Goat Milk and Moonshine

Mike: My friend Freddie Wilkinson is not your average guy. While most of us are waking up in the morning, downing our coffee and heading to an office, Freddie spends his days dreaming up new and exotic acts of vertical insanity for his sponsor, Mountain Hardware, to showcase. To visit him at work, Susannah and I had to spend two days riding buses on roads chiseled into mountainsides by hand, then trek up a remote valley for three days beyond the last human settlement to the foot of a Himalayan glacier. That's a long way to carry a bottle of scotch, but hanging with Freddie has never been boring.

This time around was no different. We caught Freddie and his partners Pat and Dave taking a rare break at base camp, after spending a week climbing above snowline. The five of us split the scotch with the trio's Nepali base camp cook (NOTE: "split,"in this case, refers to dividing the bottle into equal portions after Freddie had consumed roughly 75% of it) and spent a few days swimming in glacial pools, relaxing and bouldering in the moraine, and riding out afternoon storms playing cards. The Nepali cook happily introduced us to his favorite card game, which featured an arcane and endlessly malleable set of rules only he could understand. He seemed to win a lot.

As the climbers prepared to head back to high camp, we shouldered our packs and headed back down the valley in early morning, hoping to cross the worst of the glacial rivers before the sun melted enough snow to spill their banks. On the way, we met our old friend Vijay, the heroic shepherd who had helped us ford a river on our way up the valley (and been soaked in the process). We passed the day hiking together, exchanging language lessons and songs. As we crossed a small stream, Vijay stopped and asked Susannah solemly if she would like to become his honorary sister. She agreed, and they knelt by the water and drank from each others' hands, cementing the new relationship. Despite warnings we'd heard about the valley's wily shepherds, we found them generous and friendly to a fault. If you need wool, give me a call - I've got a brother-in-law in the business.

The next afternoon, as storm clouds closed in, we saw Vijay beckoning to us from the doorway of a squat stone shepherd's hut. We were happy to escape the rain, and crawled into the tiny shelter to find Vijay and his uncle stoking a fire fueled with dried cow dung. They had a pot of tea going, and invited us to share a cup and wait out the rain. After the tea, they brought out a steel fuel canister full of fresh goat milk, and insisted I try some. Glancing out the narrow doorway at the flock of muddy beasts bleating below, and repeating "pasteurization is for pansies" again and again in my head, I took a long pull. It was as fresh as dairy gets.

After the storm passed, we reluctantly left our bed of hay beneath the rocks and continued south, camping near a pair of herders on their way out of the valley, bringing their flock to market. The next day brought us to the village of Tingrit, where we were welcomed with open arms by a local farmer and his family. The farmer, Tashi Dorje, took us on a long afternoon walk through his fields and the hills above the village, stopping frequently to pick us samples of the local produce and wild berries. "Idyllic" simply doesn't do the place justice. Green fields abundant with sugar snap peas, potatoes, carrots, kale, cabbage, soy beans, wheat, lentils and seabuckthorn berries gave way to apple orchards on the terraces above, before the slopes steepened to become towering snow-capped peaks. Majestic white Buddhist stupas stood guard above it all. We spent the evening enjoying the hospitality of Tashi's entire extended family (which required me to take repeated shots from a bottle of unidentified homemade firewater).

Before dawn the next morning, Susannah, my headache and I caught the bus out of town, headed for the high Himalayan kingdom of Ladakh.