This story is from The Pulse, a weekly health and science podcast. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Find our full episode on adventures in the wild here. 

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About 10 years ago, Kim Frank asked herself a simple question: “What is your mountain?” 

Frank was just settling into a new career as a writer, and she often wrote features about explorers — people who had traveled all over the world to experience and document places and cultures. But Frank had not experienced anything herself; she only wrote about it. 

So when a friend of hers told her a story about wild Asian elephants in India and how villagers would often come dangerously close to them, sometimes being trampled and killed, Frank was shocked. 

Intrigued, Frank set out to explore this human-elephant conflict firsthand. But her journey was anything but straightforward, taking her down dead ends, into encounters with an Indian princess, and finally coming face-to-face with the forest giants. 

Listen to the story:

Kim Frank compiled her journey into a memoir, Elephants in the Hourglass: A Journey of Reckoning and Hope Along the Himalaya, and a documentary, Where the Forest Roars.