A First Ascent and Two New Routes in the Boesam Valley, Pakistan
This is a preprint version of the article that appears in the 2024 UK Alpine Journal . 'How are your plans?' asked Zishan at our guesthouse in Shimshal. Privately, I thought 'not good', but replied, 'I think we'll wait a bit longer'. It was our first full day in Shimshal, and only two porters had appeared earlier in the morning out of the fifteen that we needed. Not a good ratio. Our plan was to trek to a base camp midway along the Virjerab Glacier, to the southeast of Shimshal, but the feedback from our guesthouse was that the way was hard for porters due to the undulating terrain. The lack of advance warning regarding our itinerary probably hadn't helped matters. Only two weeks earlier, Arran Turton-Phillips and I had pulled the plug on our trip to the Indian Karakoram. To cut a long, tedious bureaucratic story short, our climbing permits were a...