Passu Glacier

The Passu Glacier descends almost to the Karakoram Highway, making it one of the most accessible glaciers in Pakistan. From the road, a rough track leads onto the ice in about thirty minutes. The glacier surface is grey-brown with debris near the snout, but the upper reaches show cleaner ice and dramatic crevasse formations. The jagged peaks of Passu Cathedral rise directly above.

The trek across the glacier to the base of Shishper Peak is a full-day excursion and requires a guide. The easier option is to walk to the glacier snout, cross the moraine, and gain the ridge above for views over both the Passu and Batura glaciers — a half-day that rewards with some of the finest mountain panoramas on the Karakoram Highway. The Batura Glacier further west is longer (56 km) and requires at least two days to explore seriously.

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The Passu Glacier and the much larger Batura Glacier to the northwest are both advancing glaciers — they are actually growing, unlike most glaciers in the Karakoram, in a phenomenon known as Karakoram Anomaly. Scientists are still debating why this portion of the range behaves differently from global trends. Walking onto the glacier, you can see the evidence of movement in the pressure ridges and the freshly crushed rock at the snout.

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