Rimo - Mountain on the Silk Road

Peter Hillary was a member of a joint Indo-Australian expedition which made an attempt on one of the world's highest unclimbed mountains, the remote and elusive summit of Rimo, 24,230 feet, in the Eastern Karakoram. This magnificent adventure entailed a three-week pony caravan in the style of many centuries of travellers before them, along the historic Silk Road and over the arid Depsang plains before they reached their mountain. Then, after many weeks of difficult climbing on Rimo's South Face they were forced to abandon their attempt, to begin an epic return to civilisation, without food or ponies, in the freezing cold of an early winter and under the unsympathetic eye of the Indian Army.

The Rimo range lies within the disputed Inner Line, an area of conflict between India and Pakistan, and it was ironic that in one of ostensibly the lonliest spots in Central Asia the expedition was being monitered by the military every step of the way. On their return from the mountain the climbers fall foul of the Army red tape, they have all of their film confiscated and Peter Hillary finds himself looking up the muzzle of a loaded sten gun in a terrifying confrontation.

This is an exciting and entertaining story, told with all the immediacy of the moment, of a journey through some of the planet's most dramatic and remote terrain on one of the forgotten fingers of the Silk Road and of their mountaineering adventures on the unclimbed Rimo.