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2008 K2 and Broad Peak Expedition

Dispatch Seventy-four: August 12th, 2008

Day Seventy-four: Jhula to Pakora; Jeep Ride to Skardu

Today, the final day of the trek down, we woke up at 5:00am, had breakfast, packed up and started the five hour trek down to Askole. I took a vicodin first thing in the morning, so the beginning of the day wasn’t quite so excruciating. The weather was clear and beautiful, but that also meant that the temperature would be rising quite a bit as the morning yielded to the afternoon. It got up to around 47 degrees Celsius midway through the trek, and our arrival in Askole couldn’t have been more welcome. We stopped there for tea and to store the kitchen gear in the ATP store, and then continued for around an hour down to Pakora, the village after the landslide where our jeeps were waiting. After arriving and arguing with the porters for around an hour about I’m not sure what, we got on our way on the six hour jeep ride back down to Skardu. We were relatively lucky, as the day before there were three places on the road where landslides and washouts had made the road impassable and where expeditions had to change jeeps. We were able to get down to Skardu with only one jeep change thanks to a collapsed bridge (seen above in the photo). Aside from a flat tire, we continued without incident. We arrived after 10pm and I was met by Rabani from ATP at the Concordia motel along with my Liaison officer, Imran Ahmed. I took dinner and spoke about the events that had transpired for awhile with Imran. Afterwards, I got to packing the bags for their trip by road to Islamabad (hoping that I would be able to fly to Islamabad, although it seems unlikely). After this, around 4:30am, I went to bed for the first time in two months, in a bed!

 

In Photos:

Left: Mountain scene enroute from Jhula to Askole

Right: Porters crossing the collapsed bridge where we were forced to change jeeps.