Day 1
We reached Makhlaiyan at around 3 pm on Saturday. The weather was now more alarming as we were surrounded by thick clouds. We were at the base of a big mountain that had about 30 houses or huts made of wood and mud. Some of them were even double-story houses with four or five rooms. Our porters told us to trek from there alone, keep our bags inside the jeep, and settle ourselves in one of the 30 huts. All of the huts were empty. No even a single human being.
Our porters were probably thinking about our well-being as they wanted us to stay inside the huts to prevent us from getting cold in the severe weather. They also had plans to spend some time there, parking the jeep at a position where it would not get buried under the snow and get damaged during the time we were climbing on the mountain.
We carried nothing from there and started climbing the mountain. Light snow had started to fall. We followed the path which had no snow on it. It was a small patch big enough for one person to walk comfortably. The trek was steep even from the beginning, We could see Shingri Peak on our right.
It was a coincidence that we chose to stay in a single room hut with its windows open. Now the snowfall was fast and thick. We were getting colder with every passing moment because of the cold air coming consistently from the open windows. After about 1 hour, two of our team members went down in the snow to see if the porters had remembered about us at all. Another issue was that our bags were in the jeep. We wanted to put on all of our clothes that we had brought from home to stay warm. It was later that we found out that the hut in which we were staying was a Mosque.
We found our guides at the exact place where we had left them. We helped them in parking the jeep, lifted our luggage, and started quickly following Shams Bhai in the trail of snow his feet were making. The snow was falling heavily.
We reached the hut quickly. Our porters quickly gathered wood in the snowfall while we rested in the hut with warm clothes and our sleeping mattresses. Our porters light a big fire around which we sat, talked, and ate. We also made plans about how to plan the next day of trekking. We checked the weather report and found the next day clear.
The snow continued to fall till midnight. Most of us hadn't seen such a heavy snowfall before in their lives so we were both amazed and terrified by it. It was constant falling of white threads of snow moving at an angle with the direction of the wind. 8 hours of heavy rainfall meant that the track ahead would be covered in deep snow. The goods news was that it was fresh snow on the mountain and fresh snow is never slippery. It holds.
