I spent October 2013 in Nepal doing fieldwork for my second and final PhD field season. This time I brought along a field assistant. We flew from Kathmandu to Nepalgunj to Jumla, where started our trek. We were on foot for 10 days, on tractor for 1 day, and in a rickety jeep for 10 days. Our trek took us north from Jumla into the High Himalaya, south into Rara Lake National Park, southwest to Sinja, downstream to the junction of the Sinja and Tila Kholas, upstream on the Tila, then back downstream to where the Tila joins the Karnali.

There were a lot of differences to this trip -- the culture was decidedly less Tibetan, although the high elevation still had most folks living off of subsistence farming and livestock grazing. A few (treacherous) new roads have cut across the area in the past few years, leading to rapid cultural and economic shifts. The topography was also different -- too mellow to be high Himalayan and too ... high ... to be Lesser Himalayan. It is a unique landscape that I hope to shed light on with my PhD work.

The other main difference of this trip is that it was WET. Although the monsoon is usually finished by October, we got soaked by storms for the first ~7 days. It made getting around difficult -- trails turned to waterslides and the "roads" turned to mush. And fieldwork was generally slower. Luckily I had built some 'weather days' into the schedule.

All in all it was another success. I'm currently in the process of analyzing the samples we collected and writing up the results.