CONCORDIA

This is K2, the highest mountain in the world next to Everest, at 28,250 feet.  It is so inaccessibly remote in the Karakorum mountains behind the Himalayas on the border between Pakistan and China, that very few human beings have ever seen it.

Last week I was privileged to take a small group of Americans to the base of K2 by helicopter.  It was the first helicopter expedition ever to K2, which otherwise takes 10 days of very high-altitude trekking to reach.

An enormous glacier flows from the south face of K2 called the Godwen-Austen glacier, which meets another huge glacier flowing from a mountain called Baltoro Tengri.  The confluence of these glaciers is known to mountaineers as "Concordia."

It is the consensus of the world's professional mountaineering community that at Concordia is the single spot of greatest scenery on planet earth.

At Concordia, one can see four of the highest mountains in the world, all over 26,000 feet or 8,000 meters high.  One of them is K2.  Another is Gasherbrum I:

We flew in a Pakistani military helicopter.  The chopper is used to supply the soldiers fighting an endless war with India just a few miles from Concordia, the world's highest war over control of the Siachen Glacier.

Here is a picture I took of a map in a tiny Pak military encampment:

I hope you can make it out.  The solid red line is the border with China.  The dash-dot line snaking down perpendicular from the red line is the Line of Control (LOC), the de facto border to the left of which is Pakistan, to the right India.

The dashed red line on the Pak side is the flight path of the helicopter pilots to resupply the troops.  It follows the Baltoro Glacier up to Concordia (marked on the map at 15,900 feet) then turns right and heads for Siachen.

Note on the Indian side the position closest to the LOC is the Kumar Post.  This is named for the legendary Indian Army mountaineer who first explored this entire region in the 1950s, Col. Narinder "Bull" Kumar.

Seeing this map marking the Kumar Post brought a big smile to my face, for Col. Kumar has been a good friend of mine for many years.  It was Bull who organized my expedition to raft the Zanskar River in the remote region of Indian Tibet in 1993.

It also brought a smile to my son Jackson's face, for he and I had lunch with Col. Kumar at the Delhi Golf Club just a week before.

Nothing characterizes the "lunacy of the legacy" of British India splitting apart than this pointless war 21,000 feet high in a glacial wasteland, where thousands of soldiers have died of frostbite, exposure, and altitude sickness, many more than have died in actual fighting.

The whole situation makes China very happy.  As long as the armies of Pakistan and India are obsessed with hating and fighting each other, China gets to be Asia's only superpower and push everyone around.

China's greatest fear is peace between Pakistan and India.  Should these two countries decide to "Make Money, Not War," to settle their differences and focus on how to bring free trade and prosperity to their peoples, the result would be a huge threat to Chinese hegemony in Asia.

A market bigger than China's (1.4 billion including Bangladesh vs. 1.3 billion) where all educated people speak English (English is the official language of both India and Pakistan) would be a magnet for foreign investment, sucking it out of China.

China would at last have an Asian rival, capable of standing up to it economically and militarily.  If only the Pak and Indian armies could figure this out, that they could play significant roles on the entire Asian stage instead of bloodily dicking around on lost glaciers no one really cares about.

So as our helicopter lifted off from Concordia and we had our last glimpse of K2 as we started down the Baltoro Glacier, I had a flash of fantasy. 

What if this magical name of Concordia stood not just for the most magnificent scenery on earth, not just for a gigantic glacial confluence, but the place where a concordance was finally reached between India and Pakistan?  Where war was abandoned in place of doing business together?  Where each country saw a vision of how flourishingly successful they could be through mutual cooperation, rather than how they can annihilate each other?

Well, it's a nice fantasy, I thought, one with the delicious side-benefit of really shafting the Red Chinese.  Still, our coming here was once a fantasy.  And now it had actually happened.  About one thing I had no doubt – that I will be here and do this again next year.