📷 The Land of High Mountains: Pakistan. Day 10. Crossing the Batur...

What is a glacier? An image of blue ice and the clearest streams probably appears in your head? Yes, such glaciers certainly exist, but one of the largest glaciers in the Karakoram, Batura glacier, is not at all like that — it is chaos and a pile of stones, some of which are the size of a house, and it becomes completely uncomfortable when you start crossing it. But we will see the glacier a little later, and for now ...

And for now we get up at 4:30 in the morning and we are all like zombies. The final check of the backpacks, breakfast, and after some waiting we set out on foot from the hotel along the asphalt road (it was planned to get by car to the beginning of the hiking trail, but for some reason the car did not come for us in time). We have to carry food on this trekking with us, almost all of it was loaded into a huge blue plastic barrel — at our final destination there will be no shops or hotels. I wonder how the porters will carry it?

Outside, despite the early hours, it is already sunny and hot, and I have lost my sunblock somewhere. I had to ask the guys for it, because I already got a strong tan around my T-shirt, I have brown hands and absolutely white shoulders. The sun is very active here: Olya @kibela even has small blisters on her shoulders — a sunburn.

The trail along the glacier starts directly from the Karakoram Highway (KKH). We go at a normal pace, but we really want to sleep.

It's good that at least very soon dense clouds appeared in the sky and it became not hot. In such weather it is much easier to walk, I want it to continue this way.

A glacier begins behind this pile of stones, moraine. But we still do not really see it, and so far we are walking along the rocks and earth along the moraine.

Our new local guide Bayram has already had 42 hikes in these places, but we are his first Russian group. It's nice to be the first in something! :)

Gradually gaining altitude along the slope, we reached the first "camping", in which some groups spend the night and go further the next day, but we don't want to lose the whole day here: because of a very early departure we came here in the morning, and we had still a lot of time ahead, so by an absolute majority it was decided to use it for further trek.

But we decided to make a small halt here anyway. Take a walk around the neighborhood, look around — and here it's beautiful again, what a surprise :))

The Passu Cathedral mountains are closer here than from the village and make an irresistible impression.

As far as I understand, the place of the hearth in the center is a tradition among many peoples.

There is no one in the hut all the time, but it is actively used by shepherds and a few tourists on the way to the other side of the glacier. Therefore, there are also some supplies and some firewood.

As a small reward, Bayram made us coffee, or rather, boiled water, and gave us a jar of instant coffee. It's always nice when someone cares about you!

We drink hot coffee and look around. This side is also beautiful, but over there in the distance, where we are going, it will be even better! We'll see :)

While we are sitting, porters begin to come. They carry that blue barrel of food along with everything else.

It turns out that they tie our things (if it's not just one backpack) to a welded homemade lattice with straps — and so they carry it. It's hard, of course.

One of the porters overslept, so they were late. We wait to make sure they are doing well.

The sky is clearing. It seems that soon it will get hot again, and it will be more difficult to walk in the heat, so it's a bit a pity to waste time, but Bayram worries about the porters and asks to wait for them all.

Finally we waited for everyone, Bayram gave them additional instructions, and we moved on. I'm going right behind him. The trail is more or less horizontal, I listen to the sound of trekking sticks on the stones in front and behind me, the dull sound of footsteps... And suddenly I realize that it is as if I got into a sound anomaly, well, on the contrary, soundless — all the sounds disappeared and we walk absolutely silently. I look at my feet, and there is a sand here, which looks more like cement.

On the way we see a closed house with a cattle paddock. This is one of the temporary dwellings of the shepherds.

Wow, what's that hanging over the door? Well, a peculiar kind of decoration, and it adds atmosphere.

The cattle paddock is built quite carefully, although the stone walls are small, but they look solid, and the land inside is completely different. I wonder if this big boulder here intended so that the most beautiful goats climb on it to pose? :)

Flowers, so similar to our native daisies, sometimes come across on the gray ground.

There are few traces of the presence of people here, but they are still there.

The greenery here is interesting: it grows quite rarely, not as a solid carpet or thickets of bushes, but in single heaps, which, if they're lucky, grow quite luxuriantly.

We are walking along a rocky slope, and then suddenly we hear a noise above. Rockfall! Quite high, and individual stones are not visible, but dusty flashes appear on the slope one after another, and lower, closer to us, it's even a little scary. We wait until everything calm down, and only then move on.

The trail, although it is still quite visible, is sometimes marked with small cairns made of stones to make it easier to navigate.

Oh, and under this huge rock there is a place to sleep. It once fell from a nearby mountain and stood upright. To be honest, it looks quite dangerous, and after all someone regularly spends the night here!

We stop again and wait for porters. Bayram explains us the reason for his special care for them: some of the guys are just starting their professional path as porters, besides, they have not walked here yet, especially with a heavy load, and Bayram, as a leader, worries that they may not find the right path.

To the left of the trail we see a small lake with beautiful emerald-colored water.

Judging by the dried algae around the edges, the lake was much larger.

Drying under the sun, the earth cracked.

The pattern looks pretty nice ... but the plants that grow here, it seems, do not feel very good after the water left (

However, some still hold on and turn quite green.

The most persistent survive, as elsewhere in harsh conditions.

Porters have nicknames that Bayram periodically shouts out when we lose sight of them. They are all rather young while in the previous treks there were many adult men. And they look completely different, not like most adult Pakistanis, and everyone's faces are so different, as if they are all different nationalities. It's so interesting.

After shouting Bayram understands where they are, and they — where we are and where they should go. It's a little unusual to walk, constantly looking back at them, but now we see and appreciate more their hard work.

Now somebody remembers that we also have one person with the nickname in our group: Denis Ragged Ear — it's me :) At the very beginning of the journey, near Nanga Parbat, one tree wanted to leave its mark on me for a long memory.

So, this small wound has not yet fully healed! So I still have to hide my ear under the buff on my head instead of my favorite baseball cap. Olya checks and evaluates its condition every day — I can't look behind my ear myself.

Climbing further and higher, we now can better see the tongue of the glacier.

It seems that it was not too difficult to hike, but no one refuses to have a little rest. It's good to lie like this and enjoy the view.

During the short rest, there was time to take a closer look at something in the distance. I wonder what they saw there?

We came to the very edge of the glacier, and then we go down, over there to that huge ice cave. We go out onto the glacier at this point.

We will first go down from the moraine ridge, and then we will rise again higher, and we will go not on solid ground, but on a glacier. Just imagine the size of this cave! For scale: on the left, our guide sat down to rest. Yes, it's that little dark dot in the upper left corner. And yes: the glacier is not blue-white here at all :(

Well, we've been on the trail for about 5-6 hours. And only now we will begin to cross the glacier itself — it seems to me that it will not be easy.

However, mountains almost always reward those who are not afraid of difficulties, right?

To be continued...

Parts of the journey:

Camera: OLYMPUS E-M1 Mark II

It's better to watch the photos in high resolution — just click on them and open in a new window.

You can also see my photos in my blog LJ and in my profile on NatGeo

📷 The Land of High Mountains: Pakistan. Day 10. Crossing the Batura Glacier: the Beginning