Looking out the window today I see the powder white snow glistening in the fiery orange hues of an inter-mountain sunset. What I’m really thinking is that I’m so glad I’m inside where it’s warm, because it has been awfully cold here among the baby mountains of northern Utah. We’ve gotten intermittent flurries of snow, just enough to let me know for sure in the mornings that it is cold and I’m freezing! The elevation here is only around 5,000 feet, which is remarkably close to that of Kathmandu, but you’d better believe they have a much different outlook on the winter than do we. As I may have mentioned before, Nepal sits at a northern latitude similar to that of the state of Florida, America’s swampy, humid home to crocodiles and college kids gone crazy. That state is primarily a flat land mass at low elevation, which serves as a welcoming mat for ferocious tropical storms. Kathmandu, land-locked and wedged up against the world’s highest mountain ranges, is at a similar latitude to Florida but a similar elevation to Utah. So just imagine if we followed the Jimi Hendrix principle where a six was a nine and Utah switched positions with Florida.

Not surprisingly you’d get a lot of very confused people, which is well-represented by the chaos in Kathmandu. Shovan tells me that it hasn’t snowed at the relatively low elevation of the Kathmandu valley in Nepal since the 1950’s, and even then it was an inconceivable mystery to the city. It was certainly decades or even a span of lifetimes since the previous incident of snowfall in the winter. Shovan heard a story of a man in the city who packed a little ball of snow and hid it away in his cupboard so that no one would steal it, but he was heartbroken to find it missing when he checked again later. Snow is a rare sight in the valley, but then there is a clear view to the north of the city of some very prominent mountains. An outgoing and adventurous urbanite could set out for some hiking and oxygen deprivation, but most people can’t see clear of their daily grind of “death taxi” to do such a thing.

Besides, there are some much more enjoyable destinations in the winter time, like the safaris in the national parks to the south and west. The winter time is actually the best time to set foot outside of the Kathmandu valley due to the reduction in life-threatening poisonous snakes and packs of blood-sucking Jello monsters sweeping the jungles. The winter is the prime season for turning attention away from the glorious Himalayas to the lower Terai plains. It’s entirely a reasonable thing to do, and who wants to actually seek out snow? In the summer it’s a different scenario, of course, and seeking out snow is the stuff of consuming daydreams. That, and running for your life to the hills to escape the leathery and gelatinous creepies down below.