A family expedition operator based in Gilgit-Baltistan, licensed by the provincial tourism department. We run ten itineraries across four disciplines with our own vehicles, our own camp equipment and crew hired out of the valleys the routes cross.
Short and long wheelbase, raised intakes for the river crossings, recovery kit and spare fuel on every run. The driver has usually been running the route since before it was surfaced.
Standing height tents with real beds, a mess tent and camp kitchen, hot water and a private toilet tent. Pitched and struck by our own crew.
Two to six vehicles with a lead guide and radios between them, a spares vehicle on the long overland routes, and a medical kit that rolls with the convoy.
Satellite phone on every departure and a check in schedule held at the office. On remote routes a second handset travels in a different vehicle.
Acclimatisation built into the itinerary rather than bolted on. Pulse oximetry at camp, bottled oxygen above 4,500 m, and guides trained to turn people around.
Comprehensive kit on every trip and a high altitude medic on the serious expeditions. Guides hold current wilderness first aid certification.
An evacuation plan written per route before departure, with helicopter landing points identified. We require evacuation insurance and we check it.
The legacy
Guide, driver and route finder, and the man the rest of this was built on. Everything below is scanned from prints kept in the family albums. Keep scrolling and the page straightens out as the emulsion gives way to digital.
1980s
Beek Baig started guiding out of Gilgit when the Karakoram Highway was still raw, the Baltoro had no itinerary written for it, and the only way to know whether a pass went through was to walk up and look.
There was no office. There was a jeep, a crew who had grown up on that ground, and a reputation that travelled by word of mouth between one expedition and the next.
1990s
Through the nineties the work was reconnaissance as much as guiding. Approaches to the high pastures. Connections between glacier systems that locals used and nobody had written down. Winter ground for the conservancy hunts that were just beginning.
Several of the trails on this site were walked first on those trips.
2000s
Gilgit-Baltistan's community conservancy programme turned trophy hunting from a problem into the reason the markhor came back, by giving each village a share of the permit fee and a reason to count its own herd.
We guided it from the early seasons, in the same valleys and with the same families we work with now.
Today
Two generations in, the operation runs treks, conservancy hunts, overland safaris and cultural journeys across Gilgit-Baltistan, with a Land Cruiser fleet, licensed high altitude guides and a crew whose fathers carried for the first expeditions.
Ten itineraries, four disciplines, and a permit file considerably thicker than the one that started it.
The families in these photographs still work with us. Their sons carry the loads now, cook in the same camps, and hold certifications their fathers were never asked for.
