As much as drowning sounded like fun, Sarthak’s way was a bit sketch for my tastes, so I spent a while looking for alternatives before gritting my teeth and taking a flying leap over the raging water.
We hiked eternally, slowly but surely inching closer by the hour toward where the GPS had the lake plotted on the map. Three kilometers… seven kilometers… nine... By the tenth, I was a bit worried, as we had only carried daypacks, and still had to return the same distance we had made all the way back to our camp. Not to mention, we hadn’t even found the actual lake yet.
Our energy was noticeably draining by the eleventh kilometer, and we had now left the meadows behind, with the terrain now obviously changing into the endless pre-moraine ridges that announce the arrival of a nearby glacier.
I kept glancing at the Garmin to gauge how far the lake was - 1 km as the crow flies .. 500m … 400m - I found my second wind, only to see Cam starting to lag behind. I stopped to let her catch up, a rare occasion, since most often I have to struggle a bit to keep up with her. I told her the lake was now 300m away - she didn't seem to believe since all we could see was just another hump.
As I came up the final hump, an unreal, sort of photoshopped, neon blue filled up the horizon, surrounded by huge walls of rock and ice. There it was - Ghepan Ghat - complete with icebergs and an island.
I knew we were there before I saw the lake myself. One hump above where I stood, I could see Sarthak crack a grin so wide it could only mean that we had made it. He motioned me to climb 30 seconds more, and despite shaking from the long route we had taken (during which, we realized, we had completely forgotten to have lunch), I began to jump up and down at the sight of this electric-blue lake.
That’s the climax, Cam. Stop writing.
We found it!
I told you it exists.
It does, in fact, exist.
If you enjoyed reading this, you'll love watching the first episode from our new VLOG series, Tales from the Trail, below.
