrorism.” “A deal between China and the Dalai Lama is possible —… but it’s feasible only as long as the Dalai Lama is alive. Only he can make the tough compromises necessary, and deliver the Tibetan poeple behind him."

February 26. Reuters corresopondent Ben Blanchard, visiting a region of Tibet outside the most controlled area, reports that Tibetans and Han are ignoreing politics to build uneasy ties based on their common history that links Tibetans and Han Chinese to Buddhism. "Qinghai's Tibetans say they are given far more leeway to practice their religion than those living in what is formally called the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR). Pictures of the Dalai Lama are openly displayed at major temples in a way unthinkable in that region. At the lunar new year celebrations last week, monks at one monastery freely carried out a complex ceremony complete with ornate, embroidered silk costumes that culminated in the unfurling of a giant image of the Buddha on a nearby hillside. It attracted a small, though fascinated, crowd of Han Chinese tourists. One observer rmarked: "I think we can learn a lot from our Tibetan compatriots. They must be doing something right."

Himalayan Portfolios page 128
Monsoon Storm, Gyamtso La, Tibet, 2003. The pass is the highest point on the way from Lhasa to the Everest Base Camp and the watershed between the Arun and the Tsangpo rivers.
"The storm soon passed;
the Chinese overlordship of Tibet remains."

Dear Chinese & Tibetan friends, you are summoned by yak bells.

Kendal Mountain Book Festival 2009

2009-12-09T12:33:00.000-08:00

BOARDMAN TASKER
"The Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature commemorates the lives of Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker, who disappeared on the North East Ridge of Everest in 1982, and is given to the author, or co-authors of an original work which has made an outstanding contribution to mountain literature. "

This photograph, a detail from page 112, 0f Himalayan Portfolios, shows the ridge with the Everest summit to the right. The Pinnacles, where the climbers died, are the center point to the right of a jagged ridge section.

The award was announced on November 20 at the Kendal 2009 Mountain Book Festival. The Kendal Festival closely parallels the Banff Festival discussed last month. Kendal is a small market town that is a south-eastern gateway to the English Lake District and the last town before the M6 road to Scotland crosses Shap Fell.

Entering Himalayan Porfolios for a literary prize was something of a long shot. We would have to convice the judges that the book was an integral work of text and pictures and not pictures with some text attached. Mirrors, Messages and Manifestations by Minor White was conceived as such a unit with "sequences" matched to original text. The works of William Blake that combined poetry and engravings served as a model. The wonderful books by Paul Strand, Time in New England for example, would not qualify because he relied on others to provide a text. Hybrid works are a tricky catagory: Wagner's Ring cycle is a monster example in which a poetic text, music and staging were promoted as one. A phone call from my brother in England told me that my book had been noted as giving particular enjoyment in the award ceremony at Kendal.

The well structured and thoughtful addess by Phil Bartlett, the chair of the judges, has been posted on the web. A paragraph of 145 words was devoted to explaining why Himalayan Portfolios, though much enjoyed, did not qualify to be on the short list. The winner, Beyond the Mountain, an autobiography by Steve House, received 318 words. (He was also a winner at the Banff Festival, see my November 11 blog.) My book was judged to be "a sumptuous collection of black and white photography and serious supporting essays." (For some reason he did not metion the extended title: Journeys of the Imagination.) We did not convince, or manage to slip in without being caught, White House fashion, but we came close enough to be seriously considered. For the full text of the judge's remarks see Book Reviews on my web page or this link.

Kangchenjunga from Pangpema (HP page 126.) First ascent without oxygen by Boardman, Tasker and Doug Scott, 1978 (see also HP page 165).

Banff Mountain Book Festival-2

2009-11-13T10:29:00.000-08:00

Finalist’s Report

This report is both sad and happy.

On the sad side the Mountain Image Award went to a super-massive book of color photographs of the Alps. They were taken from an ultra-light motor-glider flown by a Slovenian biologist and mountaineer Matevz Lenarcic (approximate transcription—the name copies as Matevc Lenar i ). The style of his photography is very unlike the austerity of Brad Washburn, the full page presentation of his photographs is totally different from our white-border formality, and his primary aim is environmental advocacy whereas my style might be called photographic introspection. In short, comparing his book and mine is almost impossible. The book is described as “a gesture on a grand scale”, “a mountain manifesto and a call to arms.”
Finalists.
Awards.

On the happy side I had a wonderful time listening to presentations and signing books. The presentations included Steve Winter’s account of photographing the snow leopard for National Geographic. A six month quest in several Himalayan regions, some familiar to me, yielded superb images. Steve House read from his new autobiography (Adventure Travel Award). Climber and artist Renan Oxturk described an epic ascent of the great wall of Mount Meru in the Indian Himalaya. The climbers, Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin and Ozturk, planned for 10 days — the climb took 17days; they lost a lot of weight. When finally they made their superlight summit attempt on the fin-like ridge, the ascent was stopped by a non-negotiable gendarme: so near and yet so far. Amongst the book signers was David Roberts with his new biography of Brad Washburn (Mountaineering History Award.) The book signing allowed many opportunities to chat. The picture shows me with Steve Winter. Finally, I did win something — a spontaneous blessing: a very nice down jacket at a reception sponsored by a group working to preserve an area adjacent to the Banff National Park.

The Banff Center is a great place. I was there over 30 years ago to speak to a biochemistry conference. It was a lot smaller then. I could see a bit of a mountain from my room (as a finalist, complementary), but the dining room gives a three quarters panorama. My dedicated publishers, Gail and Charles Fields, were at the meeting to work on book promotion, but the fringe benefit was that they were up at 5 am each morning to go out and photograph. By the Sunday of our departure they had the back roads well worked out. On the Sunday we set out in pitch darkness and, despite very icy roads, we were at Lake Louise in time for the sunrise. This photo was taken on a back road. The flight from Calgary was at 2 pm. I was home by 1:30 am.

Banff Mountain Book Festival-1

2009-10-25T17:33:00.000-07:00

FINALIST
Message just received:
On behalf of the 2009 Banff Mountain Book Festival, I am pleased to inform you that Himalayan Portfolios: Journeys of the Imagination, by Kenneth Hanson, has been selected as a finalist -- one of four in the Mountain Image category.

Gail and Charles Fields and this blogger, expect to be present at this international festival from Thursday, November 5th to Saturday, November 7th. Book signings Friday and Saturday.

The other Mountain Image finalists:
Above All: Mount Whitney. David Stark Wilson. USA
The Alps – A Birds Eye View. Matevz Lenarcic. Slovenia
Wildlife of the Canadian Rockies. John Marriott. Canada

The Large Format Conspiracy Again

2009-10-19T18:02:00.000-07:00

Fall Exhibit
New England Large Format Photographic Collective,
NELFPC, Until November 6
Gallery hours and directions: http://www.belmonthill.org/

Those in the Boston area may see a selection of work by collective members at the Landau Gallery in the Robsham Arts Center at Belmont Hill School, 350 Prospect St, Bellmont MA. Gene LaFord, once more, did a great job of hanging the show. A cheerful opening was held last Sunday despite rain and sleet. Great gobs of wet snow assaulted those of us driving from Connecticut just after we had entered the Mass Pike. This is my section of the exhibit:

The NELFPC was created a few years ago to bring together like minded practitioners and promote the art of the view camera. See Blog Jan 5, 2009.

Starred Review

2009-09-16T19:05:00.000-07:00

Library Journal, 9/15/09
*Hanson, Kenneth. Himalayan Portfolios: Journeys of the Imagination. Fields, dist. by IPG. Sept. 2009. c.190p. illus. maps. ISBN 978-0-9790597-0-4. PHOTOG.
Excerpts:
In this beautifully illustrated, oversized publication, landscape photographer Hanson sets forth over 100 high-resolution black-and-white photographs he took between 1985 and 2005 of the Himalayan mountains and their inhabitants. He presents five geographic portfolios ….. more than a dozen trips to inaccessible Himalayan regions in Pakistan, India, Nepal, and Tibet. The second part of the book features two scholarly essays by Hanson, who is able to envision the mountains, glaciers, rivers, and peoples he photographed from diverse artistic, cultural, scientific, and spiritual perspectives…...
Verdict: With awesome images and insightful commentary, this significant book will engage both general and specialized audiences with various interests not limited to extreme experiences, mountaineering, and fine arts landscape photography. Strongly recommended.—Cheryl Ann Lajos, Free Lib. of Philadelphia.

Book News Annotation, October 2009
Excerpts:
The splendor of this collection of black and white photos of the Himalayas is breathtaking. Hanson, a biochemist in a previous existence, began his photographic journeys in 1986..... The images alone are worth acquiring the book, but the commentary by Hanson that follows the portfolios enhances them greatly. The writing is beautiful; a combination of philosophy and factual information, demonstrating the personal quest that brought Hanson back to the Himalayas time and time again. Link
(For more see the Book Reviews section of my Web Page.)

Virgil Revisited

2009-09-08T08:06:00.000-07:00

Getting down from the mountain
My earlier blog (March 15, 2009) about geology and the invention of the photographic process by Fox Talbot included a quotation. Fox Talbot, who had received a an education in mathematics and the Greek and Latin classics, cited two lines from Virgil’s Georgics. Virgil describes making his own way on the heights of Mount Parnassus, the home of the muses, and descending to the Castalian spring of Delphi. As chance would have it, my wife, Betty, and I made a last minute decision to take an excursion to Greece. After traveling from island to island we came to Athens and then to Delphi and the astonishing Sanctuary to Apollo.

Apollo is said to have killed the Pytho, a female serpent that guarded a deep cavern and the spring of Cassotis. This legend was linked to an Apollo cult whose central feature was the Pythian oracle. On ritual occasions the oracle placed herself on a tripod above the vaporous chasm. In this unenviable toxic situation, partially poisoned by the cyanide released from chewing laurel leaves, she uttered strange cries that were interpreted by priests. At the time of Virgil the Sanctuary was still active and, more significantly, the cult was sponsored by the Roman Emperor Augustus, Virgil’s patron.

Steep limestone cliffs rise above the Sanctuary. The Castalian spring is at the bottom of a gully with steep walls — the above photograph was taken from near the spring. Here lies the problem. No obvious track slopes downwards to Castalia’s spring. Poetry should be prepared to meet a reality test. How did Virgil descend from the Parnassian heights without breaking his neck?

Further Research
After visiting the Sanctuary our group stayed in a small hotel in the village adjacent to the Delphi sanctuary. The roads of the village are carved into the mountainside. As the day began to cool, around 5 pm, I set out to explore by ascending the steep sequences of steps that linked one road level to another. Above the final road were open fields with scattered olive trees. A sign indicated a Forestry Commission trail to Mount Parnassus. The highest point of the mountain is about 2,450 meters (8,056 feet); I was probably at 900 meters. I followed the trail upwards past limestone boulders. Soon no village was visible — looking back the panorama extended to the Gulf of Itea, some 5 miles away, and beyond that to the Gulf of Corinth. As the trail approached the steeper rocks it swung to the left but I pushed my way to a ridge on the right where a wire fence blocked further exploration. Beyond the ridge was a precipitous decent to the Stadium of the Sanctuary. The fence could be followed upwards through a barrier of thorns and thistles towards the steeper rocks. If I had been wearing boots instead of sandals I could probably have scrambled beyond the fence, but from my highest point I could see, carved into the limestone, a series of steps. Could this have been the decending path taken by Virgil?

I can only speculate about the upper reaches of the mountain. If it is like the Turkish Mount Olympus (2,366 m/7,762 ft), whose limestone heights I ascended in 2004, it is a rolling barren stone desert. In Turkey there was no certain track and plenty of choice as to route — for a while I was slightly lost in the mist. If it is like Mount Pachnes (2,453m/8,045 ft) in the White Mountains of Crete that I ascended in 2005, the bare rocks may have deep potholes and caves. Mount Parnassus should thus have afforded Virgil plenty of choice for exhilarating wandering. But was Virgil wearing sandals?

The Heroic Quest
The relevance of all this to Himalayan Portfolios lies less in the view camera and geology linkage than in the iconic figure of Virgil -- a molder of the Western concept of the epic form and the heroic quest. The Aeneid, once a staple of a classics-grounded education, decribes how the virtuous Aeneus escaped from the destruction of Troy with his wife (daugher of the slain Priam, king of Troy), his son and his aged father Anchises. The escape was helped by Venus his mother (daughter of Jupiter). He set out to recreate the glory that was Troy in a new city and country, but from the beginning he was opposed by Juno, wife of Jupiter. (The conflict between Venus and Juno started the Trojan War.) In Virgil's poem Aeneus' heroic struggle was accomplished, but with much grief and slaughter. The Aeneid begins with a cry of bafflement: Can there be so much anger in the hearts of the heavenly gods? Tantaene animis caelestibus irae? It is a question that might well be asked when deeply committed and experienced climbers get wiped out by a storm or avalanche.

Virgil’s Virgil and Dante’s Virgil
In Himalayan Portfolios, under the heading “The Eternal Quest” (p 167), I cited Tennyson’s poem Ulysses that influenced generations of explorers and mountaineers. The poem is based on a famous passage in Canto XXVI of Dante’s Inferno. Dante’s guide Virgil, by his authority as an epic poet, commands the flame-encased spirit of Ulysses (Gk. Odysseus) to describe his final journey. It is a story unknown from any source other than Dante. Ulysses, growing old and bored by life in Ithaca, sails southwards beyond the Pillars of Hercules and beyond Africa in search of “knowledge and excellence.” After glimpsing the island of the mythical Mount Purgatory that Dante places at the South Pole, the ship is destroyed in a storm and the flawed hero, Ulysses, ends up in the circle of those who gave council to promote deceit (he promoted the Trojan horse.) The sprit, having related his fate, is dismissed by the poet and Ulysses rejoins the endless cavalcade of wandering flames. Tennyson, by omitting this context, avoids the implication of deceit and clothes Ulysses in the virtue of the struggle.

How did Virgil get the job as Dante’s guide? In Book VI of the Aeneid Virgil describes how the Sybil of Apollo at Cumae in Italy tells Aeneus that if he performs certain tasks, most famously finding and plucking the golden bough, she will lead him to the shade of his father in the underworld. This journey, in which various other shades are encountered, forms the outline for Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio. (The shades encountered include Dido whom Aeneus had abandoned in Carthage --Dido had committed suicide -- not surpisingly, she refuses to speak.) In Dante’s Divine Comedy Virgil takes the place of the Sybil. He qualifies for this task because, like Aeneus, he is wise and virtuous (Inf. I, 85), and because for Dante he is the guru-like teacher and master of the poetic craft. As a soul guide (Gk, psychopomp) he is unlike the Shaman soul guide who escorts the dead (see HP, p84), he is a guide of the living.

Virgil takes on the task because he is asked. In the poem the exiled Dante is lost and frightened and in need of rescue. In this he resembles Wordsworth who experienced a “treacherous desertion” of the soul when the French Revolution turned into the Terror. Wordsworth was rescued through the support of his sister Dorothy and the intervention of Nature (see HP, p142.) For Dante the rescue comes through the intervention of Beatrice. In the poem she is the agent of divine grace. In his commentary “The Figure of Beatrice” Charles Williams points out that Beatrice cannot command Virgil. She may astonish him by her beauty—“Her eyes outshone the firmament.” (Inf II, 55)— but his assistance in rescuing Dante is ultimately a matter of courtesy. (Williams quote Tyndal’s translation of St Paul: “Love suffereth long and is courteous.”) Virgil accepts her request, but it is only when his ghostly form is addressed by Dante, who appeals for help, that he takes on a corporeal form and the dialog can begin (Inf. I,65). In the journey through Hell and Purgatory the bond between Dante and Virgil increases until in the sacred wood of the earthly paradise Virgil departs and Dante is “orphaned”. This takes place when Beatrice appears in a magnificent pageant and Dante turns to Virgil, quoting a passage from the Aenaed relating to Dido and her love for Aeneus, only to find Virgil has departed, his task being completed (Perg. XXX, 46).

It is easy to miss the utter strangeness of Virgil’s commission. Beatrice and Virgil belong to different theological universes separated by a great gulf. Her system centers on a single all loving and all powerful god. Virgil had cried: Can there be so much anger in the hearts of the heavenly gods? He could equally well have been a Himalayan Buddhist believing in many terrifiying earth spirits and mountain gods. How can she be sure he has changed to her system of belief? But Beatrice does not quibble about his theology. They are united in courtesy: he understands her compassion, she accepts his autonomy as a poet. It is as a poet that he can speak to Dante.

Addendum: The classical sublime

The Golden Bough; J.M.W. Turner, exhibited 1834, Tate Gallery. The Sibyl holds a sickle and the freshly cut bough in front of Lake Avernus, the legendary gateway to the Underworld. There are earlier more literal versions. A 1798 version is in the Tate Gallery. "Lake Avernus: Aeneas and the Cumaean Sybyl," 1814-15, is in the Yale Center for British Art. The 1834 version relates to Claud's Aeneus paintings and to Turner's Claud-inspired Carthage paintings. In these late Turner's the gold has taken over the painting. Sir James Frazer in Chapter 1 of the Golden Bough wrote: "Who does not know Turner's picture of the Golden Bough?"

A School in Afghanistan

2009-07-27T12:26:00.000-07:00

In the New York Times July 18, Op-Ed columnist Thomas Friedman has written about his presence at the opening by Greg Mortenson of a new school in the Hindu Kush Mountains of Afghanistan. The title is "Teacher, Can We Leave Now? No." Here is the link. The school will educate both girls and boys.

The need for women’s education in Afghanistan is demonstrated by infant and maternal death rates. In the New York Times July 28 it is reported: “Afghanistan has the world’s second-highest death rate in women during pregnancy and childbirth (only Sierra Leone’s is worse). For every 100,000 births, 1,600 mothers die; in wealthy countries the rates range from 1 to 12. In one remote northeastern province, Badakhshan, 6,507 mothers die for every 100,000 births, according to a 2005 report in the medical journal Lancet. In all, 26,000 Afghan women a year die while pregnant or giving birth."
The article continues: “The deeper problems are cultural, rooted in the low status of women and the misperception that deaths in childbirth are inevitable — part of the natural order, women’s lot in life.” Girls education is an essential component for change.

Pashtoon Azfar, advocate for change and president of the Afghan Midwives Association.

For recent mortality and education satistics, and maps of ethnic and cultural divisions see this BBC link.

Reviews plus Catching Up with Greg Mortenson

2009-06-25T08:55:00.000-07:00

This month brought two encouraging reviews of Himalayan Portfolios, Journeys of the Imagination. One was in the latest issue of Appalachia (2009, Vol LX No. 2, p153; Summer/Fall issue). The review by Malcolm Meldahl in the “Books of Note” section outlines the five portfolios. He then adds “No less a part of the book is the ambitious essay on the history of Western engagement with the Himalaya.” He comments on the composition of the photographs and notes that the strength of the large format approach is that it makes each photograph a deliberate act. The Karakoram portfolio is chosen for further comment: “The most otherworldly image among many is the distant view of K2 over a snow saddle at dawn on page 29.” The review concludes:
“Each portfolio is a marvel. This is a book to pore over and to engage intellectually. This is indeed a pilgrimage that Kenneth Hanson has put into our hands.”
(for more see the Book Reviews section of my Web Page.)

Appalachia is published by the Appalachian Mountain Club: “America’s longest running Journal of Mountaineering and Conservation”. In addition to these topics, Appalachia contains articles on AMC history, poetry, ecosystem preservation, Accidents and Books of Note. The present issue includes the regular Alpina section describing mountaineering in the Himalayas and elsewhere by Jeffery Parrette. His articles are always rewarding. I found his essay 100 Years of Life and Death in High Places, that appeared in the 2000 (LIII#1) issue, and another on 50 Years of Climbing Everest (2004, LV#1) extremely valuable when I was writing my book. The current issue also contains a fascinating interview with Rick Wilcox, Himalayan climber and mountain guide (he is based in Conway, New Hampshire). The year of his Everest climb, 1991, was a year after I had taken a course with Mark Chauvin his associate in the International Mountain Climbing School. We made a midwinter ascent of the headwall of Tuckerman's Ravine and camped beneath a full moon near Lake of the Clouds. It was remarkable cold and incredibly still. Other articles in the issue bring back memories, such as the crossing of the Punta Union Pass in the Cordillera Blanca, Peru.

The other review is in BiblioBuffet, an on-line literary journal: Writing worth reading. Reading worth writing about. The editor, Lauren Roberts, received Himalayan Portfolios as a judge for the Benjamin Franklin Awards (see June 2 blog below) and decided to write about it in her column. She refers to its glorious black –and-white photography, explains the portfolio divisions and illustrates the conjunction of people and mountains by discussing the photograph of Namche Bazaar. This Sherpa center, elevation about 11,300ft, and shown on page 103 of the book is perched in a hanging bowl on the mountain side above the Bhote Kosi.

"More than a fine art photography book, Himalayan Portfolios aims to educate the Himalayan admirer about the mountains, the culture and religion, the people, the impact of the world coming to its doors, the importance of photography in discovering the Himalayan story, and much more. …It is also a tribute to something ultimately unexplainable, something beyond the ken of human attributes."
(for more see the on line article or the Book Reviews section of my Web Page.)

Finally: Catching up with Greg:

Kenneth Hanson and Greg Mortenson at BookExpo America, New York, May 2009 (Greg wrote the Foreword to Himalayan Portfolios and is the co-author of the international best seller Three Cups of Tea.)

Ben Franklin (Act 2)

2009-06-02T13:37:00.000-07:00

Benjamin Franklin meets “Britain’s Got Talent”

See April 24 Blog. On arriving at the Roosevelt Hotel Ballroom on Thursday last we encountered the book display for the Benjamin Franklin Awards and realized that we were in a serious horse race. The significant contender was Wildlands Philanthropy: The Great American Tradition — color photos of different parks and seashores, historical essays and linkages to various conservation groups. Delux slip cover. It was no great surprise when, cheered by a slap up buffet and fortified by wine, we heard the golden award in the ‘Coffee Table Book’ category go to Wildlands.

Instead Himalayan Portfolios achived silver status. A little sad, but then came Saturday — Susan Boyle lost out to an agile dance troupe on “Britain’s Got Talent.” Like her, we sing "I Dreamed a Dream" at full force and enjoy the warm and fuzzy feeling of knowing that everywhere there is sympathy, and gee, an award is an award.

Finalists 2009 Benjamin Franklin Awards, Roosevelt Hotel, New York, May 28.

Question Time

2009-05-11T08:48:00.000-07:00

The photograph documents the question time after my talk on The Making of Himalayan Portfolios at the Large Format meeting in Springfield MA on March 29 (see blog, March 9; photo by Marie Curtis). An account of this event, together with the above picture, is contained in the March/April issue of VIEW CAMERA (p 57). In the talk I recounted the evolution of my book from a gallery exhibit through the design process and essay writing to the epic struggle to achieve the best possible duotone printing.

The slide seen as a wall projection to the left in the photograph was added as a grace note. The original photograph, seen by me last year, is in the Darjeeling Himalayan Mountaineering Institute (founded by By Tenzing Norgay). It shows Oliver Wheeler, age 31, together with his two Tibetan assistants, on the 1921 Everest Reconnaissance Expedition. He was seconded to the expedition as a photographer and surveyor by the Survey of India because of his experience with photo-surveying. The caption says that he is posed with a plate camera. That would be consistent with the idea that the camera was for survey use. In the course of his map making Wheeler discovered the East Rongbuck Glacier. Mallory’s climbing group had hiked right past the junction. Later Wheeler became Surveyor General of India.

One question remains: how did the picture captions in VIEW CAMERA get switched!

NOMINATION

2009-04-24T13:33:00.000-07:00

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AWARD NOMINATION

Once a year the Independent Book Publishers Association holds a festive jamboree in New York just ahead of the opening of Book Expo America. On that occasion they wrap themselves in the mantle of Benjamin Franklin, who is well know to have enjoyed gala occasions in England, France and America. He was an independent printer and publisher and, undoubtedly, would have qualified as a member had he applied. Therefore, in his name they hand out AWARDS to publishers for the “BEST BOOKS,” as judged by top designers and editors. Lo and behold, Himalayan Portfolios; Journeys of the Imagination (Fields Publishing), to which this blog is devoted, is one of three nominees in the category: Coffee Table Books / Large Format.

Ben Franklin was no stranger to awards. In 1753 he received the Copley Medal from the Royal Society for his work on electricity – including the invention of the lightening conductor. In 2006 Fields Publishing received a Benjamin Franklin Award for their Ann Packard book. Gail and Charles Fields, designer and editor, and pre-press expert Glen Bassett, are anxiously awaiting May 28, the date of the gala. Will lightening strike twice?

Stay tuned for more information.

Darwin, Fox Talbot, The View Camera

2009-03-19T08:36:00.000-07:00

JUVAT IRE JUGIS QUA NULLA PRIORUM CASTALIAM MOLLI DEVERTITUR ORBITA CLIVO

There are times when some piece of historical information fits exactly in place and locks in an argument already made. This occurred last week when I visited for a second time the exhibit Endless Forms: Charles Darwin and the Visual Arts at the Yale Center for British Art (the show runs until May 3.)

The pictures that caught my attention on the first trip were the watercolors by Joseph Dalton Hooker from his botanical and geological trip to Sikkim and Nepal in 1848-9. You will find a photograph of a rock formation that Hooker described in his Himalayan Journals on page 122 of my book Himalayan Portfolios; Journeys of the Imagination. I called it “Hooker’s Obelisk.”

But on my second trip to Endless Forms I noticed a rather small photograph labeled The Geologist by William Henry Fox Talbot (dated ca.1843, salt print from a paper 'calotype' negative.) In the inset I have cropped off a woman with a bonnet to the left (his mother?) The shadow of the walking stick implies that the exposure was relatively short. This picture was made at the point when Talbot’s ten years of research had created photography as we know it. The astronomer Sir John Frederick William Herschel had just recently suggested to Talbot that hypo would be a better fixing agent for dissolving unchanged silver chloride in nergatives and prints than alkaline potassium nitrate. The reducing agent Gallic acid had been introduced in order to convert silver chloride to silver (i.e. develop the latent image) in exposed paper negatives or prints. The camera obscura had become the view camera. All this progress was drawn together in the first photographic book The Pencil of Nature published in sections in 1844-46. Direct contact prints of leaves and other objects on silver nitrate imprgnated paper were probably made some decades earler by the circle that included the Wedgewoods and Sir Humphry Davy, but examples are lacking (see recent dispute.)

Those of you have read the essay in my book will realize that I have been intrigued by the linkage between Himalayan photographers and geology. In the essay I discussed the influence of John Ruskin (you will find a painting by Ruskin of a rock formation in the Endless Forms exhibit.) Ruskin’s Modern Painters appeared between 1843 and 1864, so Fox Talbot was not following Ruskin. Almost certainly he was responding to the publication of Charles Lyall’s Principles of Geology (1830-32) that appeared just in time for Darwin to take with him in the Beagle a copy of the first volume. It is also the point at which Fox Talbot began to explore the photographic idea. Lyall’s bombshell was that he made the case in popular form for James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth (1785). Hutton argued that the landscape we see had been formed by great forces of erosion, eruption and movement over vast periods of time. Fox Talbot’s photograph not only points to the existence of “deep time” but it has a second connection with “deep space”. Sir William Herschel had been interested on hypo because he wanted to use a telescope to obtain silver images of stars that could be assayed to measure relative star magnitudes. Ruskin's painting is about experience -- the quidity of rocks. Talbot's phtograph is about the process of interpreting the rocks.

What about the above Latin quotation? it appears on the title page of The Pencil of Nature. A little poking around on the Internet established that it is from Book III of Virgil’s Georgics. Fox Talbot studied Classics and Mathematics at Harrow and Trinity College Cambridge (alongside exercising his scientific curiosity). He published in both areas. Virgil was part of the basic training in the classics, so the quote implies a context that a reader would be expected to fill in. The poem is concerned about Nature, including horses, oxen and goats, hence it fits well with the title of the book. But the specific reference is to Mount Parnassus, a mountain of barren limestone in central Greece that towers above Delphi. Parnassus is dedicated to Apollo and is the home of the muses. The expanded quotation and a poetic translation are as follows:

sed me Parnasi deserta per ardua dulcis
raptat amor; iuvat ire iugis, qua nulla priorum
Castaliam molli devertitur orbita clivo.

But I am caught by ardent sweet ravishing desire
Above the bleak Parnassian steep; I love
To walk the heights, from whence no earlier track
Slopes gently downward to Castalia's spring.

Fox Talbot was the first to walk the heights.
He made his own track.

COLLECTIVE ACTIVITIES

2009-03-09T11:08:00.000-07:00

Valley Photo Center
Second floor of Tower Square
1500 Main St Springfield, MA 01115

Meeting sponsored by the
New England Large Format Photography Collective (NELFPC)
Sunday March 29th
1:00 pm:
Kenneth Hanson (this blogger) will be giving a talk on the making of his book Himalayan Portfolios; Journeys of the Imagination. He will discuss both the development of the project and the mechanics of the process (as outlined in his January 5 blog).

3:00 pm:
Paul Turnbull, Executive Director of the Hallmark Museum of Contemporary Photography in Turners Falls, MA will present a talk on how to successfully prepare and present work to galleries and museums.

Downtown Springfield, MA, is very quiet on a Sunday afternoon and there should be no problem parking in the street near the Tower Square building.

Kehler Liddell Gallery
873 Whalley Avenue - New Haven, CT 203-389-9555

Meeting of the Photo Arts Collective of New Haven
Thursday April 2
7:00 pm:
This blogger will jump right back up again and, having learned by experience, will give an improved version of the Springfield talk listed above. Those who attended the first talk will have had time to think up really difficult questions. They will be able to expose the confusion in his thinking. It should be an interesting evening. All welcome. No camera necessary, just curiosity.

There is a parking lot behind the gallery. Entry just beyond the gallery.

ORDERING: GOING GLOBAL

2009-02-12T12:44:00.000-08:00

Book marketing involves a complicated relay process. At one end is the author who engages in friendly exchanges with the publisher. At the other end is the reader. The friendly reader could, perhaps, buy the book from the friendly author or friendly publisher, but no, there are market forces that demand otherwise. Big Big book stores, or on-line chains such as Amazon, are set up to buy books from a distributor who fronts for the publisher (who, in turn, holds friendly exchanges with the author.) Small book sellers do not like to deal with small publishers as they have to spend money setting up separate accounts.

Up to now the distributor has been missing in this relay, but no more! Fields Publishing has now linked up with IPG, the Independent Publishers Group, one of the largest book distributors nationally and world wide. They will sell directly, or through booksellers. The book should be available through chains such as Barns and Noble, later this year . IPG issues its catalog in May and the catalog will contain a full page promotion. At present the simplest method to obtain the book is to order from IPG by phone.

Order by Telephone: IPG Orders: 800-888-4741.

IPG Himalayan Portfolios Click

Web IPG general: http://www.ipgbook.com/

Enter Kenneth Hanson for information.

E-mail IPG Enquiries: frontdesk@ipgbook.com.

The Large Format Conspiracy

2009-01-05T08:52:00.000-08:00

In these digital days of point-and-shoot and cell-phone cameras it may come as a surprise that Large Format photographers are alive and active. They exist as custodians of a wonderful past. More importantly, they exist because the discipline of using the large format camera offers a distinct way of seeing. The process is necessarily deliberate: the image is composed on the ground glass screen inverted and reversed — an arrangement that helps to brings out the graphic composition.Darkroom printing creates a performance memory that bonds the photographer to the image. The New England Large Format Photographic Collective, NELFPC, was created a few years ago to bring together like minded practitioners and promote the art of the view camera.

Toyo 4x5 View Camera and Goat near the Masherbrum base camp, Karakoram 2001. Photograph by Rob White.

Thanks to the determination of its founder Steve Sherman, NELFPC has arranged a special

Large Format Weekend, March 27-29.

Friday March 27: Trip to the AIPAD exhibit in New York City. Gene LaFord will hang work by NELFPC members in the Valley Photo Center in Springfield MA.

Saturday March 28: Workshop-demonstration by Bob Carnie, master printer and photographer (Elevator Photographic, Toronto, Canada). The workshop will be conducted in Steve Sherman’s large darkroom in Rocky Hill, Connecticut.

Sunday March 29: Lectures and discussion at the Valley Photo Center, Springfield, MA.

I (Kenneth Hanson) will speak about the creation of Himalayan Portfolios; Journeys of the Imagination.

Paul Turnbull, Director of the Hallmark Museum of Contemporary Photography in Turner Falls MA, will describe his work as a curator (his most recent exhibit was of work by Paul Caponigro). He will also talk about the process of creating a book of his own photographs.

My Talk:

The Process and the Dream: Himalayan Portfolios

The book was created in a period when enormous technical advances were being made in scanning and digital printing. I will discuss my stumbling technical progress and the expert involvement of Charles Fields, Gail Fields and Glen Bassett. . The timeline was as follows: The initial conversation with Charles Fields took place in 1999. A tentative structure emerged after I mounted a large solo exhibit at UConn in early 2002. Two further Himalayan trips were made and the text was written and rewritten. In 2006 came the editorial choice of images and the contract commitment. The book was almost press ready, barring final corrections and the duotone separations, in late 2007. The press run was completed March 1, 2008 and the shipment arrived from Korea on Cape Cod May 19.

A book is more that a grab bag of well rendered photographs. My fundamental task has been to explore photographically the concept of the Himalayan journey, both as reality and as symbol, by documenting actual journeys.

Precise documentation is an essential part of the view camera aesthetic. In Part 1 I have emphasized the specificity of the process by including maps, by noting the trek day on which each photograph was taken, by reporting the elevation of camera and peaks, and by outlining the geology, but I have omitted the usual travel anecdotes about lost duffle bags, altitude, apple bandy and what not. In many cases the landscape images include Buddhist emblems of the Absolute: prayer stones, isolated monasteries, prayer flags, cairns. A few portraits have been included.

The images were selected on the basis of on my own subjective judgments, but viewers will bring to the book their own prior experience and will make from the photographs their own imaginative journeys. The Himalayas are emblems of the ultimate challenge and the final passage between life and death. As such they demand our serious attention.

The second part of the book is a record of my own iconic explorations; the essay is an Enquiry in the eighteenth century sense rather than a statement of beliefs. I am concerned about the childhood sense of curiosity and astonishment without which the journey would not take place. I am concerned about Western and Buddhist narrative frames and modes of perception: there are Western traditions of exploration and mountaineering, and there is the understanding of the mountains by the people of the mountains. I am concerned about the poetic concepts of the quest and of the Mountain Sublime — call it joy, beauty, terror. I am concerned about the journey that abandons security and moves beyond the certainty of accepted boundaries.

In presenting my photographs I am faced with a dilemma. Given the constraints of time and attention, it makes sense to reverse this presentation — to begin with some theme examined in the essay, such as the elements of the heroic journey or the concept of the Sublime, and then use the photographs to illustrate the theme. But the book allows the viewer to follow the photographer who first had to learn to trust the landscape. I had to feel the space encountered in order that the two-dimensional print could be an entrance to an imagined space. The discovered emblems, the whole notion of a Himalayan journey arose from that experience. Much the same could be said about the art of listening: trust the music, trust the poem. From such trust much else can follow.

These reflections were, in part, prompted by an Amazon review written by a friend, Kate Latimer. In order to appreciate the power of the book, she found she needed to view and read its "chapters” over several days. “Each chapter invites you to feel as well as see the stark reality of being in the midst of such dangerous and overwhelming landscapes.” (You can find her words via my Web site under Reviews.)

Another factor was the viewing af extraordinary 1973 Spanish movie The Spirit of the Beehive directed by Victor Erice and photographed by Luís Cuadrado (Criterion, 2006). The setting is 1940 soon after the end of the Spanish Civil War. The superb images of the bleak Castilian landscape and sparsely furnished house interiors are haunting, as is the acting of the small six year old girl Ana. In some ways the making of a movie is like making a photographic book: images have to be chosen and ordered in a meaningful sequence. With the movie came a documentary “Footprint of the Spirit” in which the director, writer and producer discussed the generation of the film. It has sections entitled: Primordial Images, Traces of Light, Journey of a Child’s Gaze, Interior Exiles, Return to the Source. They were organizing the film in terms of echoing symbols and yet the subject was the, ultimately mysterious, unbounded imaginative world of the little girl as she encounters gentleness and danger and the death of a fugitive. As they proceeded they found they could throw away the framing material about the devastation left by the Civil War and leave the biographies of the adult parents undefined. Symbols dissolved into events. The movie forces the viewer to identify with Ana and thus to construct the unexplained mysteries and dangers as seen through her eyes. I am still trying to find words for this experience: astonishment is linked to fear and trust. Is this what my book is about?

Three Cups of Tea

2008-12-03T18:31:00.000-08:00

I heard about Greg Mortenson’s work in building Korphe school near the Braldu river in the Karakoram shortly before my 2001 Pakistan trip. When I unexpectedly encountered a brand new school in the village of Hushe I at once knew that this was a further achievement by Greg. Here girls as well as boys are being educated. The story of its construction, completed in 1998, is included in chapter 16 of Three Cups of Tea; One Man's Mission to Promote Peace One School at a Time. This book, written by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, has been a New York Times best seller for an incredible 94 weeks.

I made contact with his organization, The Central Asia Institute (CAI), when I got back. In 2006, although I knew Greg would be incredibly busy, I wrote to ask if he would write a foreword to my book. To my astonishment he said yes—with enthusiasm. That was just before the paperback edition of Three Cups of Tea hit the world. I finally shook Greg by the hand this fall, but I had to stand in line for two hours to meet him and thank him for his support. Such is fame.

The Institute’s publication Journey of Hope arrived last week. It records the growth of the CAI and its success in working with communities to achieve their educational goals in the mountains of the Karakoram, Pamir and Hindu Kush. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, where so much is going wrong and the struggle for military control seems endless, this is one story that is going right. What a difference a small amount of money can make when the community is determined to succeed.

Today I received a Christmas card from Jim Koenigsfeld of Durango, CO. We shared a tent on the way to Everest in 2005. Greg visited Durango and Father Jim had the presence of mind to ask Greg to add his signature to mine in his copy of Himalayan Portfolios. Thanks Jim for the idea. If you, the reader, can track Greg down I am sure he will be delighted to sign your copy.

PS. The new CAI calander features schools being built in the Pamir mountains of Afghanistan.

Interview of the Month

2008-11-28T10:03:00.000-08:00

My October exhibit at the The Picture Framer gallery in Cheshire prompted Tracey O'Shaughnessy to arrange for us to meet. Our exciting and rewarding conversation about Himalayan Portfolios lasted for almost two hours. Later there were numerous e-mail exchanges to clarify philosophical points. The result is the essay Portfolio / This Month in the December issue of the Connecticut Magazine (p 42). An equally professional and rewarding interview by Hank Hoffman in September led to an article in the series Artists Next Door in the October issue of The Arts Paper (Arts Council of Greater New Haven.) I am amazed how these skilled writers were able to turn a stack of notes into valuable presentations. The text of these articles, together with Lee Jacobus’ enthusiastic comments on my book on the Faith Middleton Book Show (Connecticut Public Radio, aired Oct 13), will be found on my web site.

Hello. Welcome to my Blog World

2008-11-25T08:58:00.000-08:00

My advisory committee tells me that a blog should be spontaneous and open to unexpected comments from those who log on. I am sure they are right, but I have one slight difficulty, I am only really spontaneous above 10,000 ft. Below that elevation I am weighed down with a sense of responsibility and given to serious analytical statements; above I am given to wry comments and liable to break into dance. In this I resemble the yak. Just looking at a yak below 10,000 ft you may not know it is weighed down with responsibility, but other yaks can tell. Above 10,000 ft the spontaneity is obvious to all, provided you take into account the limited gestures that nature has given to the yak. But here goes. Even a philosophical yak can hope to fly.

Bound by Tradition and Religion:

Tibetan Tangkas
Exhibit: THE BENTON MUSEUM OF ART

UConn Storrs (Until Dec 19)

Some months ago when Himalyan Portfolios first emerged Karen Sommer and Tom Bruhn, at the Benton, invited me to contribute to their planned exhibit. They needed a landscape context for the Tibetan art to be displayed and for the sand mandala to be constructed by the monks of the Namgyal Monastery. The mandala has been a great attraction at the museum in the past. The completed design will be swept away in a closing ceremony on December 7.

We selected two pairs of photographs. Each pair joined a Nepalese monastery to its mountain setting. The first joined Braga Monastery with the Roc Noir, a massive glaciated promontory of the Annapurna Himmal. The second pair, taken in Inner Dolpo, joined Shey Monastery with a view of the arid landscape seen from the Se La looking towards Tibet (Himalayan Portfolios, pages 85, 89 and 58, 59.) Shey monastery was the 1973 destination of Peter Matthiessen, as recoded in his book The Snow Leopard. My visit was in 1993; the first year that access to Inner Dolpo had been granted for many years.

With my usual excess zeal for imparting information, I prepared a wall statement compressing the evolution of Himalayan Buddhism into just three pages. “No way can we display that,” said Tom. But then he came up with the idea of printing a fold-out flier. With a touch of great showmanship he used as the cover a spectacular image taken from one of the Tangkas: Palden Lahamo, “Glorious Goddess,” protector of the Geluk order (to which the Dalai Lama belongs), guardian of Lhasa. The image was a great hit with the school parties trailing through the museum to see the sand mandala.

Lecture: Once the pictures were chosen I had to fulfill my commitment to give a Sunday lecture on Landscape and Belief; A View Camera in the Himalayas. This was a chance to revisit some of the ideas I had developed in the essay in the second part of Himalayan Portfolios. I contrasted two narratives: that of the Western visitor who travels by choice and that of the people of the mountains who must survive isolation, aridity, earthquakes, landslides and the collapse of moraine lakes.

For the first I showed pictures taken in the Pakistan controlled Karakoram, the region of K2. I argued that the primary Western narrative is the Heroic Quest whose focus is a search for a core identity. There is an encounter with the Mountain Sublime that combines beauty, joy, terror, awe.

For the second I showed pictures of Dolpo in Nepal. Here the narrative centers on Buddhism. My photographs show tokens of the Absolute: carved mani stones, prayer flags, cairns decorated with tattered scarves, isolated monasteries and sacred mountains. The Buddhist and Bon monasteries focus on Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. But the dangers of the environment are entwined with idea of mountain gods and sprits, demons and fierce defenders. Many of the Tangkas on display that represent fierce defenders derive from the yogin-based tradition exemplified by Padma-sambahva (Lotus Born) a Tantric teacher and miracle worker who came to Tibet around 760 CE and founded the Old Sect (Nyng-ma-pa). In the mountains Buddhist devotion embraces the isolation as it concentrates on the Absolute.

Such a condensed presentation raised many issues. Do the concepts of the Mountain Sublime and the Absolute share enough to form a bridge between East and West? Can a non-Buddhist use the View Camera as a neutral instrument to understand the Buddhist culture in a more that superficial way? Can the View Camera help to reveal the concept of core identity to a Buddhist culture that believes in transcending identity? Are such journeys of the imagination possible?

History: My participation in the Benton exhibit is the completion of a challenge posed in 2001. As a result of Karen’s suggestion, I was invited to exhibit my Himalayan Photograph in the Jorgensen Gallery at UConn. I spent the year preparing the exhibit of some 70 black-and –white photographs, plus some in color— making larger or better prints and creating introductions and maps. The exhibit in 2002 coincided with an exhibit at the Benton: The Mystical Arts of Tibet. Later, my photographs, thanks to Toni Hulse and Tom Vendola, were whisked away to the Pfizer Headquarters in New London.

The Jorgensen show convinced Charles Fields, and eventually me, that a book was possible. I did not realize how far I might have to journey and how many books I would have to read and reread to reach that final goal. But without that initial invitation the book would never have happened. What have I learned along the way? Well for one thing, Yaks are very hard to photograph.

Nepalese Ambassador

2008-11-18T11:34:00.001-08:00

Kenneth Hanson presents Himalayan Portfolios to

the Nepalese Ambassador Suresh Chalise

“…. in gratitude to the Nepalese guides who have done so much to make my visits to the Himalayas memorable, With all good wishes, Kenneth Hanson, November 08.”