A team of four climbers from Srinagar has opened a new route on Kohenoor South-West, the highest peak of the Kohenoor massif in the Marwah valley of Kishtwar district, climbing it from a side of the mountain that no recorded expedition had attempted before.
As per a statement, the climbers claim that it is the first ascent of the peak in nearly fifty years. The team recorded an elevation of 5,146 m on the summit. Earlier records list the peak at 5,136 m.
Muzakir Khan, Yasir Khan, Faik Aijaz Pattoo and Saqib Shafi, all aged between 20 and 30, summited at 1:15 p.m. on 6 September after a climb of close to nine hours from their base camp. They believe it is the first time an all-Kashmiri team has stood on the summit.
The peak was last climbed in August 1976, by a Japanese team. The team left Srinagar on 4 September for Sukhnai village (2,800 m), intending to push through to Kohenoor Lake the same day. They stayed the night in the village instead.
At 5 a.m. on 5 September they set out with a plan to bypass a conventional base camp altogether and place an advanced camp directly on the Sheeshnag glacier, above the col separating Kohenoor South-West from Kohenoor Central. The trail climbed steeply out of the valley floor, and by 10:30 a.m. they had reached Kohenoor Lake at 4,060 m.
By 1:30 p.m., at the snout of the glacier, the weather turned. Hail gave way to snow and then to a complete whiteout. The climbers built a small bivouac under a rock, pulled a tarp over themselves and their gear, and waited.
With no improvement, they abandoned the advanced camp entirely and descended some 400 metres to a doka roughly 200 metres below the lake, reaching it at 4 p.m. That shepherd’s hut, at 3,860 m, became their base camp.
The retreat forced a change of strategy. Rather than carry heavy loads to an advanced camp and climb from there, the team decided to strip down and attempt the summit directly from base camp, moving as fast as the terrain allowed.
Nine hours to the summit
They left at 4:30 a.m. on 6 September. Within two hours they had regained the ground lost the previous day. Moving up and across the glacier, they reached the col between Kohenoor South-West and Kohenoor Central — at 4,750 m — by 8:10 a.m.
There they roped up, fitted crampons and crossed the Sheeshnag glacier, negotiating crevasses and the bergschrund before reaching the north-east face of Kohenoor South-West.
From this point the route was unknown ground. The team had plotted a line on the map beforehand and followed it, scrambling a steep wall that took two hours to yield 200 metres of height.
The summit arête above proved harder still: narrow, exposed, and interrupted by pinnacles that had to be traversed one by one. They reached the top at 1:15 p.m.
The summit gave a full circle of the ranges — Thajiwas, Kolahoi, Amarnath, Nanga Parbat, Nichheng, Katsal, Kallatip, Brammah, Flat Top, Sickle Moon, Nun Kun, the Zanskar range, and the peaks above Warwan and Kishtwar. The climbers left a rock piton as their summit marker.
Judging the north-east face unsuitable for a descent, the team came down the south-west side instead, through steep gullies and along traversing ridge lines in what proved to be a heavy rockfall zone. Rocks came down around them through the afternoon. They reached base camp at 7 p.m. and walked out to Sukhnai the following morning.
The route has been named One Day Boys — Up & Down.
The climb was made in alpine style. Porters carried loads only as far as base camp; above it the team used no fixed ropes, no supplementary oxygen and no high camps.
The three summits of the Kohenoor massif — South-West, which is the high point of the group and is recorded at 5,136 m, the middle peak Kunyirhayan or Kohenoor Central (5,036 m), and North-East (4,966 m) — carry an unusually long climbing history for a Kashmir massif.
In September 1898, the British mountaineer C.G. Bruce climbed the north-eastern summit while Karbir, the Gorkha climber accompanying him, took the south-western and highest top. The middle peak followed in 1911, climbed by Captain J.B. Corry, Lt. R.D. Squires, men of the Sherwood Foresters and Dr. Ernest Neve.
In 1972, an American-Kashmir expedition led by Mohammad Ashraf, the former Director General of Tourism, climbed all three summits with a team that included Nazir Ahmad, Vijay Kumar and Mohammad Aslam alongside American climbers. A Japanese team repeated the trio in August 1976.
Nothing has been recorded on the massif since. Climbers have gone in from the Sheeshnag side in the decades that followed, but according to the team, none of those attempts reached a summit.
That approach is the other thing that sets this month’s climb apart. Every recorded expedition to the Kohenoor peaks, successful or not, has gone in from Sheeshnag and up the glacier from there. The four climbers came instead from the opposite side of the mountain, walking in from Sukhnai in the Marwah valley and climbing directly to the col between the central and south-west summits — ground that, until this month, no one had taken to the top.
The climb is one of the more significant in an ongoing series of route openings the team is undertaking in the valley.
“We are opening new routes in Kashmir so that fellow climbers can come and climb them, and so we can revive and promote alpinism and mountaineering in the valley,” the team said.
