Nanda Devi is the highest mountain lying entirely inside India, 7,816 metres in the Garhwal Himalaya of Uttarakhand, and nobody has been inside the basin around it since 1983. A wall of peaks above 6,000 metres closes almost the whole way round, broken only by the Rishi Gorge, and that gorge is so narrow that no outsider reached the inner basin until 1934. Two years later two men stood on the summit, the highest anyone had stood until Annapurna in 1950. Then the door closed. The outer park still opens each spring, but the basin itself has been off-limits to all but sanctioned science ever since. So what you choose here is where to stand.
Auli asks the least: a road from Joshimath climbs to pine-and-oak ridges where the twin summits lift over the forest, Trishul beside them. Two or three days on the Curzon Trail to the Kuari Pass buys a nearer line through rhododendron and meadow. Bedni Bugyal, higher and emptier, puts the southern rim across the skyline. One walking route into the buffer zone survives, climbing from the village of Lata to the Dharansi Pass. A handful of people a week are let up it, never without a guide, and past it nobody goes. Whichever you take, the thing itself lasts minutes. Long before the valleys brighten, first sun touches the top and works down the snow, orange, then pink, then plain white. You face your spot the evening before, because there is no time to move once it starts. In the villages below, the mountain is a goddess, a daughter of the hills. Once every twelve years they carry her image 280 kilometres on foot to a glacial lake near the snows, behind a four-horned ram said to know the route. One thing went further in and never came out. In 1965 an American and Indian intelligence team hauled a plutonium-powered listening post high onto the mountain to track Chinese missile tests, then lost it in a storm. The capsules are still in that ice, inside a ring nobody is allowed to enter.