Noshaq
— — a mountain held between two countries.
Not only on a wall.
“The second-highest peak in the Hindu Kush, rising to 7,492 metres on the watershed between Pakistan's Chitral District and Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor. From the Chitral side it lifts in long ice ridges above the Qaqlasht plateau, a wall the monsoon never quite reaches. The summit is Afghanistan's high point and Pakistan's seventh. Climbers come for the south face; herders graze yaks far below.
Noshaq, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Noshaq stands at 7,492 metres on the border between Pakistan's Chitral District and Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor, in the eastern Hindu Kush. It is the highest mountain in Afghanistan and the second-highest in the range after Tirich Mir, 30 kilometres west. The closest Pakistani road head is at Qaqlasht in Upper Chitral, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province; from Kabul, expeditions reach the northern base camp via the Wakhan and a multi-day approach up the Qazi Deh valley. The northern slope drains into the Amu Darya watershed.
Above 7,000 metres the air carries roughly a third of the oxygen at sea level. Noshaq sits north of the South Asian monsoon line, so its weather window holds longer than peaks in the Karakoram further east. July and August are the standard climbing season, with storms blowing in from the west off the Pamirs rather than up from the Indian Ocean. The first ascent was made by a Japanese expedition led by Toshiaki Sakai and Goro Iwatsubo, who reached the summit on 17 August 1960 via the south-east ridge.
The Wakhan Corridor along Noshaq's northern foot is among the most remote inhabited places on earth, a narrow sliver of Afghan land between Tajikistan and Pakistan with no through road. Wakhi and Kyrgyz herders graze yaks and fat-tailed sheep on summer pastures below 4,000 metres. Decades of regional conflict kept the mountain largely unclimbed; the first Afghan to summit, Malang Daria, reached the top in 2009 with a small expedition that reopened the route from the north. Annual ascents from either side remain in the single digits.