Lee Harrison Climbing

This is an English language version of the article published by Norsk Tindeklub in the Tidsskrift for Norsk Alpinklatring 2025 . 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 s...

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...

My one month trip to the Karakoram during summer 2015 could loosely be regarded as a success in that we climbed three small summits, two of which were first ascents. We had planned bigger objectives prior to the trip and we also fell short in this respect. The trip as a whole was far from being problem free and all too easily it could have been a disaster. There were lots of factors involved so I thought it was worth writing about some of the problems we experienced as well as things that worked well. As much as a reminder to myself for future trips. The original trip report is  here for anybody interested. Base camp with the Batura Muztagh in the distance Porters Lack of porters at the trail head in Passu was our first problem, which I had not anticipated away from the Baltoro region. It has been ten years since I last hired porters in Pakistan and maybe the numbers have dropped off because of the lack of visitors. Maybe we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. A loca...