Bivouac flying, Karakoram Highway

In the airspace of the alpine chough, a long distance aerial hike, alternating between distance flying, bivouacking and walking, enables us to discover some of the most famous walls in the Himalayas.

TEXT & PHOTOS : Philippe Nodet

At an altitude of 7,200 metres up from the Trango towers, it is cold, very cold. The view is incredible, inevitably. What we are gazing at, nobody before us has ever admired it in this fashion. We are flying higher than the helicopters from the Pakistani army can! Before us a sea of mountains merge into the distance in a powdery mist, which is most likely due to a breath of air from the big Taklamakan… Together with Julien Wirtz, we have reached this spot above the Baltoro glacier by paraglider, solely by means of the ascending currents. In our invisible wake, we’ve already racked up nearly three hundred kilometres in three days flying.
We began our trip in Tarashing, at the foot of the gigantic Rupal slope of the Nanga Parbat. An initial flight of some one hundred kilometres in the form of a circumvolution has enabled us, one by one, to visit four of most famous walls in Himalayan history. Frozen almost vertically, we skirt by them as closely as possible, like alpine choughs, to the extent that we are able to hail the imaginary occupants of a climber’s tent, abandoned on a rocky ledge, at an altitude of nearly 6,500 metres!
The second flight consisted of getting to and then traversing the Indus valley, by clearing a route through the maze of glaciers and the big wall of the Deosai massif.
We constantly flew side by side, animated by a real rope party spirit. We surfed the same monstrous ascending currents, which, at their peak, sometimes lifted us up four thousand metres higher within the space of half an hour. We also plummeted in the same terrible descending currents, generated in the main by the cold air flowing off the big glaciers.
Straight up from Baltoro, we are now finally perched at the culmination of our dreams: Trango towers, Masherbrum, K2… They are all there, the mountains of legend, and some are crowned by a pretty cumulus, and with it the promise of further generous ascending currents. “And now?” Says Julien to me, on the radio. “…Headache… We make do with a flight over the Trango and make towards Askole, which should take us an hour or two if all's well, and then we’ll take off again tomorrow!”
The reason for this is that tomorrow and over the next few days, if all’s well, we'll need to fly over the gigantic glacier avenues of Biafo and Hispar. Two hundred kilometres further on, we hope to reach our oasis, the bright valley of La Hunza, and the culmination of our aerial exploration of the Karakoram massif.

Genesis of an exploration

Read the rest of the article in the Mountain Report magazine - Where to find ?