Himalaya Expedition: The Forest Roars

An expedition to film destructive wild elephants in the Himalaya tests an Explorer Club fellow’s courage. 

This article was written by Kim Frank. Photography courtesy of Kim Frank, Avijan Saha, Trevor Wallace.

Midnight on the India-Nepal border. A full moon hides behind the clouds, no longer illuminating the wispy thin trail. The snowy peaks of the eastern Himalaya are shrouded in darkness. A crowd forms along the edge of a field: farmers with flashlights, boys with firecrackers and mobile phones, and young men with homemade cannons firing loud bombs that arc sparks of orange against the sky. Searchlights sweep over the crops, ready for harvest. Lights shine out from the hands of men protecting the clusters of homes behind them, where their mothers, wives, and children sleep. Aggressive shouting and static from walkie-talkies echo like a game of call and response. Sirens from a patrol jeep pierce the air; headlights flash. I feel like I am on the front line of a war zone.

A farmer casts a broad beam of light over his rice field, and it lands on a massive elephant with curved, piercing tusks, the sticky black secretion of musth visibly draining from his right temple as he gnaws the rice paddy. I am transfixed. The man next to me lights, raises, and shoots a cannon-the blast sounds lethal. It is not.

Silence settles over the field-more chilling than calm. All sound abates. The large male tusker, known as Lama, continues to eat. From the trees rises a noise I have heard only in movies and dreams: the resounding trumpet of a second elephant. From a different patch of trees directly to our right, another elephant responds with an earth-shaking, full-bellow roar, followed by a steady and thunderous rumble that rattles me to my core. My watch hands illuminate the time, 12:30 a.m. I still have to spend another five hours in these forests, careening on the back of a motorcycle over darkened trails to document this conflict between humans and elephants. It’s going to be a long night.

If this were a vintage Rolex advertisement, the narrative would continue with lines like these: “Inhospitable conditions seem to pose no problem for George Schaller” or “Neither searing heat nor violent sandstorms can stop Tom Sheppard & his Rolex from Crossing the Sahara.” But not here. I could not feel further from these tough and heroic men wearing the watch that historically defines indestructibility: a Rolex Explorer. However, I have been granted the use of this iconic symbol of exploration by The Explorers Club as part of its Expedition Watch Program, in collaboration with Rolex. The Explorers Club has also granted me the honor of carrying its historic Explorers Club Flag #71, first carried into the field in 1937, in recognition of the significance of my multimedia project to document the coexistence of humans and elephants at the base of the Himalayas.

What began as a desire to tell a single story about people dying while taking selfies with wild elephants for social media glory has become a multiyear, multimedia quest to deeply understand human-elephant coexistence in this region of India. For four years, I have been working toward this goal. 

A sudden blast from a nearby flare gun causes me to yell out loud and nearly drop my camera. It now dangles from my wrist, capturing video of men’s feet, snatches of dirt and grass, and a blur of movement. I wonder, “Who am I to travel across the globe, the only woman here in the middle of the night, the rare westerner, given this extraordinary access, only to squander it out of fear?”

This ancient habitat stretches along the foothills of the Himalaya from Bhutan to northern India and onward through Nepal. While the area once supported wildlife and people in delicate balance, rapid population increase and widespread deforestation have turned the routes for Asian elephants into a dangerously fragmented landscape. Elephants now travel between patches of natural forest interrupted by barbed fences, tea gardens, chaotic highways, army barracks, speeding trains, and villages with ripe paddy crops. Desperate for food, elephants have discovered that these crops deliver far more nutrients, in a much shorter time, than anything they are able to obtain from stripped forests. This diminishment of resources is creating one of the highest human-elephant conflict zones on earth, nationally resulting in fatal clashes that kill more than 500 people and 100 elephants each year. 

As the forest roars, Lama lifts his head and slowly ambles into the trees. The smell of musth, earthy and ominous, clings to the mist and smoke that swirls around us. Elephants in musth tend to be violent, attacking when disturbed. With two teenage daughters and a loving husband waiting for me at home, I am loathe to move closer. Risk is sometimes difficult to fully calculate until you are in the thick of it, leaving little to do but manage. My companions see this situation differently, and soon we are following Lama’s route.

Not wanting to take any chances, I wait alone near a fragile tin house, glowing with purple lights to make it visible to passing traffic. My companion, photographer Avijan Saha, instructs me to throw myself inside the crack between the house and outbuilding if an elephant appears. The crowd joins our team, forming a reception line at the bend of the road where the tusker is expected to cross. 

I think they are foolhardy, and I am stricken for putting myself at such risk. Distracted by a phone alert from my daughter’s dermatologist, I text an urgent appointment reminder to my family back home. (Did Shackleton confirm his teenager’s doctor appointments from Antarctica?) When I look up, the mob is running toward me, flashlights waving across the field. Lama fooled the mob by passing directly behind me, as I was oblivious to the danger of an agitated male elephant in full musth using the glow from my smart phone to guide his escape.

“The great strength of a Rolex is strength; Designed for survival in extreme conditions,” says the Rolex ad featuring Jean Claude Killy. It reminds me of an image of Killy, his bright eyes, calm focused, peering intensely from beneath his ski helmet. I am wearing a helmet, too, a motorcycle half-helmet meant to protect me as I zip through dark forests at night. Sensing my need for additional strength, my teenage daughter has painted a brilliant Ganesh on its top and a protective blue and pink third eye on the front. This meager lid has become a talisman, and I won’t take it off the entire night. My eyes are not calm and focused like Killy’s, but I am not giving up because of my brush with Lama. The phone must go away: It emits dangerous light. But the watch stays firmly on my wrist. each time I glance at it as we hurtle through the night, happening on herds and lone bulls at each stop, time is blessedly moving on.

It is 4:30 a.m. when we return to the house in the village that just last week had its kitchen crushed by an elephant. Exhaustion overcomes fear. My sleep is filled with a kaleidoscope of dreams: yelling boys chasing slow sauntering herds, thick black oozing from the eye of the tusker, sirens, flashing lights, explosions, angry trumpeting. I wake to a powerful sense of foreboding, certain the elephant from last night is roaming nearby. In stillness, with a full bladder but less courage, I wait.

When the light becomes more pronounced, I peer out. Framed directly through the window, etched in white against a milky blue sky, is Kanchenjunga, the highest mountain in India, third highest in the world. To its left, Everest. At its roots, the Rolex Explorer was born from the Himalaya, as daring pilots first flew over Kanchenjunga on their way to Everest in 1933, passing not 40 miles from me, wearing its predecessor. And of course, Edmund Hillary, the original inspiration for this model’s name. After days within the full embrace of this range, only now does it appear. Proving that just because we can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there . . . or it isn’t true. A 1970s Rolex ad features a woman in a Gernreich dress, with this quote: “A woman is beautiful when she looks like what she is. A woman.” I cannot imagine what I look like now, but if feminine charm comes from a sense of accomplishment from fighting through staggering fear and uncertainty to illuminate the truth, in the hope of saving elephants and ourselves, then I must be radiant.

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