Pakistan’s mountains are calling—here’s why you should go

This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK).

Friday prayers have ended, and the streets of Rawalpindi are hot, noisy and rammed. Mopeds growl as they edge through the crowd. In the throng, details catch the eye: henna-dyed beards and candy-striped hijabs; a knife-sharpener showering sparks over the pavement; four passengers and a goat in an auto-rickshaw. Down an alley, boys are playing cricket under a tangle of overhead wires. The heat is thick. Brakes squeak, brows sweat.

“We’re coming into mango season,” says local tour leader Aneeqa Ali, striding through the traffic. She points out a roadside stall amid the hubbub, piled with yellowing fruit. Above us, the sun beats down on tall, sand-coloured buildings. “I like this time of year. June is good for hiking,” she says with a smile. “It’s hot here, but cooler in the Karakoram. You’ll see when you’re in the mountains.”

Aneeqa has her hair loose and is wearing a paisley shalwar kameez (tunic and loose trousers). She used to be a finance worker but moved into tourism after seeing the country’s untapped potential as an adventure travel destination. “The internet is still a black hole for Pakistan travel information,” she explains, raising her voice as we squeeze between barrows laden with ginger and almonds. “Even getting details on restaurants or train tickets can be hard. But people shouldn’t be put off.”

This is wise advice. I’m in the country as part of a new group tour with Intrepid Travel, and since my plane touched down the previous day, any nagging doubts about my safety have dissipated. Security worries? Not unless I include locals waving hello while I’m trying to dodge mopeds. Unasked-for attention? Only bashful selfie requests from teenagers curious at seeing foreign visitors. Endless red tape? The authorities have recently scrapped visa fees for tourist arrivals from 126 countries, including the UK, so that’s no problem either.

Pakistan is a young country with an age-old history. Founded after the partition of India along religious lines in 1947, its lands have been home to ancient civilisations and its past has been shaped by waves of different settlers. On this trip, we’re seeing a few of its many faces. The jostling northern city of Rawalpindi — where most of the architecture is pre-partition, including a ramshackle former Hindu temple — is a short drive from our base in the capital city Islamabad, laid out from scratch in the 1960s and where we spend the first two nights.

The bulk of the trip, however, will be focused on the Baltistan region in the far north, home to the world’s second-highest mountain range: the mighty, snow-capped Karakoram. In nearby Nepal, a million or more adventure travellers a year head to the Himalayas. The Karakoram, by contrast, attracts only around 15,000 hikers annually.

Our 12-strong group will be exploring one of the lesser-known parts of the range, culminating in a hike up to Amin Brakk Base Camp at 14,000ft. “No one’s telling Pakistan’s story,” Aneeqa tells me. “The more remote valleys have a really special beauty.” This, I’ll soon come to learn, is an understatement of alpine proportions.

Before then, though, we have time in Islamabad. The city, which replaced coastal Karachi as the national capital in 1967, is now home to more than 1.2 million people. It feels ordered on the one hand, with fig tree-lined avenues and blank-faced civic buildings, and offbeat on the other. Saloon cars share the roads with three-on-board motorbikes and riotously hand-painted trucks. Tethered camels rest next to a construction site.

On our first evening, we head to the basement restaurant of Khoka Khola, where booze-free mint margaritas quench the heat of the samosa chaat (spicy chickpea mix) and framed pictures of The Beatles and Frida Kahlo hang alongside cult Pakistani celebrities. A wall stencil shows the head of former prime minister Imran Khan on the body of Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo. In my hotel room, every TV channel is showing either cricket or politics.

Aneeqa won’t be joining us in the far north, but fellow tour leader Muneer Alam — a kind-eyed force of nature with a can-do grin — will be. In a multiethnic country of almost a quarter of a billion people, Muneer is a Baltistan native accustomed to the quiet magnitude of the Karakoram. “I am a man of the mountains,” he tells me when we meet in Islamabad.

The evening before our one-hour flight north, he takes us to the capital’s Faisal Mosque. Set among woolly hills on the city’s outskirts, it’s the biggest mosque in South Asia and the fifth largest in the world, with four minarets towering over the pyramidal peak of its prayer hall.

“Shoes off here,” says Muneer, as we approach the vast courtyard. The sky is a darkening blue and the evening is warm, with sparrows sending a wash of song over the hundreds of people waiting outside for the call to prayer. Under my bare feet, the marble-like stones of the courtyard are still hot. The mosque looks monumental.

I notice Muneer looking at the slender crescent moon above the hills. “Just like the Pakistan flag,” he remarks. Then he rubs his hands and his thoughts travel 200 miles away, to the Karakoram. “I think that’s a good sign for our adventure.”

Valleys & villages

Pakistan has five mountains higher than 8,000 metres (26,240ft), and Sadiq Sadpara has climbed them all. I meet him among the rutted roads and chicken crates of Skardu’s Old Bazaar, where, after spending his youth as a mountaineering guide, he now runs a market store selling hiking gear. He wears a traditional woollen hat, has a thick moustache and unfurls his fingers in turn as he recounts his proudest summits. “G2 six times, G1 twice,” he says, softly. “And, of course, K2.”

When the British surveyor Thomas Montgomerie assigned titles to the highest peaks in the Karakoram in 1856, he played a very straight bat. Labelling them in the order he came across them — the K stands for Karakoram, while the G is for Gasherbrum, a massif in the same range — he bestowed some of the most extraordinary mountains on Earth with names more suited to school classrooms.

It’s a miracle he wasn’t more rhapsodic. K2, after all, is the world’s second-highest point, unseen on our trip only because too many other titanic peaks crowd it from view. From the moment we land in the small Baltistan city of Skardu, the scenery lifts and swells around us. Sky-high ridgelines jag like arrow-tips above gargantuan gorges. Wind-scoured valleys stretch across the land to show glaciers in distant saddles, their bulk ice-white against the fearsome silver of the rockfaces.

Driving east through the mountains towards the trailhead village of Kanday, we stop above a wide river glinting in the sun. On the other bank, two figures appear as specks. The waters are loud and milky-grey. “The Indus,” says Muneer. “It rises near Mount Kailash in Tibet and flows right the way through Pakistan to the Arabian Sea. It’s our lifeblood.”

Like the river, the people of the region — known as Balti — have their origins in Tibet, from where they arrived more than 3,000 years ago. Highlighting Pakistan’s complex cultural make-up, they’re predominantly Shia Muslims (the country as a whole is mainly Sunni), and their first language — also called Balti — is one of around 70 spoken by different groups around the nation. Baltistan itself covers 12,000sq miles and gets called Little Tibet, despite the fact that there’s nothing little about it.

The drive to Kanday is split over two days, our tiny 4WD beetling through a realm of rock and river. When villages appear, they come as remote green oases. We stop at one, Yugo. From the road it appears to be little more than a cluster of apricot orchards, but villager Inayat Yugvi leads us beyond them to reveal a maze of mud-and-stone houses dissected by neat, poplar-shaded lanes. White butterflies flit at our feet. “There are 600 households here, all farming and herding,” he says, leading us past hand-cut irrigation channels that gush glacial run-off into the soil.

The houses are mainly three-storey, with their ground floors given over to chickens and cattle. Young men are building a small mosque (“our fourth,” says Inayat) and women are rinsing rainbow-bright clothing in a mountain stream. We pass beds of tomatoes and ripe plots of wheat. “I hope to attract more tourists here, to show them how we live,” continues Inayat, who charges a small fee for his tours, sharing the money across the community. He hands me freshly picked cherries — plump, juicy and lip-staining — and explains that over the past year, around 500 visitors have come calling.

Inayat’s goal, to bring advantage to his village by immersing travellers in an under-visited destination, is similar to that of the trip itself. Domestic tourists flock to certain Baltistan beauty spots, most notably the lakes of the Hunza Valley almost 120 miles away, but the parts of the region we’re travelling through are infinitely quieter.

This is especially true of Kanday, the village where we begin our hike. Having stopped overnight in Khaplu — a town dwarfed by pale mountainscapes and home to a 19th-century fort — Kanday feels even more of an outpost. More isolated than Yugo, it stands beside a river plain at the head of a hushed valley. Our trip here is bringing income to more than 20 local porters and cooks, who will be accompanying us onto the higher slopes. We’re greeted with warmth (“Welcome to Pakistan!” beams a boy no older than nine) and a feast of dahls and curries we eat sat on the floor.

After lunch, the hike gets underway. Our ultimate target is the Nangma Valley, a 13,000ft-high basin reachable only on foot. The first part of the trek, however, leads up between a pair of 3,000ft-tall granite cliffs — it feels like entering the gates of a promised land. We’re on narrow herders’ trails, and within minutes, the epic scale and silence of the scenery is all-enfolding.

The path is steep. I walk slowly, keeping my breath in check. There are earthy-smelling herbs at my feet and totemic slopes above me. It takes five hours to reach our first camp, at the summer herding pasture of Mingulo Broq. Unshouldering my pack, I see we’re ringed on all sides by a fortress of sharp, spiky peaks. The mountaintops are ice-pocked, their bladed edges raw and chiselled.

Our tents have been set up by an advance group of porters, so I do the most sensible thing remaining: that is, accept their smiling overtures to play cricket. My bog-standard bowling gets smacked all over the Karakoram, but never has wooden bat met taped-up ball in finer surrounds.

Hitting the heights

Sometime around 3am, I stumble from my tent to answer a call of nature. The night air is crisp and the sky is brimful with stars. The Milky Way arcs overhead. When I studied this part of the country on the map pre-trip, Pakistan’s neighbours had seemed close by — India, China, Afghanistan — but the outside world now seems light years away. On the highest summits, fields of snow softly glow in the starlight.

“Chalain! Let’s go!” says Muneer later that morning, after an early breakfast of warm flatbreads and piping-hot tea. He hands round packets of nuts and dried mulberries as hiking sustenance. We have a further 1,300 feet of altitude to gain before reaching our Nangma Valley campsite, and he’s keen for us to cover them early. An hour into the trek, with yaks grazing on far-off slopes, a solo female hiker passes the other way with her guide. They’re the only other people we see in three days.

As the trail rises further, past gnarled willows, I fall into step with Liaqat Ali, the chief porter. He walks with the sure gait of a born hiker. “Red-billed choughs,” he says, pointing out dark birds speeding across a cliff-face. Minutes later, he gestures to a giant, jagged peak in the distance. “It was climbed for the first time in 2022, by a Hungarian group,” he explains. “It had no name. I was the expedition chef, so they called it after my young son. Now it’s Mount Ananat.”

Nangma Valley arrives in dumbfounding style. It’s as though some celestial hand has flung a dozen Matterhorns together to frame the grandest of all amphitheatres. And there’s no one else here to see it. At the campsite, under the colossal Shingu Charpa glacier, the grass at our feet is emerald-green. A stream is chuckling past beside the tents, and when I dip my fingers in the flow, they’re numb within seconds.

In the mess tent, sapped by the hike, we refuel on noodle soup and chicken curries. We talk about the aims of the trip we’re on, and the hope that local communities will benefit just as much as travellers and the whole experience will help change perceptions of an often-misunderstood country. “The region needs responsible, sustainable tourism,” emphasises Muneer.

The fact that it also has scenery that swallows you up and leaves you reeling is a bonus. If the planet holds a more majestic place to spend a night under canvas than Nangma Valley, it keeps it well hidden. The sense of solitude once the sun has set, in the midst of such violently large mountains, is head-spinning.

And there’s more spectacle to come. The final ascent of the trip is an out-and-back trek to the 14,000ft-high Amin Brakk base camp. We make the climb gradually, setting off in the late morning up a rocky path out of the valley. “When I was here last month,” confides Muneer, “I saw fresh snow leopard droppings.” I scan the flinty grey of the mountainside as we walk, spotting only ice-drifts and yak-pats but feeling elated nonetheless. To be somewhere this wild is an endlessly raw thrill.

The temperature drops. I keep my eyes lowered, trying to stay sure-footed as the path straggles across the mountainside. Red wildflowers squeeze out of the stony ground and vivid orange lichen coats the trailside rocks. As we get higher still, snow starts to fall. We’ve been climbing for nearly three hours when we arrive on a plateau, marked by a hand-piled cairn. We’ve reached base camp. Liaqat points to a wall of granite to the west. “Amin Brakk,” he says. I look up and around at the striated slopes that encircle us. There are higher points in the Karakoram but to be here in the heart of the range, feeling the mountain wind on my face, is privilege enough.

Two mornings later I’m having coffee in the sunshine at Shigar Fort, a heritage hotel in a broad valley just north of our route back to Skardu. The fort’s chunky 17th-century stonework looks out onto a clear-running stream. I get talking to Noor un Nisa, a young front desk clerk who defied the norm in 2021 by becoming the first woman to be employed here; several others have since followed her example. She has a maroon hijab and a resolute gaze.

“I was determined to get this job,” she says, gently thumping the table to illustrate her point. “It was a challenge, but I wanted to be a part of the visitor industry.” Around us, the skyline is still filled with zigzagging peaks. This part of Pakistan is a sleeping colossus of a travel destination, and its advocates are passionate about its potential. “For me,” says Noor, providing a neat footnote, “tourism is the future.” And in a region where heartfelt hospitality is a way of life and the mountain trails are nothing short of transcendental, it certainly deserves to be.

Published in the April 2025 issue of National Geographic Traveller (UK).

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