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ONE
Packing

They weren’t the type to brag. But Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings had been to many places, far more than most of their friends. Soon after getting together back in 1985, they had concluded that in this life there was no point treading water. With no children between them, Don, forty-two, and Jane, forty, had made the most of their shared wanderlust, embarking on six ambitious foreign expeditions in the past eight years. Now, on a summer’s evening in late June 1995, Jane was packing once again, surveying the items laid out around the bedroom of their large, high-ceilinged cedarwood home in the Pacific north-west, ticking them off on a checklist: money belts, passports, tickets and travellers’ cheques, a well-thumbed edition of the Lonely Planet Trekking in the Indian Himalayas, preparing for their latest foreign foray with the clinical confidence of the well-travelled. Memories flitted back and forth – Switzerland, Bolivia, Turkey, India, Nepal. They lived for the wilds, preferably high up in some mountain range. She loved her job as a physical education teacher at a local elementary school, but Jane lived for these summer voyages.

It was a passion for the outdoors that had thrown her and Don together, and as she got ready for another adventure she found herself thinking how strange it was that they had turned out to be such a perfect fit, as back at the start she had not been at all sure about him, and had not thought there would ever be a them. Nowadays she loved Don’s strong, calm demeanour, this dependable climber with a sinewy frame and a rugged beard, who brought others through risky situations with a joke and a squeeze of the arm.

On their wedding day in 1991, Don described them as climbing partners. ‘When you’re tied to someone with a rope,’ Jane would later say, ‘you get to know them very well, and you learn about trust.’

At home they were sober, law-abiding citizens, from solid backgrounds: her father had been a scoutmaster, his a cattle rancher. Out in the wilds, they were both risk-takers. Don had hacked up Mount McKinley in Alaska and taken a tumble at Montana’s Rainbow Falls. Jane had traversed the volcanic glacier fields of Mount Rainier and taught cross-country skiing at Spokane Falls Community College. On a clear day, Rainier, the highest peak in the Cascade Range, was just about visible west of Spokane, a laid-back, outdoorsy sort of city on the eastern fringes of Washington state, where the couple lived and worked. ‘The Mountain’, as people called Rainier, with its three peaks, Columbia Crest, Point Success and Liberty Cap, served as a constant reminder of why they were there. ‘Mount Rainier had a special meaning for him,’ said Jane. Don had been brought up in Spokane, whose motto was ‘Near Nature, Near Perfect’, and the mountains, lakes and woods grounded him like no other place, he said.

Most weekends Don and Jane went out of town. They’d head for the Cascades or the Rockies, whose peaks delineated the skyline to the east and north, trekking, skiing or kayaking with friends, many of them doctors and nurses who had trained or worked with Don, a neuropsychologist, or were old classmates from Spokane’s Shadle Park High. On weekday nights Jane liked to cycle with her fellow teachers and friends from the Spokane Mountaineers, whose eight hundred or so members belonged to the region’s oldest outdoor association. ‘What we did was with the Spokane Mountaineers and through the Spokane Mountaineers,’ she says. For two years she had served as club president, one of the first women to do so, and everyone quickly learned not to get on her wrong side. ‘Don’t bullshit Jane,’ the Mountaineers whispered. Don, as fit as a man a decade younger, joked that he was the First Husband.

Once a month a group of Mountaineers would gather at Jane and Don’s, in the Spokane Valley suburb of Northwood, to plan the next club outing over an exotic dinner. The shady wooden house on stilts with verandas back and front, surrounded by Ponderosa pines, its large sunken living room painted blue and red to match a rug the couple had bought in India, was filled with photos of Jane, smiling or waving against a snowy backdrop, and mementos from the couple’s foreign voyages: Tibetan rugs and prayer flags, tribal masks and recipe books from some far-flung place or other. It was an easy spot to hang out, Don’s golden retrievers, Homer and Bodhi (short for bodhisattva, an enlightened being in Buddhism), sprawled across the floor, Jane walking visitors around her latest botanical acquisitions, displayed in pots along the red-brick path that wound around their garden, Don conjuring some Indian or Thai recipe in the kitchen. ‘You move the flowers around so often you ought to put them on roller skates,’ he used to joke out of the window.

In the summer, most of this close-knit group went further afield, and this year Jane and Don were heading back to the Himalayas, which they had explored twice before. The world’s largest mountain range was a place you could visit time and again, and still know little about it, Don told friends. This time Jane was packing extra carefully, as she had a gut feeling that things might get choppy. They were heading for the mountains of Kashmir. From what they had read, this trip would come with additional risks, as the ranges lay on a political fault-line: a disputed border between warring neighbours India and Pakistan. For the past six years the state had been enmeshed in a local insurgency that pitted Muslim rebels calling for independence against the Indian security forces, which accused them of being in the pay of Pakistan.

Unsettling stories of political and religious turmoil had recently emanated from there, and for several weeks Don and Jane had debated whether to go at all. But they had done their homework, listened to other people’s views and read widely, before concluding that this was, like so many others they had negotiated, a risk worth taking. And now Jane was surveying their kit with a sense of anticipation.

Don’s royal-blue fleecy climbing hat, his blue Gore-Tex Moonstone walking trousers with the black inset panels above the knee, an extra-thick blue Patagonia top. On top of the pile she laid thermal underwear, lightweight T-shirts and rainproof gear. As she ticked off the items, Jane thought how among the many things that had drawn her to Don was something that others found galling: his impulse to order. They were both inveterate list-makers. Hers were invariably practical. His were a mix of function and aspiration, scribbles on yellow legal pads that he left scattered around the house: skiing once a year, cooking the perfect Indian meal, semi-retirement by the age of fifty (which only left another eight years to get his work–life balance sorted out) and, most importantly, an annual mind-expanding and physically demanding expedition. Climbers are like that, he would say. Embracing order so as to cope with the disorder, fetishising the planning in order to counter the random. It was the same with their equipment. Although he said he hated technology, he always bought the latest climbing gear and gadgets. And she loved laying it down, cleaning it, counting it out. This time especially, they needed to get the preparation right.

There was a satisfying rhythm to Jane and Don’s life. He was ‘the philosopher’, she ‘the shipwright’. He sought experiences, while she wrangled with logistics. Prepping for these trips, Don always beefed up on the region’s spirituality and history, while Jane wanted to know how many hours it would take to climb to a particular col. At home, he cooked. She rearranged the garden. He took the photos. She put them into frames. He wanted a crystal ball. She preferred a new set of skis. On holiday, he talked to most anyone, while she took notes and crammed little keepsakes into her rucksack. She was capable and devoted to Don, whom privately she called ‘sweetie’, while publicly she remained fiercely independent, retaining her maiden name. The students at Arlington Elementary viewed her with a mixture of bafflement and awe. ‘Stimulating the nation’s young hearts and minds,’ she said to herself every morning in mock-declamatory style before setting off for school.

With her tight brown curls and turned-up nose, at first glance Jane had an impish air. But to those who knew her well, she was the more driven of the two. Among their circle, many had watched, doubtfully, as Jane had made her first attempts to infect Don with the travel bug. She had gone on foreign-exchange trips at school and travelled across the United States from her native Pennsylvania before pitching up in the Pacific north-west. She was already an explorer, and wanted to partner up with someone who felt the same way.

Don was many things, but until Jane came along nobody would have described him as a man of the world. He was of pure north-west country stock, his father, Claude ‘Red’ Hutchings, having been a tough-talking Idaho cattle-rancher, originally from Coeur d’Alene in the neighbouring county. Don was closer to his mother, Donna, a nurse, and there was a bond between mother and son that had its roots in the loss of his twin brother, who had died at just three days old. But Red had been intent on shaping his surviving son’s earliest memories. Almost as soon as Don could walk, Red had him in the saddle, dressing him in a cowboy hat and boots. Sitting astride his own palomino, Don would accompany his father on week-long ‘gentlemen on horseback’ rides, as he called them, into the wild. But Don wasn’t cut out to be a cowboy.

Instead, a freak accident helped him find his niche. After flying through a car windscreen during high school, he spent months in hospital being put back together. ‘With cuts from ear to ear, tongue damage and teeth knocked out, he thought he looked like Frankenstein,’ said Jane. When he had recovered, Don determined to help others who had also been to the brink. He would follow his mother into the health-care sector. As soon as he was old enough he grew a beard, to conceal his scars.

After school and a BSc from Washington State University, Don opted for neuropsychology, a specialism that appealed to a man who had had many months to explore his inner self while in hospital. For a while it seemed as if he would be a student forever, gaining a Masters and then a doctorate, never straying too far from home. But eventually he made a break, taking up a position as a hospital psychologist in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on the other side of the country. He married for the first time, a psychology student from West Virginia, and together they attempted to renovate a thirty-acre abandoned farm in Pennsylvania. Both projects failed in the end, and Don returned alone and disconsolate to Spokane in 1984.

He found a job as a neuropsychologist at the Sacred Heart. Scott Earl Bently, a former patient who had suffered a severe head injury and paralysis in a car accident, was in awe of him: ‘Don was the catalyst that moved my life away from institutionalised health care to a life of happiness and freedom by integrating me back into society and by remaining my friend, talking with me about hiking, camping, climbing, and other things we were both interested in. I’ll never forget him for that, and I thought then he would remain my friend for my entire life’. Such was Don’s enthusiasm for this esoteric field that the hospital was persuaded to open a dedicated head injuries unit, the first in the region. Soon other local hospitals did the same, bringing Don on board as an advisor.

But the mountains remained his passion. After returning from Pennsylvania he had joined the Spokane Mountaineers, finding a release at high altitude. Soon he was signing up to ice-climbing seminars, instructors’ workshops and winter-camping seminars, and learning Telemark skiing. At five feet eight he had been too short to fulfil his dream of becoming a professional basketball player or footballer, but here was something he could do. Within a few months he was elected to the club’s climbing committee, soon becoming its chairman. One climbing friend described his ‘unbeatable combination of moral fibre that is absolute high-carbon steel’.

Don had not been looking for romance, but through the club he met Jane Schelly. Born and brought up in Orefield, a small town in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, Jane had left the flat landscape of the east as soon as she got out of college in 1976, and headed for the wilderness of the Pacific north-west. She had earned a reputation for fearlessness, and could outpace many of the men in the club. Luck ran in her favour too, said climbing friends: ‘Jane is the type who always lands on her feet.’ She and Don had their first tête-à-tête waist-deep in the Jerry Johnson Hot Springs near Lolo Pass, during a club trip to Idaho in October 1984. ‘Don and I sat in the hot pool and chitchatted,’ Jane remembered. ‘He didn’t tell me for many years that he thought, “That’s the woman I’m going to marry.”’ Afterwards, Don signed up to a country ski class Jane was running out of Spokane Falls Community College. They dated ‘a bit’, but Don was wary of messing things up again, and they did not come together until the following October. ‘We took the same hot springs trip, and clicked,’ says Jane.

Behind Don’s practical façade Jane discovered a romantic, who took her away from school on Friday nights: bed and breakfast on the bay at San Francisco; Point No Point on Washington’s Kitsap Peninsula; an inn in Oregon overlooking the Columbia River. ‘I just couldn’t imagine finding someone as good as Don,’ says Jane. ‘He was a very gentle and sensitive person.’

Don soon became a leader, arranging ‘crazy weekends’, pitching himself and other club members into ‘endurance stunts’, like the time he bivouacked up the East Ridge of Wyoming’s 13,775-foot Grand Teton to watch the Northern Lights. ‘Don got me so fired up about ice climbing,’ recalled Bill Erler, a close friend. ‘We’d just motor up stuff.’ He also gained a reputation as a man who could operate under extreme pressure. Don ‘always tried to do more than his share’, and was ‘a talented and stable force’, according to club member and friend George Neal. Inevitably there were knocks and scrapes, like the winter’s day at Montana’s Rainbow Falls when Don fell and sprained his ankle. Telling the rest of his group to go on without him, he had dragged himself down across a rockslide and to his car, risking permanent injury.

Jane bided her time, waiting for the right moment to widen their horizons. It came in 1988, when they spent four weeks trekking on the arduous Annapurna Circuit in Nepal, in the shadow of Mount Everest. It was Don’s first big foreign trip, and only the second time he had left the US. He could not get enough of the Himalayas, which sparked a fascination in him with all things Asian. Soon his upstairs office in Northwood was crammed with books about climbing in the subcontinent, Tibetan Buddhism and Indian philosophy, yoga and meditation. Most evenings he could be found sprawled across the living-room floor, surrounded by books and maps, Indian music tinkling out of the speakers, plotting the next foray to the East.

The only problem was synchronising their lives. While Jane had the long summer school holidays, Don could never take more than two weeks off. For a while they turned this into part of the adventure, Jane going on ahead and rendezvousing with Don at some distant destination, like the time she toured alone around Thailand and India, having arranged to meet him outside a post office in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. When Don quit his job at the Sacred Heart to set up Spokane’s first independent neuropsychology practice, he did it mainly so he and Jane could spend more time travelling together.

They got round to marrying in 1991, a home-made affair in their back garden, literally tying themselves together with climbing ropes looped into a double fisherman’s knot. It could have been corny, but that was Don and Jane, bound to each other by the things they loved. The act, for Jane, ‘symbolised the dependence of each of us upon the other’. Afterwards, Don gave a set of Tibetan bells to the chaplain in thanks. For their honeymoon they returned to the Himalayas, this time visiting Ladakh, a solemn, arid mountain landscape dotted with prayer flags and Buddhist monasteries in India’s far northern Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) state. Don came home mesmerised by what they had seen, and also by what they had heard of another nearby destination, the Kashmir Valley, that lay three hundred miles to the west, a place of ancient gods with a landscape shaped by hunters and poets.

Four summers later, Jane was packing for the Kashmir Valley. This trip would be a culmination of many things: ten years of climbing, ten years being together, almost a decade of foreign exploration. They had decided there was no better location in which to celebrate.

The journey was well within their physical capabilities. Jane had worked it out. The twelve-day trek would, they hoped, fill their heads and hearts. If the maps were accurate – Don had struggled to find anything half decent – they hoped to cover over a hundred miles, which seemed about right for the kind of weather and the severity of the inclines they expected to encounter.

Don read how the wilderness of glacial chutes and iridescent mountain lakes had a way of punishing trekkers, while serving as home to hard-pressed nomadic gujjars, dards and bakarwals, the native herders, hunters and cowboys who wore kohl round their eyes to ward off evil spirits, their children bound to the backs of their ponies with rope. Through a silent landscape they moved in slender single-file convoys to summer pastures of lush, flower-filled valleys and on to the high Himalayas, a medieval caravan of maroon robes and scarves. Up high, the temperatures careened from the seriously sub-zero to the high forties. There was a dry heat that cracked skin, and a wet cold that blistered everything. Sometimes the wind dropped, only to slam into you like a pantechnicon.

But then, many times before Don and Jane had started off from somewhere beneath a cobalt sky, only to end up in a white-out. Jane had read that it was not exceptional for the highest passes in Kashmir to become blocked by snow even in summer. At times they might need to double back. She knew that, warming and cooling, dehydrating and freezing, the mountains would be punishing, but their years of experience should get them through the worst of it. In Kashmir, where the rich pastureland typically remained frost-free from May to September, they would probably walk for ten hours a day. In the upper reaches, where they would have to negotiate fields of scree that would punish their ankles and knees, they might go down to eight hours. But they had time.

Their destination was a high-altitude ice cave called Amarnath that was dedicated to Lord Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction and transformation. A giant, gaping hole, it looked as if a meteorite had slammed into the side of a mountain. While Amarnath was virtually unknown in the West, it was revered across India as an ancient Hindu pilgrimage site, to which hundreds of thousands of devotees flocked annually. Some came by foot, others by pony, a few on their hands and knees, the least able piggybacking on local guides, everyone scrabbling to scale the mountains so as to demonstrate the depth of their faith.

Don was drawn by the collective act of devotion, and loved the idea of going on Shiva’s trail, but he and Jane intended to arrive at the end of June, before the main pilgrimage season began the following month. That way they would have the route to themselves. After Amarnath they would head west, following the ice-water streams down to the lush pasture of the Lidderwat Valley, where mountain flowers gorged on snowmelt, according to the guidebooks. There they would pitch their tents at a legendary campsite that travellers simply referred to as ‘the Meadow’, a velvet green cleft at a little over ten thousand feet, with an icy river running through it and enveloped on all sides by conifer forests. There was something prosaic, minimalist even, about the sound of the Meadow. Don and Jane looked forward to pitching camp up high, surrounded by aromatic mountain pasture.

By late evening, Jane had placed tidy little heaps of possessions all over the bedroom floor. Now she slid each one of them into a separate waterproof pouch, working on a maximum load of fifteen kilos per person. Using the vacuum cleaner, she sucked the air out of each before slotting the shrivelled jellyfishes they now resembled into the new frameless purple-and-red Sundog daypacks she and Don had bought during a recent club trip to Montana. For Jane, packing was an art, the trip broken down into components, each of them carefully arranged like evidence at a crime scene, then layered in a bag that just might save you one day. Plasters, antiseptic spray, teabags, Don’s favourite Snickers bars; and should she bring some more Imodium? Could you get Imodium over there? She did not know, and threw in an extra packet.

The most important thing was her journal, in which she would note down the route, the ascents, the views, as well as snippets of lore picked up from locals and information on flowers and plants. Sometimes she enjoyed the quiet moments after dusk just as much as the walking, a time to lounge across their sleeping bags making notes, with books scattered around, her head propped against Don’s flat stomach, their limbs heavy from exertion. This was a real existence, the living that gave purpose to life.

Batteries, waterproof bags, first-aid kit, rolls of film; she counted the final items off her list. Don’s post-expedition slide shows at the house had become a tradition among the Spokane Mountaineers. They were nothing flashy, just a chance for Don to cook, try out the latest micro-brewery beers and give a talk. He loved to share what he had seen. Some people didn’t get that Don and Jane were just who they appeared to be. They had no interest in getting one over on anybody, or crowing about their far-flung adventures. There was no edge to them. Their lives were about getting out and making it back sufficiently healthy to tell others what they had experienced.

As she finished packing, Jane reminded herself to remind Don about his black-and-yellow Casio altimeter. He would be sorely disappointed if he got halfway over Mahagunas Top at fifteen thousand feet, only to realise he’d left it at home in a bedside drawer.

Finally she stood back and surveyed her handiwork, pondering the things that were not yet sorted out. Was this really a good time to go to Kashmir? What did they actually know? They had both had a gnawing sense of unease that had kicked in after they had bought the tickets, as they read that the region was in a state of flux, a worrying instability that became more real to them with every new snippet of information they gleaned from newspapers and magazines.

Don knew from his research that as a geographical and spiritual crossroads between the Arab world to the west, China to the north and the tropical subcontinent of India to the south, Kashmir had always been steeped in one conflict or another. Its recent troubles stemmed from the Partition of India in 1947, when the predominantly Muslim principality, whose residents longed for independence, had been split in two after both India and the newly founded Pakistan claimed it. Since then the two countries had fought three wars in their attempts to gain the other’s share, in 1947, 1965 and 1971, with the Muslim population of the Kashmir Valley caught between the aspirations of the warring neighbours, and held in a firm grip by the Indian government in New Delhi.

In the years after the 1971 conflict, Kashmir had settled down for a time. Srinagar, its summer capital, became a place of pilgrimage for Western backpackers, the valley eulogised by the likes of Led Zeppelin, whose music evoked a mystic kingdom of the mind, a lyrical paradise wreathed in hash smoke, drawing in thousands of visitors who put up on intricately carved wooden houseboats moored on the city’s tranquil lakes, Dal and Nagin. Between the lotus gardens, floating markets and bobbling villages glided some of the world’s most persistent salesmen, touting shawls woven from antelope hair, almond biscuits, semiprecious stones, papier-mâché boxes and sticky gobbets of dark charas from their hand-painted shikara boats, against a backdrop of the jagged Zabarwan mountains.

But these days Kashmir had an undercurrent of tension, especially after reports that New Delhi had rigged the state assembly polls of 1987, so as to box in the independence lobby. This ham-fisted act of muscle-flexing had gone largely unnoticed in the West, but had led to an explosion of protests in the state that had developed into an armed insurgency. For the past six years, bloody clashes had been erupting between Kashmiri Muslim youths calling for freedom from India, and the Indian security forces sent by New Delhi to neuter them. India accused Pakistan of exacerbating the dissent. Pakistan slammed India for triggering a revolution through its brutal crackdowns, as army bunkers rose up on the street corners of Srinagar, and post offices and cinemas were requisitioned as barracks and interrogation centres.

What little news leaked out had served to deter much of the foreign tourist trade. Rather than Kashmir, stoners and their disciples, adventurers and refugees from the West now headed for India’s Parvati Valley, or far south-west to the beaches and freshwater lagoons of Goa and Kerala. The number of tourists visiting the mountain state shrank from eighty thousand a year in the mid-eighties to fewer than ten thousand in 1994, leaving the houseboat owners destitute, dreaming of a time when their paradise had paid the bills.

Jane and Don knew they would have to be careful. But then, ascending a mountain was no different. ‘We did a lot of preparation before we left,’ Jane said. ‘We knew there was some turmoil in Kashmir, but we had been in northern India in 1991, and what we had heard about the Kashmir area from various people was that … there were no problems trekking in the areas where we were most interested.’ But in those days it was difficult to find up-to-date and accurate information about such a remote area without actually going there. ‘Don had recently purchased a computer for work, but he hated technology and we were not on email yet,’ Jane recalled. ‘Thus, we had limited access to news of that area.’ Jane and Don decided to leave for Kashmir with maps in hand, ready to switch destinations should they become spooked by the ground realities.

A few nights before they left for New Delhi, Don took out a notepad. ‘The Don Hutchings yellow-legal-pad method of decision-making’, as friend George Neal called it. The biggest ‘pro’ was the weather. Don’s work commitments meant they could only trek at the end of June that year, and for a maximum of two weeks. That ruled out possibly safer destinations like Nepal, which would be lashed by monsoons at that time. For Jane, there was also Kashmir’s flora, which she had read was second to none: wild mountain strawberries, lilac and forget-me-nots.

The obvious ‘con’ was the unrest. What to say about that? Don made a list.

1 According to the limited information they had been able to pick up, the trouble was largely restricted to the northern and western portions of the Kashmir Valley, close to the border with Pakistan, far from where they intended to trek in the mountains rising to the east of the valley.

2 None of the violence had been aimed at foreigners.

‘We had heard consistently that as long as you stayed out of the central part of Srinagar, the summer capital, out of the old part of the city … there were typically no problems,’ Jane said. Although they would have to fly in to Srinagar, they planned to stay only as long as it took them to negotiate a taxi ride south to the hill-station town of Pahalgam sixty miles away, the starting point for many treks.

Don and Jane invited some Spokane Mountaineers over for a farewell dinner. They were leaving with open minds and a back-up plan, they told them. Mount Rainier was probably far more taxing than anything they would encounter in Kashmir, Don said, reminding them that in 1981 an ice plug had fallen from above, entombing eleven climbers traversing the Ingraham Glacier on the mountain’s eastern flank, the worst mountaineering accident in American history. And Don and Jane had erred on the side of caution once before, and regretted it. Having travelled to La Paz in Bolivia so as to climb to Machu Picchu, they had been warned away by local officials, only to discover from other climbers that the route had been safe.

‘We’re going to look into it,’ Don told his friends as he bade them goodbye. ‘We’ll ask the authorities there: the Indian government tourism bureau and the American Embassy. We’ll see what they have to say.’ He had already tried to call the Indian Consulate in San Francisco several times, but had been unable to get through. He had another worry too. Jane had recently injured her shoulder, and part of the reason they had decided to head for Pahalgam was because they had read that there they could hire ponies to carry their equipment. ‘That was the first choice, as I wouldn’t have to carry a heavy pack,’ Jane said. They promised to make some final checks upon arrival in New Delhi. ‘It only seemed logical that the Indians would know best what was safe or unsafe.’ For a seasoned traveller like Jane Schelly, asking people on the ground for advice seemed the logical thing to do.