In The Valley of K-1

Mount Masherbrum rises like a glistening white spire at the northern end of the Hushe Valley. At 7,821 meters it doesn't keep company with its neighboring peaks in northern Pakistan, where five of the world's fourteen 8,000-meter mountains are located. One of these, at the end of the next valley, is K-2, Mount Godwin-Austen, second-highest peak in the world.

Masherbrum, also known as "K-1," is not quite like Everest or K-2, but its meters of elevation convert to 25,659 feet, an awesome mountain that sits among the highest, steepest, and most rugged mountains I have ever seen. Back in 1856 Thomas George Montgomery and Harry Haversham Godwin-Austen of the Royal Survey of India spied a cluster of high peaks from a distant vantage point. They named them K-1, K-2, K-3, and so forth. The "K" stands for the Karakoram Mountains, a precipitous range nestled between the western Himalayas and the Hindu Kush. Masherbrum remained unconquered until 1960, when an American-Pakistani expedition made the summit. Technically, however, Masherbrum is a lesser peak.

This distinction didn't seem to matter much as we worked our way slowly up the Hushe Valley. The mountains seemed very tall and very steep and, in early February, covered with an awful lot of snow. I wondered what in the world I had gotten myself into, and why I was setting myself against mountains like this in the dead of winter.

The Himalayan Ibex
Well, okay, I knew exactly why. Not because the mountains were there--I'll leave that to the climbers--but because of their big ibex. The ibex is a true goat, genus Capra, found in various races in a great arc across Europe to Central Asia (with two races dipping down into North Africa). The easternmost species, Capra sibirica, is perhaps the largest-bodied, growing thick, heavily ridged horns that grow in a dramatic curve.

We mountain hunters don't like to make things easy on ourselves. It hasn't been enough for us to have just one C. sibirica to hunt. No. Based on regional variations we have divided him into several races. Perhaps the typical Siberian ibex is what hunters now call the Altai ibex of northern Mongolia, and of course, his smaller desert cousin, the Gobi ibex. Then there's the larger bodied and longer-horned mid-Asian ibex, found from Kazakhstan western China. To the south, in the Karakorams and Himalayas of northern Pakistan, Ladakh, and northern India one finds the Himalayan ibex, Capra sibirica hemalayanus. The books call it a big-bodied ibex, and it surely is that. It grows horns that are, generally, not as long as the best trophies from Mongolia or Central Asia--but are incredibly thick and heavily ridged.

Visually this animal is not much different from ibex I've seen in Mongolia and Tajikistan, and it has never been my intention to take one each of all the world's ibex (though I'm coming pretty close). Somehow, however, I let myself get talked into this hunt. It was Bob Kern's fault altogether. I had a nice little window of time between conventions in late January and early February. I had long wanted to hunt Pakistan, and their seasons are still open. His Hunting Consortium arranged a hunt for Blanford Urial and the pale, small-bodied Sind ibex in the south. Initially I figured this was enough. Kern thought otherwise. "You really need to go north and see the Hindu Kush and the Karakorams."

Well, just the names speak volumes, like Serengeti and Yukon. Other game in the region includes markhor and blue sheep, both 'way above my pay grade. But, like most of the world's wild goats (except markhor), the Himalayan ibex, hunted in some of the world's most legendary mountains, is an affordable adventure. Too, the community development that has made ibex permits available in northern Pakistan is a relatively new opportunity, so this is an animal that few hunters have taken. I was hooked.