Dochula Pass looks out at a mountain nobody has ever stood on. Gangkhar Puensum — 7,570 metres, the highest summit in Bhutan and the highest unclimbed mountain on Earth — sits on the skyline north of the pass, out of reach because the kingdom closed its peaks above 6,000 metres to climbers in 1994 and banned mountaineering outright in 2003, holding the summits to be the homes of protective deities. The pass itself crosses at 3,100 metres on the only highway between Thimphu and Punakha, where wet hemlock forest gives way to open ridge. On the knoll beside the road stand 108 whitewashed chortens, raised in 2004 under the patronage of Queen Mother Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuck for the soldiers killed in December 2003, when Bhutan cleared insurgent camps out of its southern forests. They climb the mound in three rings — 45, then 36, then 27 — around one larger chorten at the top.
Most travellers give the pass twenty minutes, and most of them are gambling. Cloud climbs the ridge from the Punakha side and can swallow the entire skyline in a few minutes, then pull apart just as fast; from October to February the air dries out and the white wall stands there all morning. Above the chortens sits Druk Wangyal Lhakhang, finished in 2008 for the hundredth year of the monarchy, its stone steps warm enough for monks to sit out on between prayers. Every 13 December the grass below the temple fills for the Druk Wangyal Tshechu, and the masked dancers are soldiers: the Royal Bhutan Army performs it, in a country where tshechu dances belong to monks. The rest of the year the pass runs on smaller things — juniper smoke, prayer flags snapping between the trees, and Bhutanese families in gho and kira stopping for tea before the road drops into the subtropical valley below.