Srinagar, Jun 11: An eight-member team of Kashmiri mountaineers successfully scaled the 4,620-metre Mt Sentinel in the Sind Valley on June 6, claiming to have become the first Kashmiris to reach the summit and the first climbers to do so since a British mountaineer ascended the peak in 1945, as per a statement issued on Thursday.
The team included SaqibShafi, Faik Aijaz Pattahoo, Muzakir Khan, Yasir Khan, Faizan Shafi, Adnan Altaf, Salman Altaf and Arun Jasrotia.
The statement adds that on June 6, 2026, at exactly 11 in the morning, eight men from Kashmir broke that silence on the summit of Mt Sentinel for the first time in eighty-one years. They did not arrive as conquerors. They arrived as something rarer, the first people from this land to ever stand there at all.
The mountain had not been summited since 1945, when John Jackson, an RAF officer and one of Britain’s finest mountaineers, climbed it while stationed in Sonamarg during the Second World War. The same man would later stand on Kangchenjunga, the third-highest peak on Earth. That the only person to have ever touched this summit went on to do something like that tells you everything about the kind of mountain Sentinel is remote, demanding, and until last week, almost entirely forgotten.
The team of eight set out on June 5 from Kullan in Ganderbal, at 2,200 metres, carrying packs, rope, and a plan. Their destination was a base camp near Khemsar Lake, ten kilometres through dense forest, uphill, in the rain.
For another team, in another frame of mind, that might have been the end of it. For this one, it turned out to be exactly what they needed.
In 2025, a Kashmiri team led by Yaseen Lone had attempted Sentinel and been driven back by rockfall, the mountain shedding loose rock onto their chosen line as if unwilling to be disturbed. This year’s eight-member team remembered that. When they left base camp at five in the morning on June 6, under a sky still crowded with stars, they climbed with that knowledge tucked carefully in their minds.
They took it. Two hundred metres of steep snow, one careful step at a time, until they reached the shoulder of the mountain. They have named this route Mamkhan Gully, a name that now belongs to Kashmir’s mountaineering history.
