Base camp approach to Nanga Parbat — the world's 9th highest peak seen from a mountain meadow at 3,300m, reached by the most terrifying jeep track on earth and then a 3-hour forest walk
Fairy Meadows (locally Joot — the Urdu/Kashmiri name for the alpine pasture) is a 3,300m alpine meadow on the northern flank of Nanga Parbat (8,126m — the world's 9th highest peak, known as 'Killer Mountain' for having the highest fatality-to-summit ratio of any 8,000m peak in the world: 31% death rate in the early climbing history, though modern mountaineering safety has substantially reduced this). The meadow is reached from the Karakoram Highway (the KKH, the China-Pakistan corridor connecting Islamabad to Kashgar via the Gilgit-Baltistan highlands) by a 16km unpaved jeep track from Raikot…
Nanga Parbat's climbing history is among the most tragic in Himalayan mountaineering: the mountain was first seriously attempted by a British-American expedition in 1895 (led by A.F. Mummery, who disappeared high on the Diamir Face with two Gurkha porters), and the German 1934 and 1937 expeditions both ended in disaster (the 1934 expedition lost 4 climbers in a storm descent; the 1937 expedition's entire Camp IV was buried by an avalanche, killing 16 people in a single night — the greatest single mountaineering tragedy until the 2014 Everest icefall disaster). Nanga Parbat was finally summite…