Following the travel restrictions of the last two years, I was yearning for an adventure to a completely new place and searching for fresh experiences. As a mountain guide and skier, I feel fortunate to be able to align my passion with my work; yet a simmering frustration lingered from the difficulties of the past two years.
When Slovenian skier Bine Žalohar reached out to me with a trip proposal and showed me a picture of the remote north face of Falak Sar (5,962m), the highest peak in Swat, Pakistan, it instantly piqued my interest. A stunning ski line on an un-skied mountain at a relatively amenable altitude, meaning we wouldn’t have to spend weeks acclimatising. As far as ski mountaineering goes, this entire region of the Hindu Kush range looked to be untouched.
The Swat Valley of northern Pakistan, in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, is certainly not an internationally renowned tourist destination as we found out, yet this is where our team of five traveled to in May. Our Chamonix-based cohort consisted of Bine, an ex-professional freestyle skier turned ski mountaineer, Aaron Rolph, a British photographer and skier with a real appetite for adventure, Juliette Willmann, a young French freeride star, and Beth Healey, a British expat doctor with multiple arctic expeditions under her belt.
A Region in Transition
While not famous for its skiing, the Swat Valley did gain international notoriety following the takeover of the Pakistani Taliban in 2007. This is where Pakistan’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head in 2012, when as a schoolgirl she defied the Taliban. Although the security situation in Swat is now stable, there have been virtually no foreign tourists of any kind to the region for years.
Upon arriving in Islamabad, we immediately got a warm greeting from our agency, and before long we were heading towards the mountains in our minibus past a sign declaring Swat to be the ‘Switzerland of Pakistan’. After entering the Swat Valley, an armed police escort suddenly appeared in front of us, which continued in slick relay fashion from village to village until we eventually reached the end of the road and our staging point, Kalam.
From Kalam we got the first views of countless unclimbed and un-skied high alpine peaks, providing a glimpse into a bygone era of untapped mountain ranges. Beyond Kalam, we drove for six hours by jeep up the lush and beautiful Ushu Valley, past remote villages and beyond the reaches of any paved road.
