The Lahore bus pulls into Mandagucha around eight in the morning and the Islamabad group arrives behind it. Breakfast, police registration and a kit check happen in the village while the porters load — and then the road simply stops and you start walking.

The climb to Dhor goes up through deodar and pine, steep in places, snow underfoot inside the first hour. About five hours with breaks. Camp is already standing when you get there: your tents went up with the advance team yesterday, so you walk in to hot chai rather than to a pile of poles in the snow.

The afternoon is yours, and it has a job. The Broad Boy Adventures guides run the mountain-skills session here, crampons on and off until it's boring, ice axe, rope basics, what a turnaround call sounds like and why you'll obey it. Then dinner, a fire, and sixteen strangers who are about to stop being strangers.

Early night. Tomorrow is the long one.

The trees thin out within the first hour and then they're gone, and the valley opens into the Khori meadows, a wide grazing bowl, green and full of herds in summer, a single unbroken white field in December. There is no one up here at this time of year. The herders took their animals down two months ago.

You climb through Khori and Jabbar to Gali, the saddle of the mountain, at 3,175 m. It's a long day on snow, roughly six to seven hours, and the pace is deliberately slow, we are not trying to arrive early, we are trying to arrive with everyone strong for tomorrow.

Camp goes up in the afternoon with everybody working: tents sited out of the wind, snow walls built, water melted. It's the most exposed night of the trip and the most beautiful one. The summit is directly above you, the Kaghan ridgelines go orange and then violet, and once it's properly dark the sky over the Siran Valley does something you will struggle to describe to people at home.

Hot dinner, kit laid out for the morning, briefing, lights out early. The alarm is brutal.

You leave camp at 05:00 in the dark, by headlamp, in the cold hour before the cold hour. The first stretch is a steady climb across the snowfield toward Pehli Ziarat, and the sky starts to go grey behind the Kashmir ridges somewhere along it. Sunrise on this slope is the reason people do winter trips.

Above Pehli Ziarat it steepens and the guides take over completely: pace, spacing, rope where it's needed. It is slow, cold, honest work. In good conditions you're on top around midday.

And then: the little stone shrine of Musa the shepherd, prayer flags stiff in the wind, and a view that runs from Kashmir across Kaghan to Kohistan and Alai with every peak in Mansehra sitting below you. You get a short time up there, not as long as you'll want — because the descent is the other half of the day and the weather up here doesn't take requests.

Back at Gali by late afternoon. Hot food, dry socks, and a camp that feels completely different than it did at four in the morning.

Turnaround is at 12:30 regardless of where we are on the mountain. If the guides call it earlier, we come down earlier. Nobody on this team has ever regretted a turnaround.

A slow start, a proper breakfast, and camp comes down. Then the long descent — Gali to Khori to Dhor to Mandagucha, most of the height you spent three days earning, given back in about five hours.

There's chai waiting in Mandagucha and usually a crowd of local kids who want to know whether you made it. Lunch in the village or in Mansehra, depending on the clock, and then the drive.

Everyone sleeps on the way down. Somewhere around Islamabad people start waking up and comparing photographs, and by the time the group splits up the WhatsApp group has already been renamed.