Ropes keep teams safe
while traversing some
types of terrain. Here
soldiers of Pakistan’s
323 Brigade have tied
themselves together
to lessen the chance
one will be lost in an icy
abyss as they cross the
Gyong Glacier at 17,500
feet. Many crevasses
are known by the names
of soldiers who have
died in their depths.Maj. Abdul Bilal of the Pakistan Army’s Special Service Group
huddled with his team beneath a rock outcropping deep in
the Karakoram Range. It was April 30, 1989, and a late after-
noon snow squall gathered around the 11 men as they labored
to breathe the thin air more than four miles above sea level.
At first glance they might have appeared to be mountaineers,
except for the white camouflage jackets they wore and the
automatic weapons slung over their shoulders.
In fact, mountaineers would have been jealous of this van-
tage point, which offered a panorama of some of the world’s
most colossal mountains. The hulk of K2, the second high-
est point on Earth, loomed just over the horizon, 50 miles to
the northwest. But the majority of the icy peaks remained
unclimbed and nameless, identified on maps only by num-
bers that corresponded to their elevations.
Climbing to their position on this peak, labeled 22,158,
would’ve required ascending an avalanche-riddled face of
rock and ice. Four men had died trying. Instead, Bilal’s team
had been ferried by helicopter. One by one, the men dan-
gled from ropes as the helicopters struggled to stay aloft in
the thin, subfreezing atmosphere. Deposited some 1,500 feet
below the summit, the team spent a week fixing ropes andM
Editor’s Note:
National Geographic
asked the Indian Army
to allow our writer and
photographer to visit
the Indian-controlled
Siachen Glacier. The
army declined to
grant access.100 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC