Despite protests from the late rises, we leave the New Mountain Refuge at 5:30 AM and walk up through the town. The mouth of the gorge opens like a knife-wound in the face of the mountain. The stream, which has its source in the glacier visible far above, roars out of the gorge in a grey torrent. The peak of Ultar stands sharp against the sky, beckoning us upward.
At the foot of the first rocky ascent we pause for a rest next to a clear spring which bubbles out of the streambed. Gradually the floor of the ravine gets steeper, the walls of the canyon closing in. The sun, now touching the peaks all around us, is still a long way from penetrating the dark confines of the gorge. The rushing water makes a considerable din as we climb. There are several small farms in the lower parts of the gorge: fruit trees and poplars growing on neatly-built terraces.
The trail winds up the left side of the gorge, which begins to open out again after about half an hour, and is very steep in places. We lose the path at one place when we follow a blind track which leads to a jumble of huge boulders with the stream cascading between them. Above us, a narrow wooden bridge crosses a slip and we backtrack to a place where we can climb up to it. After an hour and a half of steady climbing, punctuated by short breaks to eat Snickers bars (we had bought 14 the previous day) and apples, we reach the First Meadow, a flat area at the foot of a towering, sheer cliff.. We meet a Czech guy descending from the top meadows. We stop and chat for ten minutes and he tells us that it is about another hour to the top. By now Kerry and Blue are far behind. We push on up the last steep face, over the rubble of the lateral moraine of the glacier whose dirty ice protrudes from the debris strewn across the valley.
We finally reach the Shepherd’s Hut after four hours of climbing. At three thousand, three hundred metres (10,000 feet), the air seems somewhat thinner and I collapse, gasping, beside a German couple who had passed us on the way up. We spread our gear about on the grass below the rough stone walls of the hut and relax in the sun. Across from us, the Ultar Glacier descends from the foot of the peaks in a steep, blackened icefall. Rumbles and crashes echoed down from hidden valleys above as avalanches smash down.
The Shepherd Meadows lie on the southern side of a huge amphitheatre, around which tower jagged peaks of ice and rock. Small streams flow down along little channels to the huts, which are surrounded by stone fences, most of which are crumbling and disused. Above the meadow, the serrated ridgeline runs around a curve to the spire of rock known as Lady Finger, then becomes a series of ice-capped peaks: Hunza Peak, Ultar One and Ultar Two.
A glacier flows down from the foot of Ladyfinger but as invisible soon after it passes beneath the flank of Ultar One. Its meltwater emerges at the north western edge of the amphitheatre as a waterfall. From Ultar Two, a jagged, rocky ridge runs down above the nala, disappearing into its depths. Out across the Hunza Valley, clouds are already beginning to gather over Diran Peak but the valley where we rest is hot and still.
Blue and Kerry arrived after about 40 minutes, Kerry exhausted and complaining. Blue pitches the tent on a flat area surrounded by two stone walls below the huts and cooks some soup which takes like old socks! A Swiss guy arrives and sprawls out beside us. He wants to climb up to Hon, the viewpoint on the ridge above the meadow. His companion arrives about an hour later, totally exhausted.
By 2:00 PM, shadow has begun to creep into the meadow. Blue and I walk over to the lateral moraine for a look. The icefall seems even more menacing close up. Crevasses and seracs form a tortured mass of ice blackened by dust and grit ground from the sides of the mountain. At the top of the icefall, a rock wall marks the spot where the glacier running down off Hunza Peak falls in pieces into the Ultar Glacier. Huge chunks of ice periodically crash down onto the lower part of the glacier.
Descending from the top of the meadow, the sun gone in and a cold wind blowing, we passed the graves of two Japanese climbers (one whose name was Kiotaki Hoshido) killed on Ultar One in 1991. It is a peaceful yet lonely place to be buried.
We eat a meal of rice, tuna, onion and tomato at 4:30. The shade in the valley is now deep and cold; above, the mountains stand already frozen, their summits bathed in the gold light of evening. Two young shepherds arrive from the upper pastures as dusk comes down. They have a few goats with them and appear frozen. One of them brings a cup of Hunza Water, a rough-edged wine which puts a warm fire in our stomachs. We are in bed by 6:15 as it is virtually dark. Around us, the mountains creak and groan and the river roars.
CurseOfTheTraveller 