Nanga Parbat stands alone. Unlike most of the giants of the Himalaya, it isn't tucked into a crowded skyline of other 8,000-meter peaks. It's the western anchor of the entire range, rising by itself out of the earth. Once you see it, you understand the nickname.
The Rupal Face, on its southern side, is the tallest mountain face on Earth. 4.6 kilometers of sheer rock and ice, roughly 15,090 feet, rising in less than 2.5 miles. Climbers attempting it face brutal elevation gain with almost nowhere safe to acclimatize along the way. It's one of the deadliest mountains in the world, and it has earned that reputation the hard way. At base camp, around 11,500 feet, a stream runs downhill through the middle of camp, past the bodies and gravesites of climbers who never made it home. Base camp has quietly become a cemetery.
They call it The Killer Mountain.
I wasn't there to climb it.
I was there visiting a friend, a man who in his own way has a bit of a death wish, chasing his own project on that same mountain. But the day this photo happened, neither of us was thinking about the summit…mostly. We were there looking for a yak.
Specifically, a dzomo, a yak-cow hybrid, that had wandered off from a friend's herd in the village below months earlier and never come back.
Chasing Tea
The morning started simple enough. Quick breakfast of omelets, drive as far as the road allowed, then walk. We had one advantage: we'd made friends with the local tourist police. That morning, word got around that we were heading up toward high camp to search for the missing dzomo, and our friend on the force decided this was as good a reason as any to visit his parents further up the mountain. He loaded his entire family into a Toyota Hilux and joined us.
Those trucks are unstoppable. We crawled over rock and through tiny villages, waved through checkpoints by other tourist police who recognized our escort, and stopped constantly along the way, not for danger, but for tea. Tea and food, again and again, all the way up.
Eventually we hit the third and final end of the road, and the truck could take us no further. So we started walking.
We passed a hospital that looked like it hadn't seen a patient in decades. A half-built guest house sat waiting for mountaineers who hadn't arrived yet. We'd heard from a local Amil roughly where the dzomo might be. We did not follow his suggestion. Instead, we walked the opposite direction. Up. Just up.
Into the Valley
The path opened into a valley that didn't feel real. Ridgelines and glaciers stretched off in every direction, avalanches and rockfall echoing somewhere out of sight all day long, close enough to hear, far enough to feel safe. We walked below the same slopes climbers have died on for decades, past the graves at base camp, three of us fanned out across the terrain, still, absurdly, looking for a cow.
I took the route along the edge of the moving glacier. My friend cut up and around toward its crown. When the path dead-ended, we looked up and there he was, grinning, a big black shape standing next to him.
He'd found her.
She was stubborn and clearly dehydrated, in no hurry to go anywhere despite the heat pressing down on all of us. We coaxed her back down into the valley, found water, and let her drink her fill.
The Shot
On the walk back to the trucks, I turned around at base camp and looked up the valley we'd just come from. The mountain is so large my camera could never fit the whole thing while we were standing beneath it. The only way to actually frame Nanga Parbat was to walk away from it. As we chased the dzomo down the valley earlier, my shutter had barely stopped clicking. But this shot, the one that became "The Killer Mountain," only happened once I'd put enough distance between us and the wall of rock to see all of it at once, right at the edge of base camp.
One More Round of Tea
Back at the trucks, we drove up to high camp to collect our escort's parents, the whole reason for his detour in the first place. And of course, we couldn't just load up and leave. Not without tea and food first.
Drinks were squeezed straight out of an old wineskin, the actual body of a goat, still shaped like one. Chai was poured. Walnuts were cracked open by hand and passed around. Then, just as quickly as it had started, it was over. The entire ensemble climbed in alongside the rest of us, and we all piled back into the Hilux to head down into the valley toward home.
There's something almost funny about it, looking back. One of the deadliest mountains on the planet, the highest, steepest face in the world, a graveyard at its own doorstep, and the closest thing to danger we faced that day was a thirsty, stubborn yak who didn't feel like walking downhill.
The Killer Mountain sat there and watched our little search party.Enormous and indifferent while three guys and a tourist police family spent their day chasing tea, chasing rumors, and eventually, chasing a cow.
*This image is available as a print here. Interested in a shoot or assignment in landscapes like this one? [Get in touch here] or here.
