Climbing the Ranganatha Pillar

A little madness in life is always nice to have. It helps in making your personality more interesting, if nothing else. Doing some extreme treks for some years had been a passion for some of us. We were all a bunch of “scientists” working for ISRO the mid-eighties and had a good few things in common: a love for wild places and a craving to get there on foot. A lifetime’s acquaintance with wilderness, forests, heavy rucksacks, sweat, leeches and ticks, eating cold food in the rain, encountering the odd snake or elephant in the wild and having human friends in far-away places, have been the unforgettable rewards.

Some time in 1990 someone told us of the Ranganatha Pillar Rock. This is a 400-500 ft rock tower, about two hours’ trek from the village of Keel Kothagiri, off the Ooty-Metupalayam highway. With characteristic madness, we got hold of the Survey map, with its topological markings of elevation, foliage and water courses for the likely path to approach the Rock. We got ourselves a 100 ft climbing rope, one of those multi-stranded nylon cored ones which could haul up an elephant, should we need one. We planned the lead climber to be tall and thin and mean and immune to skin injuries (me!), and how the rope bow-lined round the waist would help me carry the rope up for the rest to be hauled up quickly. And we planned the food that we would need to carry up; light on weight but good on nourishment such as dates, oranges, chocolate ( yes we binge on chocolate..) water and our ever present medical kit and torch.

We arrived at Ooty in the cold morning and pushed on to Kothagiri an thence to Keel Kothagiri. We had a quick breakfast there and checked our rucksacks, distributed the rations so that everybody had a share of the weight. Filled up water. The road leaves that little sleepy town and plunges straight into tea gardens.

The path goes through shola forests and is decent climbing for the most part. Once we were clear of the village and had achieved some

elevation the view was superb. We could see the village of Sholurmattam and Kodanadu on the far slopes; the Bhavani dam’s reservoir lay like molten silver in the plains below. The valley of the Moyar River lay to the north.

We breasted the top of a few ridges and then the heart-stopping sight of the tower. It was just there, straight up, looking solid and big and seemingly close enough to where we stood to hit with a stone but yet...what egoistic fancy prompted us to even dream of this? What made us think that we could even go and touch this massive missile from God that it looked like?

We soberly set up the camp, near the small pond of water that slowly oozed out of some underground source, as we had noted from the map. The Tamil Nadu Forest department had put up a small concrete check-dam there so that the water had accumulated into a reed-ringed pool. Gathering the firewood for the night and cleaning up the bare rocks where we would sleep. We had some lunch and watched the afternoon sun on the Rock.

We sat and memorized as much of the Rock as we could; we traced the man-sized cracks and the foliage, the few bushes and trees that grew there and the spots where there would be undeniable exposure to height and danger and our minds would need to be strong. Post lunch, we decided to descend down the thorny, stony, bamboo-girt slope to the base of the Rock. It takes all of 45 minutes, in places we had to be flat on our backs or faces and crawl through the undergrowth. Finally we were there at the base. A scene straight out of Raiders of the Lost Ark, only we didn’t feel half as cool as

Harrison Ford. Rocks at the base, with tangled roots and thick bushes and trees growing out of anywhere. The sun could barely dapple the forest floor, if you could call that a floor. The rock seemed to be just growing out of the slope so there was just that little bit of space for our already dirty-looking Dozen.

Well, here’s to it, so setting foot on the first step, I began to climb. It was just a recce and we wanted to just get a feel of the rock. So the rope stayed packed in my slim backpack. My fingers quickly adjusted to the task. We planned to climb in pitches, i.e. intervals of climbing: I was planned to climb some 30-40 feet, anchor myself up there and the rope and the rest would climb up holding the rope with substantially less difficulty. I climbed up to the first difficult spot, getting holds on rocks and small trees. Here the Rock had a “crack”, two walls of rock at right angles with about 6 inches of gap in between. The walls themselves had small toe-hold sized ledges on which I was finding the pressure and pinch holds. The crack itself would help by allowing me to jam my body in there when needed and allow me to stay aloft while I rested my hands. There were several moments of effort, like once where I had to get my right knee to near my chest, place the right foot on the small ledge and haul myself up along the crack, pushing on the small stone inside the crack with my left hand. It was also the very place where my friends below would no longer be able to hold me at all, so a fall from there would be interesting to say the least. Well I made it up and found a nice place to anchor myself and the rope for the morrow’s “official” climb; I looked upwards through the few trees to see what the challenges the next pitch held for us. My friends came up, some of them and we looked around and felt we had seen enough of the rock to examine the upper reaches of the Rock from the Base Camp itself. There was a feeling of reasonable confidence as we descended back in the late afternoon. We knew we would have our task cut out and would need to overcome our fears. But we felt there was hope for us.

But the night itself had other plans for us. We had dinner and went to sleep, with people taking up night-watchman duties in pairs. It was very cold and several among us had very disturbed sleep, with dreams of falling off heights and being stranded and so on. And then at 3 AM we had a visitation: a herd of elephants from the nearby shola forest came over for a drink. We had to raise up our fire and repel them; of course there was another large pond about a kilometer away to which they could go to. Their trumpeting and furore kept us awake for another hour or so. We shivered and kept watch, looking up at the Milky Way and the hunter Orion in the sky, wondering what those eternal stars thought of our antics here on earth.

Next morning we were at the base at 830. People had not slept much so were sluggish and it was still piercingly cold, the water from the freshet was freezing enough to hurt as we washed. I took the lead and tied the bow-line around my waist. My friends pulled it taut so that it would not slip off as I climbed. Very quickly we were at the first pitch that we had done the previous day. I went up that and anchored myself alone up there. I thought and prayed and decided that nothing would stop me from going up and that I would not be afraid but I would take no risks. I did not hum or sing, I did not talk, I almost did not think. The rope burned my hands at it took the weight of the persons coming up, but I did not even notice it until someone asked me what those spiral singe marks on my wrists were. Halfway up we looked across the valley at the Base Camp to see that we had an audience; another trekking team had arrived and were pointing at us and taking pictures. We waved and climbed on.

There were several pitches of varying difficulty but we climbed up. Finally we were at the “shoulder of the tower”, a rocky outcrop where there was complete exposure. There the rock was curving upwards out of sight; if you can imagine being stuck on the side of a bottle, near to where the bottle narrows into the neck, you will get the idea. The rock had been exposed to weathering and was crumbly to feel. I felt that I could still go up but the pitch would itself be long and that both the anchor point would be high up out of sight and the people below invisible to the climber. Psychologically it was very difficult position to be in for an individual climber, to say nothing of my own difficulty as I went up first alone. We looked to the left and found on the very edge of the ledge some very thorny bushes growing. Between the wall of the Rock and the bushes was a narrow gap, which we decided to squeeze through. Beyond that were a set of relatively safer rocks, which seemed easier to climb, with ledges and grassy flat patches where we could even sit down. Our fingers and indeed our clothes were ripped by thorns as we went laboriously through that gap and after nearly an hour of labour we stood on the shoulder of the Rock. The Neck still stretched another 100 feet into the sky.

At this point we had a serious setback. Three among us felt that they were too scared to proceed, that they were dizzy and wanted to wait it out there. We were in a quandary since our credo has always been “All for One, One for All “. We sat and thought and finally decided that with the summit within reach, it was worth pushing on. None of them was really ill; they had food and water, besides they were together too so they would be ok. We left them sitting in a small rocky nook on the Shoulder and proceeded upwards.

But the interruption had taken its measure of us. We forgot the all-important camera bag below with them, so were destined to have no pictures of the final climb, which was the most dramatic part of

the climb. We had also lost precious time and it was already 2 pm and the sun was burning hot. We pressed on.

We came to what looked like perhaps the last challenge. Two parallel rocks, 30 feet high with a gap of some 4 feet between them. A rock stuck out like a broken tooth between them, about 20 feet up. There was almost no room to stand at the base, so with my chest to one of the walls, I inched into the cavern in between. With my feet braced against one wall and my behind to the other, I “chimney-climbed” up to the broken tooth and hauled myself up. I sat there and gathered my breath and then slowly stood upright, reached up and climbed the remaining 10 feet using the Tooth for support. There was a small cave on top there with a robust looking tree. I anchored myself there and the rest came up. There was a short 20 feet slope after that and there were bushes by the side so they went on straight up to the Summit.

After they had all gone up, I sat alone for a while. I slowly unwound the rope from my waist, coiled it up neatly and hoisted it around my shoulder; dusted off the vegetable detritus that I had been showered with and was the last one up at 345 pm. We had been climbing almost 7 hours.

With the help of self-belief and friends we had made it up.