Kaghan: The “unseen” Rhapsody

Kaghan: The “unseen” Rhapsody

The great grand journey, that we call life, and of which we are all willy-nilly a part of, often puts us in places so astoundingly beautiful that we want to turn around and pat ourselves on the back for just being alive. Such is a place called the Kaghan
valley, a name well known but the place, barely. 

Kaghan may not stand shoulder to shoulder to the beauty and grandeur of Skardu and Gilgit, but its lakes and pastures that still remain hidden from the eye of the camera, are no less than a heaven on earth. Not many who might just have been able to reach
these places would most certainly speak of the criminal negligence of our tourism department for there is hardly any details or snaps of these places available anywhere- places beautiful enough to leave one speechless at first sight.

Since the dawn of geological times, no less than nine Orogenic or mountain building movements have taken place, folding and fracturing the earth’s crust. We are now living in an era very close to the last of the major Orogenic movements of the earth-the
Alpine- which took place about 30 million years ago. Young fold mountain ranges were buckled up and overthurst on a gigantic scale. Being the most recently formed, these ranges such as the Alps, the Andes, the Himalayas, Hindukush and the Karakorum are the
loftiest and most imposing.

Kaghan valley is a part of the Himalayas making it the Western most off-shoot of the range. The northern regions of Pakistan including the Kaghan valley also hail from the last Pleistocene period, better known as the “ice age”, about 30,000 years ago. Great
continental ice sheet covered much of the temperate latitudes. The warmer climate that followed caused the ice sheets to retreat.

The features of highland and lowland glaciations are more than evident all across the valley. Boulders of the size of small truck can be found lying near the base of the mountains, brought only by a travelling and retreating glacier. These stones that breakup
from the top of the mountain due to the colossal weight of eroding and melting glacier, swim within the ice and are left stranded at the bottom as the glacier finally melts away.

The infamous Saif-ul-malook is also a glacial lake formed by the rise in temperatures and melting glaciers. Kaghan valley presents an ideal opportunity for the students of geography to witness the effects of lowland and highland glaciations, the glacial
lakes and their impact on human lives.

Some of the other serene and fairly unknown lakes of the region include Lake Dodipitsar, Lake Lulusar, Lake Saral and Lake Sat-sar Mala. Lake Dodipitsar and Lulusar fall in the recently designated Lulusar-Dodipitsar National Park and can be reached through
treks along the Kaghan Road. 

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Posted by Naveed A Bari on Nov 1 2011. Filed under Pakistan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry