Attabad Lake

LakesGilgit-Baltistan,Pakistan

A 21-kilometre teal lake in Pakistan's Hunza valley, made overnight by a 2010 landslide that drowned the Karakoram Highway — you cross it by boat.

September·Peaking now

May–Sep

This is the full season. July and August afternoons sit near 30°C and nights fall to about 15°C, so the wind coming off the water is the only cool thing in the gorge. Every jetty, boat, jet-ski and cliff café along the shore is working.

Year-round The teal deep basin, the drowned Karakoram Highway beneath it and the bare canyon walls stand every month. The shoreline never sits still — silt, boats, gold and winter ice all come and go.

Attabad Lake is 21 kilometres of hard teal water lying on top of a buried highway, and it did not exist before 4 January 2010. That morning the slope above the village of Attabad tore loose — around 45 million cubic metres of rock — burying houses, killing twenty people and dropping a natural dam some 120 metres high across the Hunza River. The water rose behind it for five months. By the time it spilled over the debris that June it had drowned more than 19 kilometres of the Karakoram Highway. It swallowed the village of Ayeenabad and most of Shishkat, pushed about 6,000 people out of their homes and stranded 25,000 more upstream in Gojal. What was left is a lake 2,380 metres up, more than a hundred metres deep when it filled and held between canyon walls with almost nothing green on them. At that height the air thins and the cold arrives the moment the sun leaves the gorge, even in July. Glaciers upstream grind rock into a fine powder that hangs in the meltwater and scatters the blue end of the light straight back at you, so the surface burns teal against grey stone. In September 2015 five Chinese-built tunnels — the Pakistan-China Friendship Tunnels — carried the highway back around the lake, and the disaster site became a shoreline of jetties, painted boats, jet skis and cliff-edge cafés. Out on the water the scale finally lands: bare walls rising straight from the teal, wind coming down the valley cold off the ice.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The colour needs the sun high — these canyon walls keep the water in shadow early and late, so the teal only really ignites from late morning to mid-afternoon.
Mid-October to mid-November is the gold window, but the poplars grow only at the Gulmit and Shishkat end — the southern half of the lake stays bare rock all year.
The lake is glacier-fed and stays cold in every season — boats are small and open, and the valley wind gets up in the afternoon, so check for a life jacket before you push off.
Everything hangs on the Karakoram Highway — the road reaches the lake through the 2015 tunnels, and rockfall or winter snow can shut it, so check conditions the day before you drive up.

Things to do

1
Ride out over the drowned Karakoram Highway
Painted wooden boats and jet skis leave the jetties and head out across water that is more than a hundred metres deep in places, with the old highway and the roofs of two villages somewhere underneath. Away from the jetty the walls of the gorge stand over you on every side, and the colour stops looking like a photograph trick.
2
Climb to Baskochi for the whole lake at once
A path leaves the shore beside the second tunnel and climbs a bare spur in under an hour — three kilometres there and back, steep but never technical. From the top the whole lake shows at once, one long teal shape between grey walls, with the Passu Cones and Ultar Sar standing behind it. There is no shade anywhere on the climb, so it is a morning or late-afternoon job.
3
Drive the tunnels that gave the highway back
The Karakoram Highway now reaches the lake through five tunnels bored into the mountainside after the landslide, then runs along the shore on a new alignment. You come out of the dark into full sun with the teal water below you — the whole story of the place in one bend of road.
4
Stay on after the last boat comes in
In the late afternoon the engines stop, the day visitors drive back toward Karimabad, and the lake goes quiet. The cliffs lose their light long before the sky does, the water darkens to navy, and the cold arrives quickly at this altitude.

Watch

Nearby

13 km