“Each step would be so exhausting that I had to breathe six times before the next one,” says Varun Gunaseelan, for whom it’s moments like these that stand out. He has trekked, hiked and climbed to the top of 68 mountains in various continents — including Mont Blanc, the highest in Western Europe — and also participated in six Spartan obstacle course races in the last year alone.
On a usual day, he works as at a private city hospital, but he credits mountaineering for having shaped who he is, as a person. The 29-year-old Chennai lad lists out a string of skills he is grateful for: “planning, crisis management, team work, dealing with unplanned scenarios...”
Varun has been mountaineering for about five years now, but has been in love with the mountains for eight. “I started trekking in 2011, and did my first mountaineering course in 2014,” he says. “It’s not the highest mountains that are tough, but the ones with the steepest gradient.” Which is why, though one of his first mountains was Western Europe’s highest, it was also one of his easier ones.
By way of example, he says, “There is a mountain called the Schwartzhorn on the Swiss-Italian border. It had a 100-metre section that was very challenging: a vertical ice face. We traversed the breadth of it. We had to attach cramp-ons to our shoes — eight spikes below and four spikes in front. The front spikes are stuck into the mountain, with the rest of our bodies just hanging on. And that’s how we moved,” he laughs at the sheer terror of that memory. “Every time you stick something in the ice, bits of it fall all the way, down a height that’s more than a six-storey building.”
But the bonds that experiences like these build, make it all worth it. “Teamwork is everything. I would not have done that without an IFMGA (International Federation of Mountain Guides Associations) guide with me.” It was just the two of them on that mountain, climbing it “Alpine style, which is fast and light, with no tents and minimal luggage.” It requires mountaineers to kick off well before daybreak, climb a mountain and return within 10-12 hours. And it isn’t practised in India.
- Varun recalls the time, three years ago, when he and some friends were stuck in a hail storm in Uttarakhand. "We made it to a village called Sidri, and took shelter in one of the huts," he recalls. What struck them all was just how suffocating these homes were, as they were hit by the heavy fumes of earthen, wood-burning stoves or chulhas that filled the entire hut. He got in touch with an NGO called The Himalayan Environment Trust, and provided the village with emission-free stoves instead. "They use the same fuel, but compress the energy and reduce the smoke," he explains. Though each stove weighs about four kilograms, it was worth the effort "because once the stoves are in, they stay put." Today, five villages in the vicinity use these stoves, and the children of the village, once trained by Varun, have now taken the prerogative to spread this technology further.
“In India, the permanent snow line is never below 5,000 metres above sea level, which means you need a week-and-a-half just to get acclimatised to that high altitude. In the Alps, the permanent snow line is as low as 2,000 metres: which is like the height of Kodaikanal. You can go there overnight and you’ll be fine to climb.”
Provided, of course, that you are fit to handle the other dangers.
Know your enemy
“Crevasses can be covered with a light layer of snow, and if you step on it, you can fall down 300 metres. But there are ways to mitigate these things. For example, crevasse glaciers should never be traversed alone, and always with a rope with maintained tension: if you fall in, your partner can arrest your fall, or you can set up anchors yourself, that make it easier for you to be pulled out.” The information pours out of him without any need for a moment’s pause or consideration. The idea, he points out, is to be aware of all the dangers and precautions. “ The IFMGA System, a certification that takes five years to complete, teaches you about local weather patterns.”
His toughest expedition, and most memorable by, far was Mount Lebuche — so steep that he covered all of 1.9 kilometres in the course of nine hours. “It’s in Nepal, and quite close to Mount Everest. We had the Everest in sight of us the whole time.”
