News

Trekking in the mountains of Pakistan

24.07.2018

Three Italian mountaineering instructors (Emiliano Olivero, Tommaso Castorina, and Omar Scarpellini) will leave for Pakistan on August 28 2018. This trip will be led by Carlo Alberto Pinelli, honorary president of Mountain Partnership member Mountain Wilderness International and member of the prestigious Italian Academic Alpine Club.

The destination is in the Swat Kohistan district, the extreme southern offshoot of the Hindu Kush range. The aim is not to ascend one of the fascinating peaks of the area, up to six thousand meters high, but to manage a course of mountaineering and eco-friendly trekking with a group of local students organized by Mountain Wilderness and the International Association of Studies on the Mediterrenean and the East (ISMEO). These are young people who live in mountain valleys, who have the potential for sustainable tourism.

Because of their relative proximity to the large urban centers of the plain, the high Swat valleys are the only ones in the whole Himalayan chain which can be reached and hiked without necessarily having to undergo the complex organization of classic expeditions that require long trekkings to reach the peaks.

The new roads would make the routes even faster. The Mountain Wilderness course has the primary purpose of providing students with the technical and cultural skills necessary to propose to Pakistani and foreign visitors an alternative experience of these environments that are still relatively untouched.

Those who pass the course can offer themselves as a reliable trekking guide - even for difficult routes - or as a facilitator of light alpine-style expeditions; always favoring a respectful behavior towards the value of the mountains and the conservation of their precious wilderness. In this perspective, the course will promote environmentally friendly hotspots along the territory hoping to discourage any unsustainable practice.

The groups of trained guides, aware of the environmental value at stake, will also be entrusted with the task of creating a mountaineering / hiking guide of the Swat mountains which  will include in the appendix, visits to the fascinating ruins of Buddhist monuments that still dominate the ridges of many hills in the lower part of the region.

The idea of ​​connecting in a unique cultural experience in the mountains through archaeological research started more than half a century ago by the professor Giuseppe Tucci. Tucci’s was responsible for the discovery and excavation of the exceptional archaeological heritage of Swat and its identification with the legendary location of Uddiyana, from which Padmasambava (Guru Rimpoché), the eight century Buddhist master,  left to convert Tibet to Buddhism.

For these reasons, Mountain Wilderness has partnered with ISMEO for this project that is carried out every year with great success. The project was made possible thanks to the support of the Mountain Partnership Secretariat, the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage (MIBAC), MIUR, the Italian Academic Alpine Club, the Rome section of the CAI, some Italian companies and the two associations themselves as project leaders.

Photo by FLICKR/Jim