The high altitude sun was blazing when I first saw the 14,000-foot basecamp my partners and I would inhabit for the next five weeks. Three- to four-thousand-foot spires - Uli Biaho, Hainabrakk, the Cat's Ears, and Shipton Spire - pierced the sky. These granite towers channeled the Trango Glacier downvalley and into the raging gray waters of the Braldu River.

I trudged over talus toward camp, arriving at a scene that was likely no different from one Karakoram explorers saw 100 years ago, when pioneering female mountaineer Fanny Bullock Workman first visited. Porters, who had hiked for days on barren, rocky glaciers, celebrated their arrival at the vegetated oasis of our basecamp. They sat in circles on the grass making chapattis, laughing as they tucked magenta wildflowers behind their ears.

What was different from a century ago, however, was that the porters carried loads for an all-female expedition consisting of Nan Darkis and myself from Colorado, and Cecilia Buil of Spain. Since the first one in the mid-1970s, only a few all-female expeditions have climbed in the Karakoram, Pakistan's most mountainous region, at the western reach of the Himalaya. Though there are over 100 years of history of women climbing in the region, little has been written about their endeavors to date.

In the beginning

During the mid-19th century, British explorers and surveyors including T.G. Montgomerie, Henry Haversham Godwin-Austen, and Sir Francis Younghusband explored sections of the Karakoram's valleys, glaciers, and angular, icy peaks. However, at the turn of the century one of the best-known explorers was a woman --Fanny Bullock Workman, born in Worcester, Massachusetts, though a resident of Europe at the time. She and her husband, William Hunter Workman, independently wealthy and curious about the world, organized seven exploratory expeditions to the region between 1899 and 1912.

Bullock Workman's serious features and stout build reflected her focussed and independent personality; she successfully climbed a number of high peaks in Pakistan in the early years of the 20th century, including both 21,000-foot Chogo Peak and 22,568-foot Lungma Peak on the Chogo-Lungma glacier in Baltistan. J.P. Farrar, onetime president of the Alpine Club of Great Britain, in writing Bullock Workman's obituary for the 1925 Alpine Journal, noted that she "was no 'quitter,' and her enthusiastic nature induced her to sustain her opinions by vigorous arguments based on facts which it was difficult to controvert." Not only did she participate in seven expeditions, she was the primary motivator behind the 1912 expedition to the Siachen Glacier (now a battle zone in the ongoing Pakistan-India conflict). In the forward to her 1917 book Two Summers in the Ice-Wilds of the East Karakoram, which chronicled the Siachen expedition, Bullock Workman explained that she placed her "full name in connection with the expedition on the map not because I wish in any way to thrust myself forward, but solely that in the accomplishments of women, now and in the future, it should be known to them and stated in print that a woman was the initiator and special leader of this expedition."