High Roads News Sticky

By request : this will be a sticky with condensed news, continously re-edited .

Srinagar-Leh Open 2013 : officially open on April 9th, light vehicles coming in to Leh the preceding two days.
UPDATE , MARCH 30th : FRESH VEGGIES IN LEH – meaning open trail over the Zoji La , not open road , and a few fresh provisions taken in by donkeys.See the comment below.

Manali-Leh Roadwork 2013 : Rohtang La cleared ( nearly two weeks after the previously announced mid-April goal ) , first vehicles over the top April 26th. Open road up to Keylong , May 17th.

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TIBET :  Closed over March , same as last five years . Mixed nationalities groups now getting in , mid-May.

KARAKORAM HIGHWAY  opened in April this year , first time ever. Still no visa on arrival in Sost – which means it becomes very hard  to enter Pakistan this way  without a visa arranged in your home country. The  road closed as usual from December.

See the relevant sections ( Manali-Leh , Srinagar-Leh etc ) for more details.

Opening The Roads To Leh , 2013

Srinagar-Leh will open tomorrow , according to The Tribune.  This may  actually happen, since the BRO road crew was a few klicks from the Zoji  La pass a week ago. There is still a conspicuous  lack of details though. Weather forecast says says rain five out of six coming days in Srinagar , thinning out towards to Kargil and Leh , night temperature just under zero , so more snow is definitely possible . 

No mentions of the the earlier bold BRO claim that the road would be thrown open  on March 31 – but still good chances of  this becoming the earliest opening of the road in more than a decade , the former record was April 15th in 2008 . That turned out mildly chaotic. 

 

The timeline for clearing the roads to Leh : 

 

Srinagar-Leh : first the road will be cleared up to Sonmarg ( this year March 16th  ) , then the Zoji La will be almost cleared and the first loads of fresh supplies will come in to Leh …with donkeys ( last days in March , this year ) .A few cabs will get in before the road is officially thrown open. Lastly the roadmarker at  the LAHDC  site will show open when the road is deemed fit for all vehicles , i.e. busworthy. 

 

Manali-Leh : first there will be rumors , like this years classic when some Indian media claimed that the whole road would be cleared by April 15th. Clearing the road starts in March , with three BRO groups working at the same time : two crews working from south ( Manali ) and north ( Koksar ) end towards the Rohtang La , and the third crew working going past Darcha towards Baralacha La and the 5000+ passes beyond that . Once the Rohtang has been cleared ( BRO´s goal at present : mid-April ) all groups will unite  in the push towards Leh. There may or may not be a period ( like in 2011) when the road is declared officially open , but not for buses : ” Open For LMV” , i.e. Light Motor Vehicles , including minibuses. Last of all the Rohtang will open for the daytrippers from Manali. This year the plan is introduce one way traffic , up only in the morning hours , down in the afternoon. 

 

Srinagar-Leh and Manali-Leh are military priorities , and get a lot of resources. The NH 22 route , Shimla-Spiti over the Kunzum La will open later than Manali-Leh , and the road over Saach Pass even later.

Flying Out Of Leh

Suddenly Ladakh becomes a part of Kashmir , as I roll in to the Kushok Bakula airport in Leh. Soldiers  at the gate to the airport , again outside the airport building , before entering , and again…

 

Standard baggage check ( where my storm kitchen is immediately picked out on the x-ray screen , and the uncapped tank saves me from ripping up the pack ) , then walking thru the metal detector … and a long pat down . Not a single smile as my parting gifts wrapped in khataks comes up . The next Ladakhi official tells me unprompted that this was a newbie from Kargil , hinting at him being half outsider , and that he clocked the process at twelve minutes. My fault , mostly  : a good pair of travelling pants stuffed  to avoid overweight charge for my main pack. The requested cooperation is symbolic from other passengers as well : lot of people like  goes thru with not only laptops but with the laptop bag ,  which acts as  the male handbag . Then a repeat baggage check , and the final identifying of my pack out on the tarmac before it gets loaded on the airplane. Two AA batteries turn up at the last screening , gets whisked away … and discretly returned to me before the the plane takes off.

High Fashion : John B West

Bowties are cool. Even more cool : bowtie doctors talking physiology , from the perspective of decades with boots on the ground , on the worlds highest mountains. John B West talks us through a medical expedition to Mount Everest , casually mentioning climbing icefalls etc , and then goes in to the physiology :

” So if any of you are thinking of climbing Mount Everest , you might want to go along to the local hospital and measure the the ventilatory response to hypoxia ..If it´s low , give up any hope of reaching the top , and take up another hobby like gardening. “
West is a giant already in respiratory physiology in general , with a widely translated textbook , and hundreds of published articles. One is a brilliant description of how Ibn Al Nafis , an Islamic scholar , gave the first correct description of how the blood moves from the heart to the lung , back to the heart and out to the arteries. Western medical tradition maintained for centuries after that the venous blood moved directly through the thick wall between the left and right heart. In hindsight this should have been easily refuted in any big kitchen at the time .

Also featured in the video : Peter Hackett , another rising star in high altitude physiology , making a solo summit
climb of Mt Everest , more succesful than wise. The video is. the final part in series of respiratory physiology lectures , shortlinked at http://korta.nu/westresp

 

Highly Rational ?

 

 

A recent study in Journal of Travel Medicine from Cusco on travellers advice and behavior makes one doubt both sides of the patient doctor relation.

 

.One out of four that had actively sought out a doctor before travelling could not recall any advice at all given in how to deal with high altitude.Seems hard to fault the travellers with this , or not looking first towards the GP group as an explanation.

.Two out of three remembered being adviced to use Diamox , an option that was promptly rejected by the majority.

. Gradual ascent is the proven most effective way prevent AMS : this option was recalled by one in twenty , less than unproven methods like hydration and near identical to the number that were adviced to use coca. By chance or from good sense travellers did a bit better than advised in this respect : one out of ten made a first stop at a lower altitude than Cusco first , and fared better from this. /p>

..So what was the outcome of advice and behavior in this group of tourists ?

A bit worse than web lore would have you believe: half of the group scored their own symptoms as AMS score three (mild AMS ) or higher , median score..five. One in six had severe AMS , highest score thirteen – that would have been the one person that evaced out of Cusco with a pulmonary edema…

!Typical outcomes were a lot less dramatic : one in six confined to bed , and one in twenty had to cancel tours.

Predictable results : those with a gradual ascent , that were older, or took Diamox had less AMS. On the mildly surprising side those that used coca reported AMS more often. Coca users also seemed to be unaware of the risk of being tested as positive for cocaine after returning home.

 

 

 

 

 

study

pP.

Manali-Leh Out After Clodburst

Cloudburst in epic proportions taking out bailey bridges , a school , the life of a Manali resident and tossing boulders and vehicles downstream Beas river yesterday.The road the southern  port of the Solang tunnel work beyond repair for the coming weeks. Manali-Leh out in five different places . Heavy rainfall for the coming two days in forecasts.

UPDATE , August 8th . That was fast :Traffic now running ( despite BRO´s first comment it would take “at least a week” to get it back in full order) to Keylong & Kaza. Moderate rain four out of five coming days.

Vertical Maps : Planning High Altitude Travel

The best medicine is a good map : plan your travel from the lowest point to the highest. This is one of the things that should be easy , but isn´t always so. To continue the medicine analogy there is both some really good medicine out there … as well as some funky pharmacies. Good and bad sources  and some online tools for altitude data  :

* Wikipedia
This is where nine out of ten go for information. Generally good for capitals and the most well known cities , but one has to read carefully to see how  many high high altitude destinations are spread out vertically. Case in point : a cursory reading of  the La Paz article will quickly take away the notion that La Paz lies at 4000+ ( a notion that relies on the airport in  El Alto – which is  a separate town ) , but you have to read it carefully to see that the lowest parts actually are well below the altitude of Cusco ( 3400-ish ) . Outside capitals and major cities anything goes on Wikipedia : I have shifted for example the fairly well known location Sarchu ( “The Vomit Hilton” ) five hundred meters up from GPS and map readings .

* Falling Rain
Fairly unknown tool , with  very accurate data on all airports. Case in point : it gives the right altitude for the Gongkar airport serving Lhasa , instead of the   internet truth saying it´s two hundred meters higher.
The site also offers a huge listing of places around the world listed alphabetically ,  often with  less sucess : one example is Kargil which has been misplaced five hundred meters vertically. The altitude is correct for the cordinates given , but this point is placed on a steep mountain   slope outside the town.
The listings also require some basic geographic knowledge , starting with placing your search in the right region and state. This means for example being aware of which parts often attributed to  Ladakh actually are within Lahaul ( i.e. Himachal Pradesh , not  Kashmir ) , and looking for Tibetan destinations under the official Chinese  name Xizang

 
* Google Earth
Software is good , while the wetware stuggles. One of many classic examples here from Tabo , Himachal Pradesh :

At the bottom of the picture we see the Spiti River , off center left is the Tabo monastery – zoom in close enough and you even get a good idea of the the layout of the buildings , and a sense of history  on seeing the fuzzy worn down edges of chortens and chapels , compared to the newer surrounding buildings. Along the   the top edge runs the road to Kaza , and a helpful linked image : “Tabo 3050 m “  This is where confusion enters : the view is looking down on Tabo from the meditation caves above . Is the altitude given from viewpoint at the caves , or from the monastery itself  ? Googling this seemingly provides an easy answer : a massive amount of sources place Tabo at 3050 meters.
This is complicated by three factors : walking down from the viewpoint you are met by sign when crossing the road : Tabo , elevation 3265 meters. Fire up a GPS and it will show this to be the altitude of the river bend , and the gompa sitting twenty meters higher. Hauling around a GPS is hardly a requirement , and one may understand the part of missing the sign at the road .. but the last part is embarrassing , at the bottom of the window : Google Earth presents both position and altitude when you plonk down place marks and images on the map, and for every instant you rest the mouse cursor on the screen. In this case : 3287 meters.
The other snafu factor is the one already seen above from fallingrain : elevation  data are correct for the placemark , but  placemarks  are erratically distributed  . Some examples are surrealistic : the Boudnath stupa is a shock white dome , one of the largest stupas in the world  in a – now – urban Kathmandu setting that for years had a placemark more than a kilometer off . You´ll find the same village along trekking trails duplicated more than a days walk from each other , after being guesstimate positioned  afterwards at the home computer.  

* altitude.nu is an online resource , that uses the same satellite data as Google Earth. The advantage over other online tools (  like Wikimapia ) is that you get an altitude with each placemark. Saving  positions gives a link – same as on Wikimapia. The flipside is that you have to know where to place positions : there is no search function. One example here : Keylong bus stand , which is below 3100 ( along with the rest of the town ), contrary to web lore.

* Altimeters are based on air pressure , and for this reason have a bad reputation , from the expectation that weather variation will mean random values. Well maintained altimeters actually seem to work  ok – one example can be seen on Janne Corax´s bicyle logs over the Himalayas , where there is little variation ( as a rule within fifty meters ) between altimeter and GPS .

* GPS is rightfully the practical golden standard. Precision depends on the number of satellites with a clear line of sight to the GPS unit  , giving highest precision on mountain peaks , wide  plateaus and passes . In practical terms precision is within a few meters  ( even with instruments that can appears as toys , as long as one is outside the urban canyon landscape , the likes of the trail to Petra , or road sections that are gallery cut in to the side of mountain.

The backside is that GPS eats a lot of batteries. Keeping them powered up for days is not an option , unless you can recharge along the way.

Afterword : does this really matter ?

Well , in some cases it means a vital difference.The Sarchu entry on Wikipedia definitely had safety consequences.On a less dramatic scale : altitude sickness is nearly impossible below 2500 meters , as long as there is no exertion involved. A thousand meters higher it starts to become relatively common – without exertion. The offshot of that , and the fact that acclimatization is dead slow to non-existent under  two thousand meters ,  means that  a lot can be won by planning the first nights right , with the right information. Especially on a tight schedule it can be worth a lot to place  your first acclimatization nights well over two thousand meters , and below three thousand.

Saach Pass Opens , 2012

In todays Tribune : Saach Pas , the third route or at least starting point for Leh , from Chamba in Himachal Pradesh , opens today. Including ” tourist traffic and pedestrians”. Stiff hike up to 4413 meters.