As the rickety bus barely rounded another corner, an audible gasp went through the passengers. A recent blizzard had taken out the road between the high Himalayan villages of Ranipauwa and Jharkot, leaving some 800 meters of mountainous mudslides between us and any number of severalhundred- foot dropoffs all the way down to the Kali Gandaki River Valley below. A few feet on our right were the steep walls of the Muktinath Valley and the 8,000+ meter peaks of Nilgiri and Dhaulagiri. To our left was a sheer vertical drop that began less than a foot away from the trundling wheels of our makeshift vehicle as we wound our way precariously along the peaks. More than once, our bus slid into the treacherous rocks, tilting almost completely sideways over the edge and holding us out over the endless expanse. It would take at least another hour white-knuckling to Kagbeni, the village along the river that would be our stopping point on the trip back to Jomsom, a few kilometers away.

Had I known the road was so poor at the time, I would have made my way down the mountain by my more typical choice of transportation – horseback. But the Himalayas are nothing if not unpredictable, and I hadn't anticipated the late-spring weather to be quite so fickle.