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 Tibetan Buddhist scholar and author W. Y. Evans-Wentz, and well-known Buddhist author, painter, and poet Lama Anagarika Govinda. Also visiting Crank’s Ridge were Indian spiritual leader Anandamayi Ma, and Hindu guru and mystic 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 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 on Crank's Ridge where he could live.  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 the inhabitants.  In 1962, Allen Ginsberg came with poet and actor Peter Orlovsky, poet Gary Snyder, and poet and author Joanne Kyger to visit Lama Govinda.  Ginsberg commented in a letter to professor 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.  Metzer was a psychologist, writer, and researcher, who participated in psychedelic research at Harvard in the early 1060s with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert.  While on the ridge Leary wrote much of Psychedelic Prayers, a psychedelic version the Tao Te Ching composed from nine English translations of the book.  Later in the decade Richard Alpert, who became the spiritual teacher Ram Dass, visited the ridge as part of a spiritual pilgrimage.

Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing spent some time there in the early 1970s, as did Robert Thurman, the Buddhist scholar.  While researching his doctoral dissertation, Thurman spent six months at the ridge studying with Lama Govinda.

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 on the slopes of marijuana. 

A Buddhist meditation center is there now.  The center is in a Buddhist ashram originally the estate of Evans-Wentz, then of Lama Govinda, then of a Tibetan Ladakhi family.  It is affiliated with the Drikung Kagyu order of Tibetan Buddhism.