The hillside woke up a few hours after our torch lights went out. Evidently, it had set its alarm several hours ahead of the one on our watches. Immediately it made its feelings known that it didn't approve of our camping spot by casting rocks at our general location. 'Wooaaahh, that one was close!' Murilo excitedly gasped while I lay semiconscious at the opposite end of the tent. I was getting a running commentary from the tent entrance about each rock that flew down the nearby scree gully - in terms of how fast it was travelling, how large it was, and, most importantly, how close it passed by. 'Shit, that one was only about 25m away'.
In resignation, we crawled out of the tent to jointly assess the situation. In a sleepy haze, I saw a large rock cartwheeling down the gully at full velocity, over the lateral moraine, and onto the glacier. Fortunately, the rocks travelling with the most energy appeared to be following the centre of the gully. We were off to the side, beneath a chossy buttress, and protected by a broad pit behind the tent, which seemed to be doing a satisfactory job of swallowing up the few rocks that went trundling in our direction. There was always the nagging feeling, though, that a rock with suitable trajectory and momentum might breach this natural defence.
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| The scree gully, trench and tent |
Several large sheets of slate littered the moraine around the tent. Soon I had one of these positioned upright outside the tent, beside where my head had been resting just a few minutes earlier. Feeling more confident about my improved chances of survival, I returned to my sleeping bag, put my earplugs in and sleeping mask on, and promptly passed out. The planned alarm sounded at 2am. By this point, the gully had settled down, but Murilo's night had been restless and he had been unable to share my fatalist outlook.
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| Head protection |
We were camped at 5400m altitude on the Yazpurs Glacier in the Pakistani Karakoram, after trekking two days from our base camp, which itself was a three-day trek from the village of Shimshal via the 5000m Boesam Pass. Our goal was the unclimbed 6000m peak at the head of the glacier. I had some minor history with this peak after reconnoitring the southern and eastern aspects of the mountain the previous year. On that occasion, my partner and I had opted for another objective with a shorter approach. This time, ironically, we had found an equally long approach from the north side, but this aspect looked as though it would offer a much more logical weakness.
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| Approaching out high bivouac at 5400m |
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| Yazpurs Sar from our bivouac at 5400m |
We left the bivouac at 3:30am and trudged up the final stretch of glacier towards the Yazpurs Col at its head. Reaching the col involved easy glacial terrain, followed by one steeper, pitched rope length of 55-degree snow/ice to a gap in the cornice a short way above its lowest point on its eastern side. This involved some brief objective danger beneath a large serac and a prominent cornice.
From the col, the west face of the mountain became accessible. We followed the left edge of the face, which ramped up to around 50 degrees for the most part. The face was firm névé and often icy, which required pitching and/or moving together with the full length of rope between us in order to place protection with ice screws. Midway up the face, a large rockfall triggered above our bivouac site, and this produced a huge dust cloud that enveloped the tent. We pressed on while contemplating the possibility that we might not have a functional tent to return to. Nevertheless, I felt relieved and thankful that we were making our attempt and not still lying in our cosy sleeping bags.
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| View South from the Yazpurs Col to Distaghil Sar and Malangutti Sar |
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| The start of the West Face of Yazpurs Sar |
Our pace slowed as we neared the summit due to our inadequate acclimatisation, while the winds increased and snow clouds began to build over the surrounding peaks. A mixture of anticipation and anxiety built in my stomach. Murilo looked to be suffering, and regularly placed his head in the snow in a gesture of prostration. Every time, though, he seemed to find a little energy from somewhere to push on, before prostrating himself again a little higher up. Clearly, reaching the summit meant a lot to him, which was reassuring to see. I wasn't suffering quite so badly, although I knew my body had a time limit before my pace would begin to decelerate. Wind slab began to build as we approached the summit, but it felt consolidated enough not to be overly concerning, and was never a distraction from the summit fever that was gripping us. By 12pm we were on top, or at least on the highest point that we were willing to reach in the full knowledge that there was likely a large cornice in our vicinity.'
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| Murilo leading towards the summit |
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| Approaching the summit |
"Yazpurs Sar" seemed like the logical name for the peak. We felt a mixture of satisfaction but also vulnerability due to the threat of bad weather. After barely 15 minutes on top, the latter feeling was sufficient to encourage us to start the descent. This proved to be a slow affair due to our having underestimated the potential difficulties and only having brought a 60m half rope from base camp. Murilo abseiled first, placing a few screws along the way, with me then downclimbing and removing them as second. Both of us fell through the occasional crevasse up to the thigh in the process. Fortunately, the weather had begun to calm down not long after we commenced our descent.
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| Summit of Yazpurs Sar |
By around 5pm we were back at the bivouac site. Miraculously, the tent was unharmed and, without further ado, we moved it away from the rockfall zone and onto the glacier with our limited remaining energy - something we should probably have done during the previous night. We promptly retired to our sleeping bags to sleep.
The next day, we descended to our base camp at the herder settlement of Avduzhi at 4060m in the Ghujerab Valley, where several hundred goats and sheep were our primary neighbours. This was a lower than ideal altitude for a base camp, but we had chosen it in order to allow equal access to three nearby valleys running south, all of which were unvisited by climbers. These were the Yazpurs Valley, where we had just returned from, together with the Shalghagin and Zangaish Valleys.
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| Base camp at Avduzhi |
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| Our neighbours at base camp |
Recovery was a slow affair. On the second day, Murilo and I both woke with similar symptoms of food poisoning. This proved to be an intermittently recurring theme for the rest of our time at base camp - not surprising, given the combination of animal faeces everywhere and the less than exemplary hygiene on display by our cooks. It was indeed in the cooking tent that laughter, food, and dung met. The local wagtail population appeared to be the main beneficiaries and were getting fatter by the day on all the food scraps that littered the kitchen tent entrance.
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| Base camp life |
The sheep and goats left for lower pastures soon after our return and possibly took some of our remaining collective strength with them.
We made a couple of visits to the neighbouring Shalghagin Glacier in order to explore the potential objectives, before opting to attempt the east face of an unclimbed 6050m peak midway up it. I had first seen this peak from another summit in the general area during the previous September. This time, however, the snowline was much higher and, as a consequence, we needed to struggle our way up 380m of scree ascent in order to reach the snowline. From here, we climbed a mixture of 45-degree névé and soft snow without bothering to use a rope. Snow conditions worsened with height due to the sun exposure. We were making progress, albeit with a lot of pauses, but by 5730m we were ready to abandon our attempt due to a lack of energy to reach the top and get back down. Feeling resigned, we retraced our steps. The snow was unsuitable for Abalakov anchors, and so we downclimbed our way back to the scree slopes. We had evidently been overly optimistic about our general form. In hindsight, we should perhaps have endured a rough bivouac at the top of the scree slope in order to break up the climb. Naturally, after the rockfall we had experienced during our previous ascent, we had become wary about sleeping anywhere near scree slopes, let alone on a scree slope itself.
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| P 6050m from the Shalghagin Glacier - the snowline was much higher than the previous year |
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| 'Rawalpindi' base camp |
A few days' rest allowed our optimism to rebuild. I reconnoitred the third glacier, the Zangaish Glacier, and we made a plan to attempt the 6030m peak at the head of its western branch. We then made two attempts to reach the base of the mountain, but both were aborted due to a similar lack of energy. Thirteen kilometres of hiking with 1400m of ascent to reach our planned bivouac had evidently been too optimistic. Over-optimism seemed to be a running theme throughout the trip. Once again, we should probably have dedicated another day to putting ourselves in a suitable position to make an ascent.
Our donkeys and their drivers arrived soon after our return, which was two days earlier than expected. It was as though they sensed we had reached the end of the road in terms of climbing. Our cook was certainly ready to go, and this had been evident from his long-standing daily countdown of how many days remained at base camp.
'Ten days, expedition finish'
'Seven days, porters here; nine days, expedition finish'
'Kerosene big problem'
We started our trek from base camp back to Shimshal, only to meet with a second, full set of donkeys and drivers travelling in the opposite direction only a few hours down the trail. Some sort of duplicate communication had evidently happened in the village, but after what felt like a couple of hours' wait, a select group of donkeys and their drivers caught us up on the trail after coming to an independent arrangement among themselves on how to settle matters. It was good to share the company of our donkey drivers again on the way back to Shimshal. Indeed, the people and cultures of the Karakoram have played a large part in my returning to Pakistan so many times - seven trips in total now. This pleasure of company also extended to our four-legged friends, despite a moment of panic when one of them tried to eat my remaining little finger. That would have been a calamitous end to a trip, although it was my own fault for teasing the beast.
Our jeep was waiting in Shimshal to drive us back to mobile phone masts, pizza, bed mattresses, and all the other markers of modern civilisation.
After our first ascent - achieved in a matter of days after first reaching base camp - it felt as though the expedition had slightly derailed itself, which was reflected in some of the flat feelings that we had been experiencing. With our ascent, we had set the benchmark high and then failed to get anything else climbed in the following twelve days of largely good weather. I have to remind myself, though, how easy it is to get nothing climbed on a trip to the Karakoram. In terms of experience though, the trip had been rich and memorable, as it always seems to be in this part of the world. No doubt it won't be the last visit.
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