Where is trango tower

He said this Pakistan trip was his first expedition geared toward big-wall rock climbing and he credited Pfaff as the "mastermind" for getting them there. For me, Pakistan is about the mountains, the people and the experience of going way out there. It's a powerful place. Many thanks conducive towards the great data. Purely nondiscriminatory wen upwards!

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Newswire Archives. Here at Alpinist , our small editorial staff works hard to create in-depth stories that are thoughtfully edited, thoroughly fact-checked and beautifully designed. Please consider supporting our efforts by subscribing. Tweet Add to Flipboard Magazine. Username Password Forgot your username or password? Nameless Tower. Muztagh Tower.

Uli Biaho. Payu Peak. Lots of gear in front of the group. The Cathedral. Glacial lake. The group from far away. Porters close to Trango. Viewing: of 4. Shahid Hussain - Apr 20, am - Hasn't voted updated information Thank you Corax for the great information about Trango Towers. Table of Contents.

Children Children Children refers to the set of objects that logically fall under a given object. Great Trango Towers, Karakoram, Pakistan. It is important that you inform your Trip Leader immediately of any symptoms or discomfort, however minor so that they can help you monitor the situation. Please be aware that remaining at high altitude in spite of alarm signals from your body may result in serious illness or even death.

Medical conditions that are aggravated or complicated by high altitude include heart diseases, lung diseases, pregnancy, anemia, and sickle cell disease. It is imperative that anyone with any of these conditions consult their physician in detail before attempting this trekking expedition. Personal Medical Kit. It is very important to have your own personal medical kit and it is wise to bring all the essentials with you from the home country.

As time is limited and it will save you having to go searching for medical supplies in an unfamiliar city. Most medicines are available from chemists in main cities. The following suggestions are based on our experience of travelling, trekking and on the most common medical problems encountered. It is important to check with your doctor in case of allergies to any medications.

We suggest that you bring the following: Plasters: Elastoplasts or adhesive tape. Antiseptic cream: Germalene, Savlon etc Crepe or Elasticated Bandage: For knee and ankle support, if you strain in these joints. Blister dressings: Moleskin, compead, spenco dressings etc. Stop at the first sign of a blister forming and use a plaster or moleskin.

Cold and Flu Medication: Beechams powders, Lemsip, nasal decongestant, and throat lozenges. On treks that stay above meters for any length of time or on treks with dry conditions, it is quite common due to breathing dry, cold air through the mouth to get a sore throat or a cough it may become productive due to irritation not necessarily infection.

Treatment For Diarrhoea: Oral rehydration salts, which contain a variety of salts electrolytes and sugar. The combination of electrolytes and sugar stimulates water and electrolyte absorption from the gut. It, therefore, prevents or reverses dehydration and replaces lost salts in conditions such as diarrhea and vomiting. Preparations such as Imodium or Lomotil are anti-motility drugs, which do not treat diarrhea but slows the gut.

They should only be used when the condition is causing dehydration, much distress or is impossible to deal with on transport. The aim in using them is to take just enough to control the complaint see section on diarrhea. Optional — Treatment for Giardia: A common infection caused by a protozoan in the upper bowel. It develops one to three weeks after exposure and can result in a sudden acute illness or a more long-lasting condition.

The symptoms are usually explosive and gassy diarrhea along with burping and wind that tastes and smells like rotten eggs. There may be abdominal pain after eating. Treatment is a course of Metronidazole; this is a prescription drug. Under the advice given by your GP, you may consider carrying a course of wide spectrum antibiotic in your personal medical kit.

A broad-spectrum antibiotic e. Ciprofloxacin may be useful if traveling to remote areas or for long periods. A broad-spectrum antibiotic can be used to treat bacterial infectious diarrhea, dysentery, respiratory, skin and urinary infections.

However, antibiotics used without proper medical advise can cause or predispose other medical complications and bacterial resistance e. Clostridium or MRSA. Under the advice given by your GP, you may consider carrying a course of broad-spectrum antibiotic in your personal medical kit.

Optional — Use of Acetazolamide Diamox : For those trekking above meters, Diamox has been described as an aid to acclimatization and the prevention of altitude sickness. Rucksack or Day Sack: This is what you carry containing any items you will need during the day, e. A rucksack of around 35 to 40 litres capacity should be large enough, lined with one large plastic bag to ensure contents remain dry.

Padded hip belts are recommended for trekkers. Sigg bottles also makes great hot water bottle! Water Purification: Biox Aqua Tablets are the safest and most effective form of emergency water disinfection in outdoor environments.

Biox Aqua Tablets are more effective than either chlorine or iodine tablets working against both cryptosporidium and giardia , and leaves no bad tastes or colours behind. Biox Aqua does not react with contaminants in the water to form hazardous byproducts. Each application will take between mins to take effect, dependant on the condition of the water source.

Puritabs are not advised as they have no effect on the amoebas and will not protect you from hepatitis. Sun Screen: High protection factor or higher Lip Screen: High protection factor or higher Toilet Items: Soap, travel towel, flannel or J-cloth , toothbrush, toothpaste, shampoo, comb, sanitary protection, toilet paper is provided but bring a roll for personal use and at airports!

Sewing Kit: Needle, cotton and a few safety pins for emergency repairs. Small Knife: Swiss army style — has many uses do not carry this in hand luggage when taking international or internal flights it will be confiscated. Money Belt: To carry valuables passport, money, air ticket this should be worn at all times when travelling.

These can make all the difference in unfamiliar surroundings. Personal Medical Kit: see list above. Wet Wipes: One pack very useful for wiping hands, face and other parts of body. Antibacterial Hand Cleansing Gel: Small bottle. General Equipment List. This is a suggested kit list of some items needed when trekking. It is best to pack several thinner layers rather than one thick layer.

There is a weight limit on trek kg depending on the package. It is best not to pack more items than what you actually need on any holiday. Clothing Lightweight Thermal Underwear: Tops 2 , bottoms or long johns 1. Made from polypropylene, Coolmax, Capilene etc, as cotton does not provide adequate warmth. Waterproof Jacket: Good storm proof mountain jacket with attached hood. As the dust cleared, I saw the tiny dots of the base jumpers who were on Great Trango Tower's snowy northwest ridge they were Glenn Singleman and Nic Feteris, both Australian, who later jumped off the north face.

The two men stood immobile, convinced we'd been squashed. In fact, we were thirty meters from the edge of an enormous geological event. A pillar of rock ten meters thick, meters tall and sixty meters wide had peeled off the face.

That morning, we had jumared just beside it; earlier in the expedition, we'd considered climbing right up it. We shouted to the parachutists that we were ok, and headed on. Late in the day we joined the Slovenian Route for the final pitches.

On a narrow ledge we found a wad of parachute cord—a souvenir left by Minamiura. As the sun set, Mark clipped up a row of fixed pitons to a snow cornice crowning Trango's summit and belayed.

In darkness we hung under the snow wave, stretched around, and patted the top. And that was it. We were done. Obsession sated. The last great unclimbed feature on Trango was the north face. Sunless and overhanging, it is split by a massive corner above the Dunge Glacier; further up the snow gully that fringes the north face, the wall looks smooth as glass.

They took the great corner, which they named the Book of Shadows. With an approach gully raked by slush avalanches and aerial bombardment, and pitches characterized by A4 aid and often loose and verglassed rock, it ranks as one of the more objectively hazardous and technically difficult routes on Trango. Given the perpetual cold of the north face, it's also as masochistic an undertaking as anything done on the Tower. The team used six ropes on their capsule-style climb, camped in portaledges, and made the summit on August 4 after a final eighteen-day push.

Located uphill from the Book of Shadows amid blank-looking stone, the route was subject to icefall that peeled off the upper wall each day; one member was injured by rockfall.

But the team cleverly avoided the avalanche-prone Dunge Glacier approach by climbing up from the Trango Glacier to a col between the Trango and Dunge Glaciers beside the pinnacle called Trango Monk , then fixing meters of rope downhill to their climb.

They spent twenty-three days on the route, which involved thin A4 aid climbing, 5. With these ten routes on Trango, it would be easy to say the tower was climbed out by , yet a hidden section of wall that seldom appears clearly in photos remained, to some degree, terra incognita.

That section, the west and northwest faces, lies left of the Swiss-French route of A route sprang up here in the Insumisioa 5.

The Basque route ranks as one of Trango's least-known routes. In fact, in when I saw a postcard of Trango Tower pinned to the lobby of the K2 Hotel in Skardu, Pakistan, with the line for Insumisioa penned in and a topo attached, I thought that another practical joke had been played on Trango, especially when almost no information subsequently emerged about the route or the ascentionists. But the Basque route is for real, and the team is well experienced, if a bit secretive.

Insumisioa is a Basque term referring to the avoidance of the Spanish military service that remained compulsory until the end of the s. The climbers were dodging the draft during their expedition. The route, called Claire de Lune by its Swiss ascensionists Gabriel Besson, Claude Alain Gailland, David Maret and Frederic Roux, took the first three pitches of the Spanish Route to start, then broke out right onto the slabs and, in the steep headwall, climbed a crack system right of the route.

The name refers to the French film Claire of the Moon, because the team summited under a piercingly bright full moon it's also a play on words: "clair de lune," of course, means "moonlight". The problem with obsessions is that, once sated, they leave very little in their place.

Even as Mark Wilford and I rappelled by headlamp back to the ledge where I'd been sitting when the rockfall occurred, I felt hollowness rather than satisfaction. I wondered if perhaps another failure on Trango would have been preferable, as that way I would have known the shape of my future: we'd return to try Trango, perhaps again and again, ad infinitum. Our thoughts were on other matters, too, like how to get back down, since our route had been obliterated by a cannonade of house-sized boulders.

We sat on the ledge that night near meters, shivering in bivouac sacks but no sleeping bags, contemplating our incredible luck. Had we been an hour behind that day's schedule, we'd have been in the path of the rockfall. It seemed appropriate to name our route Run for Cover.

When the sun crested the jagged horizon the next morning and purged the cold from our bones, we breathed with relief. Then we peered over the ledge. The wall below was alive with clattering rocks and rivulets of mud and water that gushed from a huge rock scar.

How could we make our escape? A week earlier, when our Korean-American neighbors at base camp had succeeded on the Slovenian Route, they'd abandoned their fixed ropes, telling us, "The next ascent will be lucky.

They'll have fixed rope all the way. Nevertheless, we stripped the ropes as we descended, for the love of Trango, and the love of booty. Back on the Shoulder, we crammed haulbags with the Korean-Americans' ropes and former expeditions' trash and prepared to drag the weighty mess down to base camp.

Prior to leaving, Mark ran the gauntlet of falling stones, dashing up the start of Run for Cover to remove meters of our own rope above that, the rockfall had done most of the cleaning for us. I tried to tell him it wasn't worth risking his neck, but he was adamant: Trango was angry at climbers for leaving their junk all over it, he said, and we needed to appease the mountain.

Indeed, we've regarded the tower as a living, willful and kinetic thing ever since. A merciful thing, too, as it could have ground us to dust had it wanted. Over a decade has now passed since Mark and I finished our mission, yet Trango Tower still remains one of our most prized experiences. Obsessions can be solitary burdens, but in Mark I found a partner who shared the dream and the madness.

Trango pushed us to the limit, and it forced us to depend on each other. Neither Mark, nor Trango Tower, ever let me down, and I thank them both for those vivid days. Login with your username and password below. New User? Here's what to do. Forgot your username or password? Search Advanced Search. Issue 11 Table of Contents Issue Archives.

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