We leave this morning for the Hushe Valley where we will begin or trek to Laila basecamp. The last day and a half has been hectic as we worked to pack everything and ensure we hadn’t missed anything.
We arrived to Skardu Wednesday evening after two full days of driving from Islamabad. And I mean full days; we were driving from 6 AM to 7 PM. The roads were as expected, with mountain passes winding into deep canyons, narrow hairpin corners, and endless near head on collisions as traffic precariously whizzed by. Part of me loves the wildness of driving (or riding) in other countries, takes me back to when I spent half a year in Haiti, driving awesome little diesel pickups around and trying to keep four wheels on the road, or South America, where the chaos is real – but after two straight days of this, James and I were ready to get to Skardu.
Thankfully, we had the best driver on the road. We were in a little Toyota Corolla, but somehow managed to pass all the 4x4 rigs and miss almost all the potholes. Here is our driver:
We arrived at our hotel in Skardu and crashed. We woke up the next morning after the best night of sleep either of us had had since leaving the States. Our luggage had been delivered by bus the previous evening so we lugged everything into a large hallway and began the arduous task of packing our gear. We quickly ran into a few issues:
Issues 1: Qatar Airways informed us that they had taken two of our fuel bottles. Unfortunately, they had also taken the pump for our stove. We searched all over Skardu and found a similar MSR stove with a pump we could use for $150. Then the store informed us that everyone uses a butane stove with a high-altitude fuel mix.
Issue 2: Damn, I had left our MSR Reactor stove back in the states. I had read online from multiple sources that butane was impossible to find in Skardu and the solution was to use a liquid fuel stove. I also was under the impression that butane did not burn well in the cold or at high altitude. I distinctly remember a argument/debate back in Colorado as we were packing where James wanted to bring the butane stove and I insisted we should only take our liquid gas stove – well, live and learn… later that day we lucked out and found an old MSR reactor stove in a gear store. $140 later we were good to go.
Issue 3: My avalanche beacon was nowhere to be found. I am 99% sure that Qatar Airways took that as well. We searched through every piece of luggage and turned everything inside out, but it was nowhere to be found. As expected, we had no luck finding a beacon in Skardu, no one even knew what it was. We’ll gameplan for that later, as we do not expect to do much skiing on Laila, likely only the lower part of the mountain.
Issue 4: All our high-altitude medication was missing as well. Our friend Casey had given us his incredibly dialed med kit he had used for Denali, complete with four different kinds of pills along with complete instructions. Fun fact: Viagra was included, apparently it is very effective in fighting hypoxia… lol. Either way, all our Viagra was gone, along with all the other pills, unbelievable, sorry Casey.
Issue 5: I had bought Mountain House meals for all our climbing above basecamp for both Laila and Spantik, but unfortunately had miscalculated the number of servings I had bought. The description online said 24 servings for each box of meals, which was only 12 actual meals, as there are two servings in each meal. To even get close to a reasonable caloric intake, we needed 2 servings per person per meal, but I had gotten half of what we really needed. We pared back the calories and ended up taking most of the Mountain House meals for Laila, we will figure something else out for Spantik.
All in all, these issues were manageable and quite expected on an expedition like this. At least I hadn’t forgotten my ski boots, or something else equally as important. It’s chaos, but it generally all works out, you just need to be flexible and adaptive.
Our view from the hotel:
Enjoying another cup of instant coffee… why does 90% of the world only use instant coffee? It’s a tragedy, and trust me, I am no coffee snob.
Our rough itinerary for the next two weeks is as follows:
Day 1: Drive 8 hours to the Hushe Valley
Day 2-3: Trek to basecamp (4000-4300 meters)
Day 4: Rest at basecamp
Day 5-11: Acclimatize, climb and hopefully summit, as weather, health and the good Lord allows
Day 12-13: Trek back to the Hushe Valley
Day 14: Drive back to Skardu
The climbing section may take longer or shorter, it’s impossible to tell at this point. We plan to have a quick turn around in Skardu before heading out for Spantik. Even though we are here until the middle of August, this type of climbing always takes longer than expected, and the clock is ticking.
Catch ya on the flip side!