Karakoram Decoder — Gilgit-Baltistan Trek Glossary

Reading about the K2 Base Camp trek and lost in the names? Askole, Jhola, Paiju, Urdukas, Goro II, Concordia, the Gondogoro La. If you haven't walked the Baltoro, those words tell you nothing about how high you'll be, how far apart they are, or which day of the trek they fall on. And half the trip reports out there mix feet and metres in the same paragraph. Karakoram Decoder answers those questions on the page you're already reading. WHAT IT DOES Click the icon and it underlines Gilgit-Baltistan place names on the page — camps, passes, peaks, glaciers, valleys, villages, forts and lakes. Hover one and a small card tells you: • its altitude, in metres and feet • what kind of place it is, and the region it's in • which trek it sits on, and roughly which day • how you get there, and the season it's open • one honest line about what the place is actually like There's also a one-click toggle that rewrites every elevation on the page into metres, or into feet, and puts them back when you're done. And in the popup, an elevation profile for five routes — the K2 Base Camp trek, the Gondogoro La crossing, Nanga Parbat Base Camp, the Biafo–Hispar traverse and the Deosai plateau — so you can finally see the shape of the walk. 114 places covered, from Skardu, Shigar and Khaplu to Concordia, Hushe, Snow Lake, Deosai, Hunza and Shimshal. HONEST ABOUT WHAT ISN'T SETTLED Peak heights and named passes are well documented, and we give them plainly. Trek camp elevations are not. Published figures disagree, sometimes badly — Khoburtse is quoted anywhere from 3,566 m to 3,930 m depending on who you ask. So where sources conflict, the card shows the actual spread and says "sources vary". Where there's no reliable figure, it says "unconfirmed" instead of inventing one. If you're planning a trek at altitude, you should know which numbers are solid and which aren't. PRIVACY The extension makes no network requests at all. The entire dataset ships inside it, so nothing about the pages you read is sent anywhere — there is nowhere for it to go. It reads a page only when you click the button, or on sites you have specifically allowed. No account, no ads, no tracking. Free. WHAT IT ISN'T It's a reference tool, not a planner. No live weather, no conditions, no prices, no booking. It knows 114 places; anything outside that list it won't recognise. WHO BUILT IT Karakoram Venture, an adventure tour operator based in Skardu, Gilgit-Baltistan. Our guides are Balti and grew up in these valleys. We built this because we answer these same questions on WhatsApp every week. Missing a place? Tell us and we'll add it.