The Way to Thorong La by John Brandi

The Way to Thorong La celebrates John Brandi’s mountain travels, beginning with a boyhood hike where he stands “in limitless sky” with his father on a granite dome in California’s Sierra Nevada. “A wild delight,” he called it, “an exalted connection with all that I saw.” As a grown man his exaltation continues as he journeys into the “razor-sharp mesas and glittering peaks” of the American Southwest, and to the “elusive heights that vanish into the jet stream”—the Himalayas of Nepal and Sikkim. Brandi’s keen eye for particularities make for an absorbing read, as does his use of the haibun (a literary form originating in Japan, combining prose and haiku). This is not simply a travel book, but a record of the importance of “straying from what you know” to enter an unexpected correspondence between the inner self and the mountain world. 72 pages, seven haibun, two narratives from Himalayan treks, seven drawings by the author