CRANK'S RIDGE

Kalimath, also known as Crank’s Ridge or Hippie Hill, is a pine-covered ridge located on the way to Kasar Devi temple, above the town of Almora, Uttarakhand, India, the ancient capital of Kumaon.  It is considered an ideal spot for spending long hours in quiet solitude, as it has a magnificent 400 km view of the Himalayas, from Api in Nepal to Bundarpunch on the Himachal Pradesh border. Kasar Devi temple is located in the Kashyap Hills, 7 km north of Almora, where, in the late 19th century, Swami Vivekananda once came to meditate.

Crank's Ridge became a haunt for bohemian artists, writers, and spiritual seekers in the 1920s and 30s, including notable western Tibetan Buddhist W. Y. Evans-Wentz, and Lama Anagarika Govinda, who in turn was visited by Anandamayi Ma and Neem Karoli Baba.  Other early people connected to Crank's Ridge were Earl Brewster, an American artist, author John Blofeld, and Danish mystic Alfred Sorensen. In 1934, Sorensen, who was introduced to Nehru by the poet Rabindranath Tagore, visited the home of Nehru’s sister and brother-in-law at their house in Khali, Binsar.  It was while staying with the Nehru family that one of their friends offered Sorensen a piece of land where he could live on Crank's Ridge.  Sorensen subsequently built a hut there and made it his residence for the next 44 years.

In the 1960s and 70s, luminaries of the counter-culture, including Bob Dylan and Cat Stevens made pilgrimages to the ridge to visit these established inhabitants. In 1962, Allen Ginsberg came with Peter Orlovsky, Gary Snyder, and Joanne Kyger to visit Lama Govinda. Ginsberg commented in a letter to John Kelley that the area was not unlike the Catskills, readily accessible, only more spiritual. In late 1964, Ralph Metzner visited Lama Govinda on the ridge and was later joined by Timothy Leary on honeymoon with his wife Nena von Schlebrügge. Leary wrote much of Psychedelic Prayers, a psychedelic version the Tao Te Ching composed from nine English translations of the book, on the ridge. Later in the decade Richard Alpert (Ram Dass), visited the ridge as a part of his own pilgrimage. Scottish psychiatrist, R. D. Laing spent some time there in the early 1970s, as did Robert Thurman, the Buddhist scholar.  Thurman spent six months with his family studying with Lama Govinda as a part of his doctoral dissertation over the summer of 1971.

A cult destination, it now has a small community of backpackers and hippies living there, the result of its reputation in the 1960's counter culture as a "power center." This reputation is due to the alleged gap in the Van Allen Belt above the ridge, a perception arguably strengthened by the free and easy availability of marijuana on the slopes. There is also a Buddhist meditation center on the ridge.