Yak butter & black tea

by Wade Brackenbury

Wade Brackenbury never meant to get into trouble. He'd been raised to respect the law. But he was born with a hankering for adventure. He'd come to China to climb mountains, to lose himself in the strangeness of a different culture, to try something extraordinary before returning to the U.S. to settle down. Then, in a restaurant in an out-of-the-way corner of southwestern China, Wade met a charismatic French photo-journalist named Pascal. Pascal needed a skilled climber. Wade was hoping for an adventure. The next day the two of them set out on what would become the journey of a lifetime. Pascal was searching for the Drung people, a dwindling minority said to live in an obscure valley in southern Tibet near the Burma border. Cut off from the rest of China by 20,000-foot mountains, accessible only when the snow in the high passes melted, forbidden to foreigners by a suspicious Chinese government, no Westerner had been there in over a century. The valley was only a few hundred miles from