It's a short 6.5 Kilometre round trip with 770 meters of ascent, and thankfully I was feeling much better after the acupuncture and the unbroken string of good nights sleep I'd had since Passu.
After an excellent breakfast we set off to make the long climb through the village and up into the mountains. The route starts by threading through the small alleys of the old town of Karimabad, and as we climbed up the hillside people greeted us and pointed the way so that we wouldn't get lost. Finally, we reached the orchards at the top of the town and started to follow the small canal that leads up to Ultar Meadow.
The path soon comes to a ledge, cut into the hillside, with a 300 meter drop down to the river below. It's easy going until the path reaches the terminal moraine of the glacier from where it's a steep scramble over giant boulders.
The ground is unstable, and the path is difficult to make out, although it's fairly obvious which direction to head in.
The exposed ice of the glacier – it's a black glacier so is mostly covered in moraine:
Finally, after a long pull, we arrived at the Ultar Meadow and the top section of the glacier.
Looking back towards the Hunza valley:
It's truly breathtaking – with mountain peaks, waterfalls, and the most incredible glacier. Constant rumbles, crashes, and ice falls are a constant reminder that the glacier is making it's way steadily towards the ocean via the Hunza River. And behind it all – Ultar standing at 7388 meters.
A friendly sheep trying to find lunch:
And as if to underline the tremendous forces at work here, a large piece of the cliff has been sheered off by the glacier, and is now moving downwards to become part of the terminal moraine.
The water has a large amount of mica in it, which hangs in suspension and creates these amazing patters in the water:
It took us three and a half hours to reach the meadow, and we'd been told that it would take an hour to return. Except – we ended up getting lost.
As we left the meadows, we decided to follow the water channel along it's upper course, and as we edged further along, the path became smaller and smaller with an ever increasing drop to the valley floor below. Finally, the path disappeared all together, and we were stuck on a tiny ledge on the cliff side.
Several hundred meters below, we could see the path, and rather than backtrack to the meadow, we decided to start climbing down. At one point we had to make a 30 foot scramble down a wet, unstable, almost vertical drop – at the bottom of which was a waterfall. We all got drenched as we picked our way down the unstable scree slopes.
The long climb down, and the water channel that runs to Altit on the other side of the gorge:
The very very long drop to the valley floor:
Finally, after scrambling down some steep scree and moraine, we made it to the path, and retraced our steps back to Karimabad.
The cobbled main street of Karimabad – just like Haworth – but with good weather :-)
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