What the High Desert Teaches You About Silence

The Himalayas don't perform for you. They just sit there, vast, jagged, and indifferent, until you stop trying to capture them on a screen and start trying to listen.

We took a rugged 4x4 up the winding cliff roads and then walked the rest of the way to the village of Langza. Our local host, Tenzin, told us about his grandfather, who could read the approaching winter just by the way the wind shifted off the peaks. He pointed to a high pass and said, 'Tomorrow, that will be blocked by snow.' It was.

Three nights without service. The first night I reached for my phone forty times. The second night, four. The third night, none. That's the gift of the high-altitude desert. Not the silence — the rediscovery of it.