Mana. We had to turn back from a point 300 feet below the summit of Mana (23,860 feet) in 1961 because of bad weather. We tried to climb it by the north face although Frank Smythe reached the summit in 1937 from the south. There were 12 members of our 1966 team: Memai Bose, Madan Mohan Mondal, Dilip Banerjee, Tapas Bhattacharjee, Prodyut Chatterjee, Pranesh Chakravarty, Narayan Rakshit, Sujan Kolay, Dr. Dipak Sinha, Dhruva Mazumder, Shib Shankar Banerjee and I as leader. On the morning of August 21 we reached Hardwar and by the next evening were at Joshimath, 170 miles from Hardwar. We followed the Dhauli gorge to Shepuk, at the confluence of the Dhauli and Raikana rivers. On the 28th we crossed the foaming, roaring Dhauli, making a bridge of logs, brought from far behind. From Shepuk we followed the Raikana to its source, the glacial lake, Basudhara Tal, where on the 30th we set up Base Camp at 15,700 feet. Camps I at 17,100 feet, II at 18,000 feet and III at 19,200 feet were easy to set up, all on the lateral moraine of the northern side of the East Kamet Glacier. The route was known and the sites were the same as in 1961. Half a mile onward the glacier took a turn to the south and merged with Mana’s north wall. On September 7 we pitched camp at 20,400 feet on a rock buttress. The route to Camp IV was easy. Suddenly the weather changed and for two days we could hardly move out of our tents. The real climbing starts from there. From another rock buttress 300 feet above Camp IV the wall of hard ice rose for more than 2000 feet at 60° and was threatened by hanging glaciers. Above was a plateau, about a quarter mile wide and a mile long, where we set up Camp V at 22,800 feet. On September 17 we pitched an assault camp on the other end of the plateau, but snow fell all night and an avalanche on the morning of the 18th shattered our tents. Another party consisting of Chakravarty and the Sherpas Pasang Phutar, Tsering Lakpa and Pasang Tsering left Camp V on the 19th at 8:30. Two other Sherpas accompanied them only to break trail on the plateau through deep snow. The weather was good for the first two hours, but afterwards it became very bad. By 2:30 the assault party had reached the north ridge and proceeding northwest, they confronted a rock face where 200 feet of ropes had been fixed a day or two earlier. They reached the top at 4:45 p.m. Next morning we left Camp V and started towards Camp IV. After descending 500 feet of that steep slope, the third man of a rope of four Sherpas had a slip and dragged the others down a thousand feet. All four Sherpas were injured, two of them seriously, but fortunately there was no loss of life. This ultimately forced us to give up any idea of climbing Kamet.

Biswas Biswadeb, Himalayan Club