Prerna Dangi's fear factor

Prerna Dangi’s love affair with climbing began when she first saw a climbing wall in her college in Delhi. Once she tried her hand at it, she knew that she wanted to pursue it for the rest of her life.

Since then, the 23-year-old designer has conquered many a peak including the Himalayan peak Stok Kangri in the Ladakh region which she was the first woman to scale. Later, she went onto climb Denali in the USA. She tells us that despite expectations being lowered for women in the field because of misconceptions about their strength, she has enjoyed breaking stereotypes.

Talking about her most memorable treks, she shares, “Crossing the Parang La, a 5,650 Mt pass that has Spiti on one side and Ladakh on the other was memorable. It was my first alpine trek and we were just the four of us with our backpacks weighing 25 kilos each and a casual map cut out from a travel magazine. I remember each bit of the 105-km trail that we covered over eight days!” Another significant one, she remembers, was returning from Dokrani Bamak glacier only to find the road swept away by the 2013 Kedarnath flood. She goes on to say, “Once, I was with a group a bit higher on the famous Triund trek but it was April so we had a lot of snow! In the night we were woken up by a beast who tried to steal our salami and ate all our pasta.”.

This year was an action-paced one for her though of late, she has been recovering from a shoulder surgery. “This year, I embarked on my first exploratory trip as part of an Indo-Romanian team that ventured into a new and unknown valley to identify and climb a 6,000-metre peak that we had only seen on Google earth and had almost no technical information about. It was during June-July which is a good time to climb in the Zanskar region which is comparatively dry. We made an attempt on T13, a tricky 6,431 metre high virgin peak but couldn't get anywhere close and had to return.” She also participated in the Bouldering World Cup that India hosted for the first time in Navi Mumbai and now teaches a climbing course for women.

The climber who has plans of doing at least two Himalayan expeditions a year, and might head down to the south this December to Hampi and Badami, regardless of her shoulder injury, has advice for other climbing enthusiasts, “Outdoors is the best place to unlearn and learn about yourself and that's why it's important to take out time for it. For women specifically, it would be to just get out there and go for it. That's what I did. I didn't cancel my plan because xyz promised to come along and ditched me in the last minute or because I was the only girl in the group. The other piece of advice is go after things that scare you, nose dive into your fears and you'll find parts of yourself that you would have never known even existed.”