Yazhghal Glacier

After a blissful day exploring Shimshal village, soaking in the sun and reading my book, Hasil Shah, the owner of my guesthouse, recommended that I head to Yazhghal Glacier the next day. It’s about a 9 km walk one way, so can easily be done in a day. Most of it is flat and you only gain a bit of altitude on the last section. The two Japanese tourists from the drive over, Oizumi-san and Senri-san, decided to join me.

Hasil used to be a high-altitude mountaineer in his younger days with ascents on a couple 8000 m peaks under his belt. He reckoned that it shouldn’t take us more than two hours to get there. As a general rule you always need to be a bit wary when locals in the mountains give you time estimates. They are very strong walkers, perfectly acclimatized to the altitude and don’t usually plan in breaks for shorter walks such as this one. They usually don’t stop to take pictures or to just sit in the sun when they are a little cold. When locals here walk somewhere, they tend to have an objective like collect livestock or fix the roof of a shepherds hut. Looking at a pretty white glacier isn’t, generally speaking, high on their list of priorities. Long story short, I figured we better plan for about three hours one-way and, based on that, we decided to leave around 9:00 in the morning.

The next morning we set off. The path first wound through the village before looping around a big hill that marks the end of Shimshal. After that it kind of disappeared in amongst a vast field of small rocks that had been left by a long-dead glacier. We picked the trail back up as we hit the river and then were joined by a man with his donkey for a little while. Never pass up some local knowledge, so we questioned him about the route. He pointed out a shepherds hut on the horizon and told us to hike up towards the rim left by the retreating Yazhghal Glacier once we got there. Something was obviously lost in translation here, as it didn’t exactly work out for us, but more on that in a bit 😉

It was a really pleasant walk! The sun was out and we chatted about life and the universe. Turns out that Oizumi wasn’t actually a tourist, but owned a little cafe in Altit, Hunza, close to the fort. And Senri had started traveling after he retired and had just celebrated his second anniversary on the road, so just as long as my current trip! We had a little break and a snack at the shepherds hut and debated which way to go next. Oizumi and I thought that we could make out a path to the top of the rim, like our friend from before had mentioned. Senri wanted to trust his hiking app and follow the bottom of the rim for another kilometer or so. It was two against one, though, so he quickly backed down.

Turns out that Senri was right. As soon as we hit the slope of the rim any resemblance of a path disappeared amongst the rocks. We were already there, though, so ended up climbing all the way to the top where we saw… nothing. A bit of white in the distance with deep gashes in the ground before us that looked impossible to cross. It wasn’t a big deal in the end and the detour only cost us like half an hour or so, but the lesson here is to always trust your navigational instruments when in doubt!

We continued along the rim, staying high, and could soon see a proper path a bit below that eventually joined up with us as it snaked higher up. From there it was just another short hike along the valley and then up the steep rim where we were greeted by the whitest glacier I had ever seen!

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