Day 13 - to Gosaikunda 4,300m
Very few folk seem to take this route when compared to the Langtang Valley but when we arrived at the Lake View Lodge, Gosaikunda we were all agreed it had been a fine day’s trekking.
It started with a wonderful walk through rich, tall forest with an ocean of cloud below and to the south. After an hour the forest thinned to low rhododendron scrub and then juniper at which point the views really opened out to the west with the Manaslu Massif clearly visible 120 km away as well as more distant peaks beyond including Annapurna and, maybe, Dhaulagiri.
At lunch the cloud rose and, in doing so, dropped the temperature by 10 or 15 degrees. We set off into the mist but were soon back in broad sunshine with even more spectacular views. Prayer flags fluttered on the ridge a few hundred metres above us and we laboured upwards always managing to keep the rising afternoon cloud beneath us.
At the prayer flags we traversed onto the other side of the ridge and the whole topography changed. Jagged, mineral rich crags above us and a steep grassy descent to a sea of cloud beneath us. The path was scratched out of the slope as it rose gently to the lodge.
The lodge, appropriately named Lake View, stood above the shore of one of the 17 Gosaikunda Lakes. The one nearest the Lodge was still frozen over in the shaded areas and a solitary duck (Merganser) occupied the centre of the lake.
Our route tomorrow climbs gently above the lake to the Gosaikunda Pass a couple of hundred metres above our Lodge.
A fantastic day in the third phase of this excellent trek.