Fresh & mr 1138, Kashmir reminded much of the Mountain West here in the US. It has a very similar climate to Colorado, maybe more snow. I camped around 12,000 ft and the peaks nearby were in the 16-17,000 ft range.
Muppet, those are some of my favorite shots too. The men were building a new ranger station. They had now power tools, all the wood was hand cut and carved, the cement hand mixed, the foundation stones carried and cut by hand. An incredible amount of work.
As for the city of Srinagar, I was shocked how off the radar it is. The town itself has narrow streets full of character and life, the architecture looks like something out of northern Europe, truly a unique place. The famous Dal lake is in the center of town which I regrettably didn't have time to see. Steve McCurry has some unbelievable shots of the region:
http://www.magnumphotos.com/Catalogu...-NN134132.html
I'd love to make it back, very high on my return to list.
For anyone interested in some trivia:
I stayed at the base of Haramukh, a mountain with a summit at 16,872 ft, shown in the shot above. My local guide kept telling me it was the tallest mountain in the world. When I would counter, stating Everest is generally regarded as the tallest mountain, he would angrily state that no one has ever made it to the top of Haramukh, therefore making it taller than Everest. Despite his flaw in logic, I couldn't dispute his claim that no one had ever made it to the summit.
After I arrived home, I checked his statement about no one summiting Mt. Haramukh. According to Wikikpedia, the mountain was first climbed in 1856 as part of the Great Trigonometric Survey to map the Karakoram range 130 miles to the North. The two most prominent peaks were sketched and labeled K1 and K2. K1 was determined to be the 22nd tallest mountain in the world, Masherbrum, as it was known by the locals. K2, however, couldn't be seen from lower elevations and was unknown by the local population. Therefore, it didn’t have a local name so the survey mark, K2 became the mountain’s official title. While Haramukh isn’t taller than Everest, it is the mountain from which the second tallest peak in the world, K2, was revealed to the Western World.