The Passu Cones are a ridge of limestone above the Karakoram Highway in upper Hunza, in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan, cut into a row of bare spires so steep and sun-struck that snow slides off them all winter, standing over the village of Passu and its stone-walled fields between two glaciers, the most photographed mountains in the country. The ridge is called Tupopdan, a name whose meaning is disputed, and it rises to 6,106 metres in a line of pinnacles that catch the first and last light, seen from the highway, from the fields and from the roof of every guesthouse in the village; the Passu glacier comes down to the road at the village's edge, and stepping off the tarmac and following the ground up brings the walker near its clean white snout in well under an hour, while the Batura glacier to the north, fed by Batura Sar at 7,795 metres, is one of the longest outside the poles. Hand-stacked walls divide the plots, lines of poplar mark the irrigation channels led down from the glaciers, and the whole patchwork sits directly under the cones, yellow and rust in the first three weeks of October and white with apricot blossom in late April.
The Hussaini suspension bridge across the Hunza river a few kilometres south is the other picture, a footbridge of planks and cables that photographs travel the internet as proof of the world's most dangerous crossing, though the shredded ropes in those pictures belong to an older bridge beside it that nobody uses, and most of the people on the planks are villagers with somewhere to be on the other side. On a shelf above the village Borith lake is a small salt lake wedged between the Ghulkin and Passu glaciers, too saline for fish but a rest stop for ducks and geese on the Central Asian flyway, with a camp on its shore. Attabad lake and the tunnels are half an hour south. The Passu Cones are a fence of stone over a village, and the glaciers come down on either side.