Kawa Karpo Part II: Into the Wild
Trip Start
Mar 21, 2005
1
16
354
Trip End
Ongoing
At the Foot of Meili Xueshan,
China
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
Pour flour into a small plastic bowl
Add some baking powder and salt
Add sugar, to taste
Add powdered milk and eggs
Add two packets of lemon juice
Add enough water and stir until the mix is the consistency of cake batter
Rehydrate dried fruits and boil over Brunton Optimus stove until sauce is thick.
Add to cake mix.
Pour mix into frying pan and cook over stove
Relight the stove, as it runs erratically on unleaded gasoline
1 Mountains in the Mist
.Find two large pieces of bark to cover the frying pan and set them on fire to cook the top of the cake.
Flip cake when top is firm.
Cook for 30-40 minutes, constantly shifting the frying pan over the flames to avoid burning.
After leaving my new Tibetan friends, I headed up another valley looking for a tent site. Most places were either pasture, cliffs, or logging areas, all of which had little appeal for a tent site. Between the logging areas and the cliffs, I found an area of moss-covered boulders and large trees. Between a couple of boulders and under a 200-year old fir tree, I barely fit my tent. Here would be my home for the next four days. I would not talk to anyone and only saw people, once, from a distance. I was in my own wild lands, where wolves still roam, at the foot of Mt. Meili, whose summit was two miles above me.
No longer was I in the safety of a Tibetan village, so I became attuned to the wildness, one of those places in the world where you are part of the food web, potentially, as a Clouded Leopard might choose you for a meal. Earlier I had found wolf scat, and the Temmick's Tragopan roamed around my tent. Birds such as the Yellow-bellied Fantail constantly sang from the trees. As a Rufous-bellied Woodpecker landed on a nearby 300 year-old spruce tree, I knew this was a wild place.
The local Tibetans use the forest for both livestock grazing, firewood, building materials, and clean water, and evidence of all of these were everywhere
2 View from the Campsite
. They would cut down the old trees and saw and axe them into boards. Most large trees were still standing, although it seemed that they had cut down more trees than they could ever need: for fifteen homes in the community of Legbam, about the same amount of twenty-foot girth trees had been felled recently and many parts of the trees weren't used. (I'll have to look more into Tibetan logging practices to get a feel for why they're felling more trees than they apparently need.)Nevertheless, an ancient forest surrounded my camping spot--immense spruce, fir, maple, birch, and many other trees of all ages. Moss, lichen, ferns, and wildflowers covered the moist, rich ground in a lush green carpet. Snags and decaying wood gave a rich organic smell to the forest.
For four days, I roamed this microcosm of the larger landscape, eating Lemon Ginger Blueberry Mango Cake, Chicken Hot Pot and other food cooked on my little camping stove. I recovered physically from the three previous days of intense hiking and became mentally more attuned to the forest and animals around me. For hours I would sit under the large fir next to my tent as the rains fell. The fir, being an expert at capturing water, kept me dry as the birds sang and the world continued at its own pace. I stayed here and celebrated the full moon and summer solstice in the wild.
