THE TRAINING
Darjeeling - Learning to See at Altitude
I had done my mountaineering course before. But this time I went back to HMI Darjeeling as a photographer and videographer, learning not just how to survive on a mountain, but how to tell its story. How to keep your hands steady when they're numb. How to protect a lens from condensation at 4am. How to see beauty when your lungs are burning.
KASHMIR - THE ICE FALL
Advanced training took us to Kashmir. That's where I did my first glacier waterfall ice climb. I remember standing at the base of a frozen waterfall, crampons on, ice axe in hand, thinking, this is either the best decision I've ever made or the worst. I shot the whole thing between climbs. The cold doesn't care about your schedule. You learn to work fast or you lose the light forever.
STOK KANGRI, LADAKH - 6,153m
Stok Kangri was the altitude test. For the kids from Telangana, it was their first real summit. I watched faces that had grown up looking at flat land suddenly see the entire curve of the earth. That expression, I've never been able to fully describe it. I just tried to photograph it before it passed.
KATHMANDU TO LHASA TO EVEREST - The Road to the Roof of the World
The road trip from Lhasa, Tibet to Everest Base Camp is something that resets you. Hours of silence. Landscapes that have no human scale. You stop trying to capture everything and start choosing moments more carefully. The Tibetan plateau does something to how you see. Everything after feels more deliberate.
Two Months. The North Face. Everest.
I spent two months on Everest. Not passing through, living there. Documenting every stage of an expedition that nobody expected to succeed.
There's a specific kind of silence at high altitude that I've never heard anywhere else. Not peaceful exactly. More like the mountain isn't interested in you. You're irrelevant to it. And somehow that's freeing, because when you accept that, you stop performing and start actually seeing.
Watching those 20 young people from rural Telangana, who had never left their villages a year before, stand on the slopes of the highest mountain on earth was one of the most quietly devastating things I have ever witnessed. No drama. No speeches. Just people discovering what they were actually made of.
I tried to be worthy of the story. Some days I think I was.
If you have a story worth documenting, let's talk - mailrahulmistry@gmail.com
