Over the Hills and Far Away by Rob Collister

Author:Rob Collister [Rob Collister]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781911342786
Publisher: Vertebrate Publishing
Published: 2017-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

Advanced Base is two small orange tents on a patch of snow among some boulders. The snow is melting rapidly and already the tents are isolated on foot-high pedestals. A matter of feet away is the Shetor Glacier, a chaotic jumble of ice twelve miles long and a mile wide, leading into the heart of the largely unexplored Hindu Raj mountains. The glacier has never been visited before. Every now and then, a poised block of ice collapses with a crash or a stone fall roars down the mountainside, leaving a plume of dust and ugly scars in the snow. One night we were wakened by a rasping crunch as a boulder weighing several tons slid from its perch on the glacier to within three feet of the tent. Mysterious creaks and groans sound from below us. It is not a peaceful camp.

At 15,000 feet we are half way up the glacier. From a Base Camp in the valley 5,000 feet below, it has taken twelve days of reconnaissance and load-carrying to establish ourselves here. Colin and I have climbed a peak of about 5,300 metres immediately behind the camp. The route looked deceptively short from below and we were slowed down more than we had expected by altitude, so that our ‘day off’ took us eleven hours, up one AD ridge of slabby granite blocks and down another. It got dark on the way down. Colin is very short-sighted and unfortunately on this occasion he had only his dark glasses … We are dangerously late in the season. We have been warned that after 15 August the weather is likely to be unsettled and the winter snows could set in any day. It is now 10 August. On top of a nine-day walk-in, we have been delayed over two weeks by the machinations of Major Munawar Khan who spends much of his time composing telegrams to the government begging that we be prevented from climbing. Liaison Officers have to be fully equipped for altitudes up to at least 8,000 metres. Sadly, Major Munawar prefers to lie on a charpoy while his batman brings him cups of tea and cuts his toenails. Batman even follows him into the bushes every morning, carrying the bog-roll. We are not friends.

Nevertheless, surrounded by such superb mountains, morale cannot be anything but high. Crawling through the sleeve-entrance of our tents in the morning, we look straight across the Yarkhun valley to the mountains of the Afghan Hindu Kush, twenty miles away. Turning to look up the glacier, Thui II stands out immediately. Dr Gerald Gruber saw the mountain from the valley floor two years ago. In an article in the Alpine Journal he wrote, ‘In my opinion it is the most beautiful and isolated summit in the Hindu Kush or Hindu Raj’. Now, only a mile from the foot of its East Ridge, we can thoroughly endorse his words; the mountain is magnificent. And difficult, too. Dr Gruber in his article went on to say: ‘The ascent of Thui II will require a strong team and a massive outlay of equipment.

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