Dochula Pass is a pass of 3,100 metres on the road between Thimphu and Punakha, in Bhutan, carrying 108 whitewashed chortens built in rings on a knoll for the soldiers killed in the fighting of 2003, and it faces on a clear morning the eastern Himalaya with Gangkhar Puensum on the skyline, at 7,570 metres the highest unclimbed mountain on Earth, which Bhutan has closed to climbers as the home of gods. The Druk Wangyal Chortens climb the knoll in rings of 45, 36 and 27 around a taller one at the summit, with a stone path threading between them, built by the Queen Mother, and each was built around a sokshing, a juniper life tree painted red, inscribed with hymns and wrapped in silk, standing hidden inside the stone; the temple above them is painted in the old style but not with the old subjects, since beside the saints and protectors are the Fourth King in battle, monks bent over laptops and Druk Air jets in the sky. Once the monsoon ends the air dries and the peaks stand on the horizon all morning from October to February, while from June to September cloud hides them completely.
A climb of roughly two hours leads north from the pass through hemlock and moss-hung rhododendron to Lungchutse monastery on a ridge at about 3,600 metres, a small temple with the whole range in front of it, and the botanical park just below the pass grows most of Bhutan's 46 rhododendron species, flowering after Losar with a festival in April. Every 13 December the Royal Bhutan Army performs the masked dances of the Druk Wangyal Tshechu on the ground below the temple, a festival danced by soldiers rather than monks and staged outdoors against the peaks, and in winter the pass whitens some 800 metres above a capital that stays bare, so the locals drive up for the season's first snow. Dochula is a pass of 108 shrines for the dead, and the mountain it looks at is left alone.