Travels by Michael Crichton

Author:Michael Crichton [Crichton, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 978-0-307-81649-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Baltistan

A trek into Baltistan followed the mountaineer’s route toward Masherbrum Peak, at 25,660 feet a major climbing peak in a remote area of Pakistan’s Karakoram Mountains.

There was much I did not know about the Karakoram Mountains. On the map, they are a part of that great crumpled range of mountains that runs from Afghanistan to Burma, a range pushed up as the Indian continent drifts north into Russia—a range I always called the Himalaya. But it turns out that “the Himalaya” refers only to the eastern section of the range. To the west, the mountains are called the Karakoram, and, still farther west, the Hindu Kush.

I had also thought the Himalaya was the highest range in the world, but it is not. The Himalaya boasts Everest, the single highest mountain, but the Karakoram is the highest mountain range, claiming the second highest peak, K-2, as well as three other peaks above twenty-six thousand feet. All together, ten of the thirty highest mountains in the world are strung along the small Karakoram Range, which extends barely two hundred miles, little more than a tenth the length of the Himalaya.

Finally, I imagined the Karakoram to be green and forested, like the American Rockies. I did not understand that the major Karakoram summits were an average of two miles higher than those of the Rockies, and that they were in essence desert peaks rising above a high desert floor—possessing a remarkable windswept, bleak grandeur, but desert peaks nonetheless.

All this I could see from the PIA airplane, flying from the capital city of Rawalpindi north to Skardu. These jagged, sharp peaks had no counterpart in the New World; they made the American Rockies look like tired old foothills, while the greatest of the mountains, like Nanga Parbat, were positively stupefying.

And when we landed at the airfield in Skardu, we stepped out into a desert setting: suffocating heat, convection waves shimmering off the tarmac, distorting the rugged, bare peaks in a bowl all around us. Skardu was our staging place for the trek; we collected some final supplies from the bazaar, and met our military liaison, a handsome twenty-eight-year-old Pathan major named Shan Affridi. Every tourist party in Pakistan had to be accompanied by a military liaison.

We drove all the next day in jeeps, following the Indus River on a road cut into the cliffs, and camped for the night at Khapulu, a large village of four hundred houses, which is how villages are sized in this part of the world. Our leader, Dick Irvin, hired porters for the coming trek. This was an elaborate negotiation that continued into the evening. It was complicated by the fact that we did not have good maps for the area we were entering. Accurate maps of Pakistan are difficult to obtain in any case; Dick carried Xeroxed notes from someone who had made the trek a couple of years earlier. That was all we had. Thus we weren’t very clear about the order in which we would pass

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