Karakorum 2003 Expedition.

It took us five days to get from the capital of Pakistan, Islamabad, to the Base Camp: we left Islamabad on the evening of July 5^th and reached the Base Camp on the evening of July 10^th with a small group of porters while the main group came next day (July 11^th). This included 3 full days of trekking: half a day to Hispar village, 2 full days of trekking up Hispar Glacier and half day trekking up Yutmaru Glacier with 42 porters. Normally the trek starts in Hispar village which is located just a couple of hours below the glacier but this year the jeep road was washed away by the mud slide. The Base Camp was established on the right side moraine of Yutmaru glacier on a small green terrace with a nice little lake. This place is protected from the winds by the old moraine of Yutmaru glacier, it looks and feels as oasis in the land of ice and rock debris spreading around. It took us two weeks to choose the route, to fix the ropes on difficult parts and establish high altitude camps: we put up Camp I at 5630 on July 15^th and Camp II at 6330 on July 20^th.

Yutmaru Glacier flows out of a great circus that looks like a horse-shoe with 1500m-tall vertical walls and solid mass of overhanging ice-cornices that end the upper plateau at the altitude 6000m. Relying on the information received from the satellite, we chose the route along a not so well-defined snow-ice pillar that we hope will take us right on the plateau. From there we were going to attempt one of the unclimbed peaks over 7000m: Pumari Chhish, 7350m or Yutmaru Sar, 7330m. The way from the Base Camp to the beginning of the route was for 3 hours. The mean steepness of the wall was just over 50°, but is consists of the gently sloped parts interchanged with much steeper, 70-80° steep walls. There are many dangerous bergshrunds on the route, with the avalanche debris providing insecure bridges, some of them falling in front of us. The upper part of the route is dangerous because of the overhanging ice cornice. We used ice-screws and snow anchors to fix about 400 meters of rope. We believe that it’s the easiest (and safest) way to the plateau in spite of that fact the route took us out to the ridge and we should descent about 800m to reach the plateau. We followed the narrow ridge to the nameless summit, 6920m on July 30^th. In addition to the two camps established on the route, we put the camp III at 6670 and then moved it to 6800 because we were planning to go further and descend on the plateau - but this would not be needed for the ascent of the 6920 peak. The ascent took 6,5 days in all including 1,5 days for descent and 2 days for waiting for better weather on the route. From the ridge and the summit we saw the huge snow-ice circus with steep north faces of Pumari massif, slopes of Yutmaru massif and greatly torn Yazghil Glacier. It would take us at least for 4-6 days to descent from the ridge on snow-ice 60° steep slope and to reach one of these summits. We would also need the time to descend from the ridge (6850m) to the Base camp. We decided that we do not have resources for all this and descended.

Note on the trekking and porters. According the agreement between Nagar and Hispar communities, the expeditions have to hire Nagar porters on the way up and Hispar porters on the way down. The problem is that Hispar porters are always troublesome, never keep the agreement and cause delays demanding more money. They enjoy the reputation of being the worst porters in Pakistan. One should be prepared that the way down will take much longer and will cost much more because of this.

Photograph of the peak with our route and camp positions can be seen here.