Crossing Shandur Pass Or Somewhere Close To It

When we arrived back in Gilgit Joe, Jakko, a Finnish traveller and I decided to cross over to Chitral and onwards to the Kalash Valley to visit the spring festival and sample some of the fiery local wine (that last point might have been the main reason, Pakistan being mainly a dry country…). Unluckily for us, the snow this year had arrived late and the pass across was still closed for vehicles. This meant that we had to cross on foot. None of us was planning on doing the walk twice, so we had to take all our gear with us

We talked to some people and everybody assured us that the walk would be fairly easy and would only take about eight hours. On the first day we took a minibus from Gilgit to Borsat. There we stayed in the only ‘hotel’ until 2 am. Only then is the snow hard enough to walk on. Even so, the going was hard until I got used to the awkwardness of walking on snow.

The owner of the ‘hotel’ hadn’t been there that night to tell us where to go, but a local on the minibus gave us some directions, which turned out quite easy to follow. Unlucky for us they also turned out to be completely wrong. Soon we were walking across avalanche fields while the mountainside got steeper by the minute. Eventually we found a way to cross the river in the valley below and we continued along our way on the other much easier side.

After five hours walking we were so exhausted that we decided to set up camp for the day. Until the sun hit our tent I probably spent some of my coldest hours, putting on more and more layers and still it was never enough to stop shivering. I fell into an uneasy sleep kind of expecting to wake up minus a couple toes. The day turned out to be as hot as the night was cold. We couldn’t move far from our tent as the snow got softer and softer. All the time we were debating between ourselves if we were in the right spot and if we should keep on going or just turn back towards Borsat.

The sun started to disappear around 7 in the evening. We had decided to turn back, but we still had to wait until 11 for the snow to harden. We figured that because of the higher altitude (we were at around 3800m by now) the snow would harden sooner. There is something highly unsettling about having to wait in the blistering cold, shivering and freezing uncontrollably, until it gets even colder, just so you can walk back to where you started a day earlier. For 4 hours I stayed in the same position, keeping my Indonesian sarong wrapped tightly around me so no cold breeze could get to me. It was highly uncomfortable, made sleep almost impossible and my back ached after only a few minutes, but at least the cold was bearable that way.

By 11 we started to pack up the tent, cross the river and head back across the snowfields and avalanches. We soon discovered that we had misjudged our previous assessment of the cold and the snow. Sometimes we broke into snow thigh deep and soon my shoes started to fill with ice. Thankfully the going was quite tough, so I actually felt quite warm as long as I was moving. As soon as I stopped though the cold was creeping into my bones and I could never stop for more than a couple minutes to wash some dried fruits down with some river water.

On the other hand I had developed a huge blister on each foot, thanks to my newly bought boots, and they started to hurt more and more. Jakko hadn’t been able to sleep at all during the night or the day, so he was soon walking around like a zombie. Then one of Joe’s shoestring broke and he lost his shoe a few times. Eventually it was soaked with both water and filled with mud. Thankfully by then we were almost back in Borsat, where we managed to catch a few hours of cold sleep until hopping on the 6 o’clock bus back to Gilgit.

The guy who gave us directions basically told us not to follow the first valley on the left, because that leads directly to Swat, not a good place to be at the moment. What we should have done, though, is first go towards Swat and then turn to the right into another valley leading away from Swat. So the path we followed wasn’t the way to Shandur but to another pass. Would we have followed that route it would have taken us another 2-3 days to get to the next village. A guide back in Gilgit told us this is only doable during summer, so I guess we were lucky that we decided to turn back…