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The Coldest War High in the Karakoram, the stubborn armies of India and Pakistan have faced off for 19 years on the Siachen Glacier, the world's highest battleground and a flash point in the deadly dispute over Kashmir. In this exclusive report, an American writer and photographer spend two months inside the ultimate no-man's-land, witnessing the human and environmental devastation of a conflict without end. By Kevin Fedarko
Up ahead rose a snowy 18,950-foot saddle that marked the end of the Indian subcontinent and the beginning of Central Asia. From its crest you could gaze into India, Pakistan, China, and Tibet. Surrounding us on all sides was an unbroken wall of pinnacles—huge cetacean humps barnacled with impossibly large cornices, seracs, and needlelike spires. "I am so happy to be in these mountains!" cried Mohmad Yaseen Khan, a 47-year-old Kashmiri Muslim who was serving as our
Within a 25-mile radius of where we stood, 48 peaks rose above 19,000 feet; only 16 of these have names, and only six have been climbed. Above them towered 27 giants with altitudes exceeding 23,000 feet. Thirteen of these have never been scaled, and they include some of the greatest remaining prizes in Himalayan mountaineering: Saltoro Kangri II, four peaks in the Apsarasas group, and another three in the Teram Kangri group. But there's a reason these mountains remain untouched: They sit in the middle of a 250-square-mile war zone where India and Pakistan have been fighting for the past 19 years as part of their intractable dispute over the state of Kashmir. What might be a climber's paradise is instead the site of a harrowing and improbable siege, the highest and coldest combat theater in the history of the world.
At Kumar Base, the by-products of this stalemate were glaringly apparent. The camp is a cluster of 20 fiberglass huts and tents shared by some 35 officers, enlisted men, and porters. Perched on the crest of a massive, scabrous pile of reddish-brown rubble roughly 60 feet high and 900 feet long, it has the same features as the surrounding mountains—cols, ridges, arêtes—with one significant difference: It's made of garbage. We picked our way through the scab with the kind of care normally reserved for a high Himalayan traverse. At the base of the camp, a recent avalanche had disgorged burlap sacks, old door frames, mortar boxes, rolls of bailing wire, and pieces of fiberglass. Running down the flanks were chutes filled with an unstable layer of plastic sunscreen bottles, bent stovepipes, charred wood, helicopter wheels, and rotting vegetables. As we trudged toward the summit, precarious cornices threatened to crack off and bury us in a deluge of empty jerry cans, burst oil drums, tattered parachutes, ammunition cases, crushed cartons of mango juice, box upon box of two-minute masala noodles, and large metal containers labeled ANTI-PERSONNEL MINES. All of the other camps we'd passed through were miniature versions of Kumar, and their collective filth—a dietary and industrial record of nearly two decades of uninterrupted war—was bound for the same destination: the bowels of the glacier. From there, this toxic compost would leach into the headwaters of the Nubra River, and then into the Shyok River, the Indus River, and ultimately into the Arabian Sea. There was no wind to disperse the odor that hung over Kumar like a malignant bouquet: raw kerosene, raw vegetables, raw sewage. I breathed it in, tasted it. Even by the standards of men who are too busy fighting one another to care about the damage they've done to a magnificent ecosystem, this was too much. Yaseen, however, seemed oddly cheerful about it all. "I am so happy to have come here and been given the chance to see this garbage!" he declared. I asked why. "Why? Because many of my friends in the army told me about how much trash was here and how it has spoiled the glacier, and I didn't believe them. But now I've seen it for myself. Now I know that my friends were telling the truth."
Correspondent KEVIN FEDARKO wrote about seeking the best buzz in the Himalayas in January 2005. • Subscribe to Outside and get a FREE Gift! • Give the gift of Outside Magazine! • Subscribe to Outside Online's free weekly e-mail newsletter featuring gear reviews, fitness advice, galleries, podcasts, and more. |
   
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