Pat Cossey crossing the bridge over the Hispar River , just below Hispar village .
Hispar La ( 5150m ) and down the Hispar Glacier . Our designs on those trekking peaks soon began to look over-ambitious . In the end two members of the team attempted one peak but withdrew when the weather turned . For the rest of us , the dif�iculties of the walk-out were exacerbated because we were burdened with climbing gear we ' d never used . I weighed my sack when we got home , and it totalled over 30kg – without the week ' s food I ' d begun the walk-out with .
That journey down the Hispar Glacier was , and remains , as tough as anything I ' ve done . Sometimes I barely had the energy to look around for possible shots ; some days the shot-count was barely in double �igures . What ' s possibly surprising is how many of those were ' keepers '.
There ' s much more to this story – ask me about the exploding Pot Noodles some time – but I need to move on .
Epilogue I arrived home browner , thinner , and anticipating a restful few weeks stuf�ing my face and sorting hundreds of slides . It didn ' t quite work out that way .
Before I left I ' d been exploring various other avenues for marketing my photography . While I was away my parents followed up a couple of these leads on my behalf and when I got back I discovered that they ' d committed me to an exhibition at Lancaster ' s Ashton Memorial , which was about to open as a tourist attraction after major refurbishment . And I had barely four weeks to prepare ...
It happened , though I and several other family members were still �inalising the framing a couple of hours before opening . And that exhibition , not the trek by which I ' d set so much store , was the real springboard for my professional career . Among other things , it opened a connection with Lancaster Tourism which was , I like to think , fruitful for both sides for quite a few years .
And it was one job for Lancaster Tourism which introduced me to the OWG ( as it was then ). They commissioned me to photograph OWPG members on a press trip centred on a Cross-Bay Walk in Morecambe Bay . In the end , that walk of just a few miles proved far more signi�icant for my career than the four weeks of the Biafo-Hispar trek .
The best-laid plans , eh ?
PS In the interests of full disclosure , I should just add that a week or so in to the trek , sick of carrying the dead-weight , I threw the defunct zoom lens down a crevasse . Its component parts are probably still somewhere under the Biafo Glacier .
8 outdoor focus / summer 2021