2 min read
Ten years in the Alps, and why I am now showing people the Karakoram
I moved to Germany in 2016 and learned to hike here. This is why I then had to start talking about the mountains I grew up near.
I learned to hike in Germany. That is not false modesty. When I moved here I was someone who knew mountains but had never moved through them systematically. The Alps taught me that: waymarked paths, booking a hut, reading a forecast, setting a turnaround time, being honest about your own fitness.
Ten years on I know a good part of the Eastern Alps. And somewhere in those years I noticed something that has not let go of me since.
The observation
In almost every hut I stayed in, someone in the evening was talking about Nepal. The Annapurna Circuit, Everest Base Camp, Ladakh. Sometimes Patagonia, sometimes Kyrgyzstan. Very rarely, essentially never, Pakistan.
And yet Pakistan holds the second-highest mountain on earth. Five eight-thousanders. The longest glaciers outside the polar regions. The highest mountain wall in the world, 4,600 metres unbroken. The biggest wall in the Alps is around 2,000.
The answer to “why have you never been?” was almost always the same: it had not occurred to them. Not fear, not rejection. It simply never came up.
Why I want to change that
Because it is a gap I can close. I know both sides: I know how a German hiker plans, what questions they ask, what they take as given: waymarking, reliable time estimates, some idea of what a thing costs. And I know the region I come from.
What is on this site is an attempt to put those together. Not marketing copy, but the numbers I would want myself: how high, how long, how hard, when, how much money, and what is unpleasant about it.
What I am not claiming
I am not claiming Pakistan is easy. Getting there is long. The Karakoram Highway can be blocked by landslides for days. Domestic flights to Skardu are regularly cancelled in poor weather. And the infrastructure you take for granted in the Alps, a rescue helicopter within twenty minutes or phone signal on the summit, does not exist there in that form.
That belongs in an honest description. If you do not want to deal with it, go to the Alps, and that is entirely fine.
What I am claiming
Those mountains are the most impressive thing I have ever seen. You walk the Baltoro Glacier among a few hundred people, where the Everest Base Camp trek sees tens of thousands. And a day there, food, lodging and a guide included, costs less than lunch at some Alpine huts.
That combination barely exists anywhere else now.