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Sikkim: Walking the Himalayas’ uncrowded corner

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Alfresco breakfast at Dzongri, Sikkim.
Alfresco breakfast at Dzongri, Sikkim.Larry Habegger/Special to The Chronicle

“My father loved these mountains,” Jamling Tenzing Norgay says as I lean hard on my trekking poles, gasping for breath.

Jamling’s father was, of course, the renowned Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, conqueror of Everest with Edmund Hillary and one of the most celebrated mountaineers on this planet or any other. (Seriously. The man has a mountain range on Pluto named for him.)

We’re walking steeply uphill through the lush, flower-dotted foothills of Sikkim, a curiously overlooked corner of the Himalayas.

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Wedged between Nepal, Tibet and Bhutan, it is home to Kangchenjunga, once thought to be the highest mountain in the world. (It’s actually third, a few rope lengths shorter than Everest and K2.)

Its foothills are a naturalist’s paradise, with more than 500 rare species of orchid, 46 kinds of rhododendron and nearly 700 different butterflies. Snow leopards and red pandas roam the hills.

Yet Sikkim, a onetime Buddhist kingdom absorbed into India in 1975, draws only a tiny fraction of the 800,000 foreign tourists who visit Nepal in a typical year.

Among the first to guide Westerners into these mountains was Tenzing, who spent much of his life after Everest exploring their valleys and summits.

He died in 1986, and today the trekking company he founded, Tenzing Norgay Adventures, is run by his 51-year-old son, Jamling.

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Following in his father’s footsteps, Jamling reached the world’s highest summit in 1996 as the star of the Everest Imax movie.

In his book, “Touching My Father’s Soul,” he chronicles his relationship with his father and fiercely advocates for his fellow Sherpas, who do the toughest and most dangerous jobs on Everest for comparatively little money or respect.

He’s joined in this campaign by his older brother, Norbu, who lives in San Francisco and helps run the American Himalayan Foundation.

Before the trek, Jamling and his wife, Soyang, had us over to tea at the family home in the old British hill station of Darjeeling.

Their home doubles as a private family museum, and we wandered the rooms examining all manner of mountaineering relics, among them the wooden ice ax Tenzing planted on the summit and the string of flags he unfurled in the famous photo.

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One picture that caught my eye was of Tenzing and Mickey Mantle grinning at each other at Yankee Stadium in the late 1950s. It seems pretty obvious neither had the vaguest idea who the other was.

In a case filled with more shiny medals and awards than I could count, one item stood out: the George Medal, shoved unceremoniously into a far corner.

This medal, typically given to heroic firefighters, was what the British presented to Tenzing in lieu of the knighthood that Hillary and the expedition leader received. To this day the family feels the British never gave Tenzing the respect he deserved.

Buddhist monastery at Tshoka, which is home to a small group of Tibetan refugees.
Buddhist monastery at Tshoka, which is home to a small group of Tibetan refugees.John Flinn/Special to The Chronicle

The all-day drive from Darjeeling into Sikkim is twisting and tortuous, passing tea estates and terraced hillsides. It’s occasionally blocked by landslides that are quickly cleared.

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Even though Sikkim is a full-fledged Indian state, we had to show our passports at a border checkpoint and obtain a special permit to proceed.

It’s a remote and sensitive region. Sikkim has one of the few open roads between India and China, an offshoot of the old Silk Road. It’s the route the British used to invade Tibet in 1904.

Fortunately, every uniformed official asking for our papers seemed to be a good friend of Jamling.

The village of Yoksum, where we began our trek, felt almost tropical at 5,840 feet, with palm trees, apple orchards and fields of marigolds. Towering above it are giant, imposing peaks of ice and snow.

Yuksom’s tiny main street teemed with dzos, a sort of Yak Lite bred for work at middle elevations. They are said, though, to possess 100 percent of the yak’s orneriness.

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Partly for that reason, we used a team of well-behaved ponies to schlep most of our gear. The rest — eggs and other breakable items — was carried by porters the traditional way: in big conical baskets suspended by a strap across the bearers’ foreheads.

High above a frothy river called the Rathong Chu, the trail climbed steadily through a forest of pine and oak, crossing side streams on swaying suspension bridges.

Vines of delicate orchids stretched overhead, and the air was filled with birdsong and the chirping of crickets.

I rarely saw Jamling on the trail. He usually sprinted ahead to arrange things, and we were left in the capable care of two Sherpas, Nawang and Tenzing.

A wobbly suspension bridge, festooned with player flags, crosses a river on the trail to Dzongri in Sikkim.
A wobbly suspension bridge, festooned with player flags, crosses a river on the trail to Dzongri in Sikkim.John Flinn/Special to The Chronicle

It was a tough walk, steep and sweaty, and I was relieved when, shortly after noon, we rounded a bend and found our kitchen crew preparing a fully cooked, multicourse lunch.

As each of us arrived and dropped our packs, we were handed mugs of warm Tang, a staple of Himalayan trekking in the old days.

Then came a movable feast of garlic soup, curried vegetables, fried potatoes, rice, curried lentils, chapatis (sort of a Himalayan tortilla), butter, jam, peanut butter and tea.

By midmorning the next day, we’d emerged from the deep green forest into a world of rhododendron and magnolia — alas, not in bloom in late October when we were there. They’re said to be dazzling in the spring trekking season.

The path was well graded for the most part, but the first two days of this trek gained almost 8,000 feet in altitude, a stiff challenge in any mountain range. We halted for rest every half hour, and I had to supplement this with a standing breather every few minutes.

The last human settlement was a village called Tshoka. Once home to Tibetan refugees, it’s now pretty much deserted except for a caretaker who sells tea to trekkers and Buddhist pilgrims coming to worship at a picturesque lakeside temple.

All afternoon we were passed by strapping young mountaineers, mostly Indian and Nepali, headed to the base camp of the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute.

Founded by Jamling’s father in 1954 after then-Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru asked him to create “a thousand Tenzings,” the climbing school has given at least that many Sherpas the skills they need to survive in the world’s deadliest profession.

As a teen, Jamling spent many seasons there helping his father, and as word spread of his presence, he was asked to pose for pictures with starstruck instructors, students, porters and yak wranglers.

By the time we arrived at a gorgeous alpine meadow called Dzongri, at 13,200 feet, we’d knocked off most of the trek’s hard hiking.

Ahead lay a much-needed rest day, followed by 2½ days of relatively easy walking to our goal, a viewpoint called the Goche La near the foot of 28,210-foot Kangchenjunga, which straddles the Sikkim-Nepal border.

We had it in the bag.

The Sherpas set up camp next to a stone hut where the king of Sikkim used to come to meditate and perhaps spend a little quality time away from his queen, a New York socialite named Hope Cook.

In the dining tent each night, Jamling spoke at length on topics such as Tibetan Buddhism and his father’s life before, during and after Mount Everest.

On this night Jamling told us about his own experience in 1996 while filming the Everest Imax movie.

Down low on the mountain when a lethal storm struck — the one at the center of Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air” — Jamling helped rescue the survivors and personally escorted another New York socialite, Sandy Hill Pittman, down the mountain. He defended her from some of the diva digs directed at her by Krakauer and others.

Later, high on the mountain during Jamling’s own summit climb, Imax director David Breashears asked him to drop down and reclimb a section for a better shot. At the edge of 12,000-foot drop-off into Tibet, Jamling told us, he ripped off his oxygen mask and shouted something that can’t be repeated here.

Prayer flags atop a hill above Dzongri in Sikkim.
Prayer flags atop a hill above Dzongri in Sikkim.Larry Habegger/Special to The Chronicle

For Everest wonks — and I count myself among the most afflicted — hearing these stories was a rare privilege.

In the middle of the night, my tent mate, Larry Bleiberg, and I were jolted awake as our tent rocked and shook.

My first thought was that we were under yak attack, but it turned out to be Nawang and Tenzing knocking snow off our nylon dome. A storm had quietly slipped in from the Bay of Bengal, and snow was piling up worryingly high.

It snowed on and off the next day, and much of the day after that. It was too dangerous to press on, particularly for the ponies. We wouldn’t make it to the Goche La after all — after doing the hardest part!

We sat out the storm doing what mountaineers typically do in these situations: playing cards in the dining tent, drinking endless cups of tea, and rereading “The Ascent of Rum Doodle.”

There are worse ways to pass your time.

The sun came out on the third day and quickly melted off the worst of the snow. Before we headed back down to Yuksom, there was just enough time for a consolation prize.

Jamling led us on an ascent of a little summit called Dablhagang, which stands 500 feet above camp.

Snow pigeons scattered before us as we crunched our way up a frosty ridge. By now we were well acclimatized, and we made short work of the climb.

At the top we found strings of prayer flags and all manner of pilgrim offerings, from small statues of the Hindu god Ganesh to hard candy.

All around us rose mighty and charismatic mountains sparkling with fresh snow, culminating in Kangchenjunga, scraping the dark blue sky almost 3 vertical miles above us.

Its name means “Five Treasures of the Snow” — for its five individual summits — and it is believed to be the home of Sikkim’s protector deity. For that reason, climbers have never set foot on its summit. Out of respect, they stop a few feet below.

As we gawped and photographed, Jamling stood silently to the side and let his awestruck clients soak up this Himalayan grandeur, just as his father did so many times before him.

John Flinn is the former editor of Travel. Email: travel@sfchronicle.com

If you go

Getting there

The nearest airport to Darjeeling is Bagdogra, a 2½-hour flight from Delhi. From there it’s a three- to four-hour drive up a winding road through tea plantations to Darjeeling.

Outfitters

Tenzing Norgay Adventures: www.tenzing-norgay.com. The Goche La Trek described in this story takes 11 days (seven days on the trail) and includes transfers from Bagdogra and three nights at a four-star hotel in Darjeeling. Last fall we paid $2,650 per person. Tenzing Norgay Adventures also offers a wide variety of other treks in Sikkim, Nepal and Bhutan.

Good to know

Jamling Tenzing Norgay personally leads some, but not all, of his firm’s treks. If this is important to you, contact him before booking.

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John Flinn is a freelance travel writer and the former editor of The San Francisco Chronicle's Travel section.