By Saqib Shafi 

The weather had already forced four young Kashmiri climbers to abandon their first plan when they decided to try something harder.

At 4,060 metres, beside Kohenoor Lake in Kishtwar’s Marwah valley, hail had turned to snow and then to a whiteout.

Muzakir Khan, Yasir Khan, Faik Aijaz Pattoo and Saqib Shafi had planned to establish an advanced camp on the Sheeshnag glacier. Instead, they crouched beneath a rock with a tarp over themselves and their gear, waiting for the mountain to clear.

It did not.

The climbers descended about 400 metres to a shepherd’s hut, or doka, roughly 200 metres below the lake. 

At 3,860 metres, the hut became their base camp. Their revised plan was simple: leave the heavy equipment behind and attempt Kohenoor South-West directly from there.

At 4:30am on September 6, the four men set out.

Nine hours later, at 1:15 p.m., they stood on the summit of Kohenoor South-West, the highest peak of the Kohenoor massif. Their altimeter recorded 5,146 metres, while earlier records place the summit at 5,136 metres.

The climb marked the first recorded ascent of the peak in nearly five decades. It also appears to be the first time an all-Kashmiri team has reached the summit.

The last recorded ascent came in August 1976, when a Japanese expedition climbed the peak.

The Srinagar team had left the city on September 4 for Sukhnai village, at 2,800 metres, intending to reach Kohenoor Lake that day. They spent the night in the village and began climbing at 5am the next morning. 

Their original plan called for an advanced camp on the Sheeshnag glacier, above the col separating Kohenoor South-West from Kohenoor Central.

The route rose sharply from the valley. By 10:30am, they had reached the lake. Three hours later, at the glacier’s snout, the weather closed in.

The decision to retreat changed the character of the expedition. Instead of moving heavy loads to a high camp and starting the summit push from there, the climbers chose an alpine-style ascent from their lower base. 

Porters carried equipment only as far as base camp. Above that point, the four climbers used no fixed ropes, supplementary oxygen or high camps.

They regained the ground they had lost within two hours of leaving base camp. At 8:10am, they reached the 4,750-metre col between Kohenoor South-West and Kohenoor Central. They roped up, fitted crampons and crossed the Sheeshnag glacier, working around crevasses and the bergschrund before reaching the mountain’s north-east face.

There, the route became their own.

The team had plotted a line on a map before the climb and followed it up terrain they say no recorded expedition had previously taken to the summit. 

A steep wall consumed two hours and yielded only 200 metres of elevation.

The summit arête presented another challenge. Narrow and exposed, it was broken by pinnacles that forced the climbers to traverse them one at a time. At 1:15pm, they reached the top.

The summit opened a sweeping view of the surrounding ranges, including Thajiwas, Kolahoi, Amarnath, Nanga Parbat, Nichheng, Katsal, Kallatip, Brammah, Flat Top, Sickle Moon and Nun Kun, as well as the Zanskar range and peaks above Warwan and Kishtwar. 

The climbers left a rock piton as a summit marker.

The descent brought a different danger. The team judged the north-east face unsuitable for coming down and chose the south-west side, moving through steep gullies and along ridge lines. The route passed through a heavy rockfall zone, with rocks falling around them during the afternoon.

They reached base camp at 7pm and walked out to Sukhnai the following morning.

They have named the route “One Day Boys — Up & Down.”

The climb also adds a new chapter to a mountain group with more than a century of recorded mountaineering history.

The Kohenoor massif has three principal summits. Kohenoor South-West, the highest, is recorded at 5,136 metres. Kohenoor Central, also known as Kunyirhayan, rises to 5,036 metres, while the North-East summit reaches 4,966 metres.

British mountaineer C.G. Bruce climbed the north-eastern summit in September 1898, while Karbir, the Gorkha climber who accompanied him, reached the higher south-western summit. The middle peak followed in 1911, when Captain J.B. Corry, Lt. R.D. Squires, members of the Sherwood Foresters and Dr. Ernest Neve climbed it.

The massif saw another significant expedition in 1972. 

An American-Kashmir team led by Mohammad Ashraf, then Director General of Tourism, climbed all three summits. The expedition included Nazir Ahmad, Vijay Kumar and Mohammad Aslam alongside American climbers. 

A Japanese team repeated the three-summit achievement in August 1976.

The record then goes silent.

Climbers continued approaching the Kohenoor peaks from the Sheeshnag side in later decades, but the Srinagar team says those attempts did not result in a recorded summit ascent.

Their expedition changed that history from another direction.

Recorded expeditions to the massif had approached through Sheeshnag and followed the glacier. The Srinagar tetrad came from Sukhnai in the Marwah valley, on the opposite side of the mountain. They climbed directly toward the col between Kohenoor Central and Kohenoor South-West before following their planned line toward the summit.

The route opening forms part of a broader effort by the four climbers to explore new climbing lines in Kashmir.

“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.

Their ascent therefore records two achievements at once: a return to one of Kashmir’s historic high peaks after almost 50 years, and a new approach to it from a valley that previous expeditions had left outside the climbing record.

Kohenoor had been climbed before, but this time, the mountain entered the record through a different door.

• The author is an adventure photographer and filmmaker from Kashmir, documenting mountains, outdoor adventures, and the stories of the people who live among them.