Looking West down the Hispar Glacier , from the crevassed slope just below the Hispar La . Further down , our route mostly followed the right edge of the glacier .
BLESSINGS IN DISGUISE
Jon Sparks finds his best laid plans going awry …
Thirty years on , I still remember the horrendous crunching sound emanating from my zoom lens . Shooting from the back of a jeep that was kicking up clouds of dust might not have been the best idea ... Not only did it suddenly sound like a moribund pepper-mill , it had lost the ability to focus further than about a metre .
This is not ideal when you ' re about to embark on a trek through some of the grandest mountains on Earth . It ' s even worse when you ' ve built it up in your mind to be the launchpad of your career as an outdoor professional .
Telling myself I could still use it as a macro lens did little to ease my distress . And we were already a long way from the nearest camera shop . I doubt there was a Contax dealer nearer than Rawalpindi / Islamabad , already a jeep-ride , plus twenty-four hours on the Karakoram Highway , behind us .
Nothing to do but suck it up , and take stock of what I had left . It didn ' t take long : two camera bodies , a 24mm lens , a 50mm lens , and a 2x teleconverter . Oh , and the grand total of twenty-�ive rolls of Fuji Velvia to last the next �ive weeks , in which we planned to ascend the Biafo Glacier to Snow Lake , cross the Hispar La and descend the Hispar Glacier . In which we hoped , too , to climb one or two ' trekking peaks ' ( under 6000 metres ).
Twenty-�ive times thirty-six is 900 . Averaged over forty days in-country that ' s 22.5 per day . Given that I saw my future as ' outdoor photographer ' rather than ' travel photographer ', it made sense to prioritise the actual trek and approach to the mountains , but I still had to reckon on shooting no more than thirty frames on a typical day . That ' s an average of less than two per hour , if you include time in camp as well as the actual hours of trekking .
I hadn ' t reckoned on how dif�icult the second phase of the trek would be , and I got nowhere near thirty or even twenty shots on some days , but that ' s for later .
Best-laid plans The need to ration my shooting wasn ' t news to me ; I couldn ' t afford more than twenty-fove rolls and would have struggled to
6 outdoor focus / summer 2021