Betsy Joles for NPR
The rawness of Pakistan's mountain regions is one of their main selling points. High-elevation passes feature on Instagram pages of adventure travel influencers, who promote their journeys along some of the world's most dangerous roads. Jeeps and buses can get stalled for hours while workers clear rockslides that clog entire stretches of highway. During one of my trips to the mountains, we had to wait at a safe distance while a boulder blocking the road was blown up with dynamite.
The intensity of the elements, along with sketchy infrastructure, can make traversing Pakistan's mountains feel like a grand adventure. That's mostly how I felt as I moved through Chitral, a district in the Hindu Kush range, during a reporting trip earlier this summer. There are currently no flights to this part of the country, so people are entirely dependent on passable roads. In winter, when the heavy snows come, it's hard to get around this area at all.
But for the people I met in Chitral, including my local reporting partner, Siraj Uddin, these unpredictable mountains are home, and they spoke matter-of-factly about managing floods, landslides and avalanches. They find ways to carry on. After pausing in Upper Chitral to take this photo during one long day on the road, that's what I did too.
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