5 Mountains, One Shared Mission: The Pakistan 2026 Campaign

Pakistan 2026 is the largest single-season campaign the expedition has ever put on the Karakoram: five 8,000m peaks — Nanga Parbat, Gasherbrum I and II, Broad Peak, and K2 — climbed by one rotating team rather than five separate ones.

That structure is the whole point. A team that acclimatises together, fixes together, and rotates through the same camps carries its judgement from one mountain to the next. Nothing has to be relearned at 7,000m by people meeting for the first time.

Why the Institute is on the rope

Every instructor who teaches a cohort at the Institute climbs an active season with the expedition. It is not a perk — it is the thing that keeps the curriculum honest. A rope-fixing module written by someone who fixed line above Camp 3 this year is a different document to one written from memory.

• Four Institute instructors are on the Karakoram roster for the full season.
• Rope-fixing, load-carrying, and weather-window calls are logged for use in the next cohort's syllabus.
• Incident debriefs come back into the rescue module verbatim — including the ones nobody enjoys writing.

The mountain updates the syllabus. We just write it down.

What happens next

The team moves to Nanga Parbat first, with the Gasherbrums and Broad Peak forming the middle block of the season and K2 last. Dispatches land here as each rotation comes down, and the season's findings go straight into the 2026 cohort's technical modules.