Rupal: the south face of Nanga Parbat
28 April 2017
May 1994. Javid Anwer (JA) who heads Green Earth Organisation (GEO), an NGO that ‘cares for the environment,’ asked if I would like to join a cleaning expedition to the south face of Nanga Parbat in August. I had never seen this mountain close up and I did not have to think twice to say yes. In the end the expedition got delayed and it was in the third week of September that we arrived in Rawalpindi to fly to Gilgit.
As expeditions go Nanga Parbat Saviour 1994 was a pretty fancy one – with a name as pompous as that it was bound to be fancy. To begin with, it was to be multi-national, and it had a TV crew to film the operations. Naturally there was going to be an immense amount of equipment and a whole team of porters – just like any old climbing expedition. This meant not having to carry anything but your camera bag and some personal belongings while the food and tents were to be with the porters or the donkeys that were to be hired. After years of mountain walking on shoe string budgets where I had to carry everything myself this was a grand treat for me and I looked forward to it.
Read more »Labels: Gilgit–Baltistan, Mountaineering, Northern Pakistan, Prisoner on a Bus: Travels Through Pakistan
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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God on a mountain
06 February 2017
Nazir Sabir, Pakistan’s foremost mountaineer and the first Pakistani Everest summiteer, says as a young man he was driven by the desire to climb peaks to see what lay on the far side. Shahid Zaidi, first-class rock climber, mountaineer and unmatchable mountainscape photographer climbed for the joy of it, for the feeling of freedom on a rock face or atop a summit. Elsewhere, someone is believed to have said they climbed the mountain ‘because it was there’.
High, snow-draped peaks are the ultimate wilderness of the world. To enter their realm is to know the true anxiety-making adventure. On those pristine white slopes where the climber is alone against the elements, he is a hair’s breadth from life-threatening perils. There a false step that can send him plummeting thousands of metres is not the only danger; the piles of avalanche-ready snow and ice are an equal and endless dread. The unseen crevasse, deceitfully lying in wait under its thin cover is the killer; and the unpredictable and sudden wind, sleet and snow, a very real threat.
Read more »Labels: Mountaineering, Mountains
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Pakistan International Mountain Film Festival
22 June 2015
Hassan Karrar, is thin as a rail, stands six and a half feet tall and teaches history at LUMS. He walks with a long step and is known in Baltistan as ‘lumbi tango walla’ – long-legged man. At Pakistan International Mountain Film Festival he and I talked of the philosophy of mountaineering and the question of ‘conquering’ peaks.
First things first. No one conquers peaks. We conquer enemies; not peaks. The only thing anyone has ever conquered attempting a summit is their own fears. That’s all.
Read more »Labels: About, Between Two Burrs on the Map Travels in Northern Pakistan, Books, Guest Speaker, Mountaineering, Mountains, Salman Rashid, Salt Range, The Apricot Road to Yarkand
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Mountaineering: the grandest of sports
20 June 2013
Nazir Sabir, the greatest Pakistani mountaineer, once told me that he was driven to see what lay on the other side of the mountain. But I think, more than seeing what lies outside, it is that these special people want to see what is within. They seek to discover the self and no better way of doing it than pitting themselves against relentless, unforgiving Nature.
Read more »Labels: Mountaineering
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Samina Baig standing tall at Everest
16 June 2013
The summit bid on any eight thousander is a test of nerves, skill and immeasurable determination. On 18 May 2013, Samina, twenty-two, and her brother Mirza Ali Baig, twenty-nine years of age, left Camp 3 (7100 metres) on Everest at 6.00 AM, reaching South Col (about 8000 metres) eight hours later. There they rested four hours and at 8.00 PM that same evening, they were on the pitch to the summit. The following morning, Samina Baig stood on the highest point on the planet Earth, 8848 metre-high Mount Everest.
Then she began the descent to reach South Col in five hours. A brief rest followed before she continued her marathon back to Camp 2, reaching it at 8.00 PM on the evening of 19 May. With two brief periods of rest, six hours in total, she had been on her feet for a full forty-eight hours! But Samina has not passed into history for making this epic struggle. She has entered the annals of Pakistani sports for being the first woman to summit Everest. For her the dream began eight years ago.
Labels: Mountaineering, Pakistan, People
posted by Salman Rashid @ 09:00,
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A world beyond the Mountains
21 May 2013
Treading on the borders of China and Wakhan to its north, Chapursan is as remote as a valley can get in Pakistan. A mere forty years ago, before the Karakoram Highway was pushed through, it was among the hardest locations to reach within the boundaries of Pakistan. With a narrow river taking up the valley floor, bounding and frothing in high summer and a sedate blue from autumn until spring, most horizontal spaces in Chapursan are under the plough. All around rise rock walls, sombre gray or brilliantly coloured, as if to exclude the valley from the outside world.
The village of Raminji sits on a shelf high above the right bank of the Chapursan River 3100 metres above the sea, barely fifteen kilometres from the entrance to the valley at Sost. Here a boy was born on the tenth day of December in 1955, the fifth of eight children. His earliest memories are of the claustrophobia induced by the sombre rock walls that enclosed his village and these go back to the time before he started school at the age of four and a half. The mountains like prison walls enclosing him in a little world that was mostly vertical with a huge slash of sky above. That was when the child felt the urge to surmount these confining hills and look upon the wider world beyond.
Labels: Mount Everest, Mountaineering, Nazir Sabir, People
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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