News Releases
Whit Magro's Latok 1 Expedition
Latok 1 Expedition 
Karakoram, Pakistan; Aug. 13 to Oct. 4, 2008
By Whit Magro
The travels were long, but 10 days after leaving my door Josh Wharton and I arrived at base camp at 14,700 feet, along with 35 porters hauling all of our belongings and food for our long stay on the Choktoi Glacier.
The goal of our expedition was to do a new route on the 9000 foot north face of Latok 1 which has a summit altitude of just over 7000 meters. There has never been a successful team to the summit from the north side.
We prepared for Latok 1 by climbing two of the many smaller 5000 to 6000 meter peaks in the area to get used to the altitude. We did this over a period of about two weeks. One of the mountains we climbed was a virgin summit we named Porter Peak--after all if it weren’t for the porters there would be no expedition. This was a pleasant but technically challenging climb with ice and rock pitches. The route topped out after two thousand feet of climbing.
We spent most of the third week waiting out the bad weather and eating lots of food that was prepared by our friend, LO (liason officer), and cook Gaffor. He was awesome; without him we would have starved. By the end of the third week the weather had become better and we were ready for a mission on Latok 1’s North Ridge. We decided not to attempt the north face due to objective hazard.
We set out early, planning on climbing as high as we could in one day’s time with light packs. We would stash food and fuel, then rappel back to the glacier and make it to camp late that night. To give some perspective, the north ridge is 9000 feet of technical climbing at altitude. It’s basically three El Capitans stacked on each other with snow and ice. HUGE! We were able to climb three thousand feet that day and cached our gear at about 6000 meters. We made it back to camp late that night after about 15 rappels. The day was crazy; just being on that monster was mystifying. We got full value alpine climbing that day: intense heat from the sun, thin rotted ice, and a small avalanche.
You can never plan on anything for sure while climbing huge mountains like Latok 1. We were set up, the cache was in, we were acclimatized, feeling healthy, and with plenty of time left. A horrible storm came in and dropped 2 to 3 meters of snow. We sat around and played chess match after chess match and reading book after book. It was a hard time! Once the weather cleared we had to give the mountain days to clear. In our last week we got some ok weather and we managed to muster up the energy to give one final try. It ended up just being an early morning. There was just too much snow once we got to the foot of the North Ridge. We decided to not even try so we might get the chance to come again instead of climbing into a death trap. We turned back for camp and with supplies almost gone and time running short we decided it was time to roll back state side.
During my time in Pakistan I saw and interacted with a beautiful culture made up of wonderful people. Though we were not successful with our objective not all was lost. We had fun, we got to climb, and we had one hell of an experience in one of the most beautiful places on earth.