In 1937, Eric Shipton led a small expedition into the area north of K2, in the Karakorum mountains (spelled at the time by the British as "Karakoram"). The goal was to fill in a "blank on the map," which became the title of Shipton's 1938 book about the journey, Blank On The Map.

The expedition consisted, first, of four mountaineers from England: Eric Shipton, Bill Tilman, the surveyor Michael Spender and the geologist John Auden. From Darjeeling they then brought seven Sherpas that they had worked with before: Angtharkay, Ila, Sen Tensing, Lhakpa Tensing, Lobsang, Angtensing and Nukku. Finally, as they approached the Karakorum, they hired over a hundred Balti porters in the town of Skardu and the village of Askole. All but four of the Balti men left the expedition  after carrying the supplies to the top of the Sarpo Laggo pass.

The area was not completely unknown. Maps for fifty years had shown the major passes over the Karakorum and the major rivers draining its north side.  What was absent was detailed topography of the glaciers in the headwaters, and in particular the course of a river called the Shaksgam, which drains most of the north side of the Karakorum range from well southeast of K2 to the Shimshal pass in the northwest.



The expedition's main goal was to find the Shaksgam River, cross it, survey the Aghil Range on the other side, and get back over the Shaksgam before the summer's glacial melt made it too big to cross. They estimated that this would happen around July 10th. They also wanted to figure out where the Zug (or false) Shaksgam River went, a river whose headwaters a previous traveller, Kenneth Mason, had mapped but had not been able to follow downstream.

Crossing rivers was a constant hazard, whether it was the Shaksgam, the Zug Shaksgam, the stream they descend on June 27th in the Aghil range, or the Braldu river in early September.  The other limiting logistical factor was fuel. As Shipton related on p. 243, they began with twenty gallons of parafin, but by mid-July most of it had been lost to leaky tins and they had only five gallons left. As they planned Tilman's route to the Snow Lake they saw that they would limited not by food (having over a thousand pounds) but by how much brush and wood they could find. They were always glad to see wood. Tilman in fact noted in chapter sixteen how wrong it felt, when descending the Cornicle glacier, to see a log and not light it on fire.

Two previous maps that help one understand what Shipton’s party knew and didn't know are the 1914 map of the Upper Yarkand Valley by the De Filippi expedition,  and the 1926 Map of the Shaksgam Valley and the Aghil Range by Mason.  Here you can see what the “blank on the map” was.

Detail from De Filippi, 1914

Detail from Mason, 1926

Shipton never mentions that they were operating for the most part outside British India. "The Shaksgam river lies somewhere on the undemarcated frontiers of Chinese Turkestan, Hunza and Kashmir," he writes in chapter one. I suspect he knew that the watershed divide between the Indus and the Yarkand rivers would be the logical boundary between British and Chinese domains. However in 1937, with China under invasion by Japan and in the middle of a Civil War with the communists, Chinese Turkestan (today's Xinjiang province) was more or less autonomous, and its government had no presence in this remote mountain area.

All page numbers refer to the the hardcover Moutaineers/Diadem edition of 1990 (ISBN 0-89886-075-X), a collection of books by Shipton called The Six Mountain-Travel Books. However, it is well worth taking a look at the original 1938 publication of Blank on the Map.  There are a number of photographs that do not appear in the 1990 edition, as well as two appendices, one by Auden and one by Spender. The maps are different and, following typical practice at this time, “K2” is invariably sub-scripted as K₂.There are also more small drawings.

Because the route from Srinagar to Skardu and Askole will be familiar to a reader who is interested in travel in this part of Pakistan, and is well-described in many other books, I begin mapping at Shipton's chapter six.


You can use the slippy map above, created in GPS Visualizer. Lines of travel (coloured by chapter) appear on the map and a list of locations (sorted by page number) is on the right.

You can download a KMZ file for use in Google Earth. An advantage of the KML file is that it contains view. That is, certain markers, when you double-click on them, bring you in at a certain angle so you can appreciate what could be seen from a certain spot, or give you an angle that emphasizes the terrain. This is perhaps the most satisfying way to view the data.

You can download a CSV file of the points and view it in other mapping software. The coordinates are in Lat/long and the datum is WGS84.

You can download a complete list of references, but the primary references used in mapping this journey were the following books and maps. Using these you can determine perhaps 90% of the described landmarks, peaks, glaciers, rivers and campsites.

• Shipton, 1938 -- the original edition of Blank on the Map
• Spender, 1937 -- the map Spender published at the end of the expedition. See p. 55f in Alpine Journal No. 50 or here.
• AMS I-43-03 Mundik -- US Army Map Service 1963 1:250,000 scale topographic map of the Mundik quadrangle
• AMS J-43-15 Shimshal  -- US Army Map Service 1963 1:250,000 scale topographic map of the Shimshal quadrangle
• The Mountaineers, Central Karakoram -- map facing p. 159 in Shipton 1990
• The Mountaineers, The Approach to the Karakoram -- map facing p. 174 in Shipton 1990
• The Mountaineers, Tilman's Journey -- map facing p. 259 in Shipton 1990
• The Mountaineers, Aghil Explorations -- map facing p. 217 in Shipton 1990
• The Mountaineers, Journey of Shipton and Spender -- map facing p. 281 in Shipton 1990

A satellite image came in handy from time to time. A particularly good recent Sentinel-2 10m image is from September 20th, 2019 at 05:48:37 UTC.


A number of different publications resulted from the expedition. Besides the 1990 edition of The Six Mountain-Travel Books published by The Mountaineers ("Shipton, 1990"), there is Shipton’s original 1938 book ("Shipton, 1938"), which includes appendices by both Spender and Auden that do not appear in the 1990 edition. Shipton also read a paper to the Royal Geographical Society on January 10th, 1938 ("Shipton, 1938, Geographical Journal," i.e., Geographical Journal vol. 91 p. 313), and to the Alpine Club on January 18th ("Shipton, 1938, Alpine Journal," i.e., Alpine Journal vol. 50, p. 34). Spender and Auden both read papers to the Himalayan Club ("Spender, 1938, Himalayan Journal" and "Auden, 1938, Himalayan Journal"). These are all available online: see the spreadsheet of references.

It is always delightful to speculate what maps these travellers carried. “Relying on the old map, I had assumed, perhaps unwarrantably, that we were on the Evi Gans glacier,” wrote Tilman (p. 273). I have never seen a map that had an “Evi Gans” glacier. Presumably they carried the Survey of India quarter-inch mapsheet 43 M, but I’ve not found a copy of one of these online.

• R.C.F. Schomberg led a 1934 expedition to Shimshal district, and subsequently published a book about it called Unknown Karakoram (London, 1936 Martin Hopkinson ). His map is available online. but the book does not appear to be.

• Ardito Desio was a geologist on the 1929 Italian Geographical Expedition to the Karakoram (Spedizione Geografica Italiana al Karakoram) under the leadership of the Duke of Spoleto. Auden refers to him in his appendix to Shipton 1938 as the most important geologist to have done previous work in the area. The Himalayan Club heard both a general report on the expedition by the Duke of Spoleto, and a separate talk by Desio on the geological findings,  Desio did cross over into the watershed on the north side, descended the Sarpo Laggo, and then ascended the Shaksgam.

• Col. Kenneth Mason was a previous British traveller to visit the Shaksgam (in 1926), and his resulting book was called The Exploration of the Shaksgam Valley and Aghil Ranges (Survey of India, Dehra Dun, 1928), which comes with a map. In 1938 he had become the editor of the Himalayan Journal, and a vice-president of the Royal Geographical Society. 

• H. Wood was a surveyor on the 1914 De Filippi expedition, which camped on the Depsang Plains, just south of the Karakorum Pass, and mapped the upper Yarkand river drainage. (The Shaksgam, Zug Shaksgam and Surukwat are all tributaries of the Yarkand.) In chapter eleven Shipton refers to "Wood's 1914 survey" showing a river joining the Surukwat three miles from the Yarkand, and notes that in general Wood's elevations were out by 300 feet. One map produced by the expedition is here and two more here. Sir Filippo De Filippi gives a talk to the RGS in June 1915 (see Geographic Journal vol 46 p. 85) and Wood gives a subsequent talk in 1922 (see Geographic Journal vol 59, p. 375.).

• Fanny Bullock Workman and William Hunter Workman were two Americans who mapped all over the Karakorum, and are most famous for their 1911-12 mapping of the Siachen glacier (Two Summers in the Ice Wilds of Eastern Karakoram, E. P. Dutton, New York, 1916).  In 1908 they were in the Hispar Area (The call of the snowy Hispar : narrative of exploration and mountaineering on the northern frontier of India, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1911) and visited the Snow Lake. (Maps from both expeditions are here.) In chapter sixteen Tilman also explains how the Workmans found a glacier which they said had no outlet, and called the Cornice glacier. One of Tilman's goals on his exit route is to find and confirm that such a glacier exists.

• Sir Martin Conway mapped up the Hispar glacier from Hunza in 1892 and “discovered” the Snow Lake, the mapping of which was an important goal for Shipton's party. His book is Climbing and exploration in the Karakoram-Himalayas(T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1894). His maps of the Baltoro, Hispar and Biafo glaciers are available from the Mountains of Central Asia Digital Database.

• Sir George Cockerill was a British army officer who "explored the eastern Hindu Kush" (according to Wikipedia) from 1892 to 1895. In chapter twenty, Shipton writes, "In the winter of 1892, during one of his remarkable exploratory journeys in these parts, Sir George Cockeril made his way up this route, but I am unaware that any other European has traversed the [Shimshal River] gorge." An article by Cockerill appeared in the Himalayan Journal Vol 11, in 1939  and it tells in detail the story of this journey.
• Sir Francis Younghusband is a major figure in this area. As Shipton explains in chapter one, Younghusband was the first English-speaking writer to describe the Aghil Pass and the Shaksgam River, which he visited in 1887 and 1889. Both of these journeys are in his book The Heart of a Continent  (John Murray, London, 1896)