Sarfaranga Cold Desert, Skardu: The Dunes Where the Shigar Valley Opens

Get the direction right first, because half the confusion about Skardu's deserts is geographic. Sarfaranga lies north-east of Skardu, on the road toward Shigar, out where the Shigar valley opens into the Skardu bowl and the river braids across gravel before joining the Indus. It takes its name from Safaranga village, a settlement of roughly 1,500 people at its eastern corner along the Shigar river.

The published figure for the drive is about twenty kilometres and thirty minutes from Skardu town. Treat that as the floor rather than the answer: it is thirty minutes on a good day with nothing in the way, and longer whenever the bazaar is busy or you are stopping for photographs, which you will be.

The road is metalled effectively the whole way and an ordinary saloon car manages it. That is worth saying, because people arrive in Skardu having read about the Deosai crossing and assume every trip out of the valley needs a 4x4. Sarfaranga does not — to get there. Driving onto the open sand is a different proposition, and it is where saloon cars get buried up to the sills. Park at the edge, walk in, and let the jeeps do the jeep things. From Katpana we sit on the Skardu side of the confluence, so this run does not begin by crossing the bazaar — on a July morning that is worth a real amount of time.

You will see Sarfaranga called the highest cold desert in the world almost everywhere, including in the national press: Dawn describes it as known as the world's highest cold desert, perched at an elevation of 7,500 feet in the Shigar district. We repeat the elevation because it is consistently published. We are more careful with the superlative — it is a widely used description rather than something we can verify against any register of cold deserts, and we would rather you heard that from us than discovered it later.

The practical translation is more useful than the ranking. Sarfaranga sits at roughly the same height as Skardu town, which means it costs you almost no altitude gain. That makes it one of the few outings that is genuinely sensible on your first or second day in Baltistan, when the Deosai plateau at around 4,000 metres would be a poor idea. Fly in, sleep a night, and the dunes are a reasonable next morning. Deosai is not.

The climate is the other half of that story. Summers here are mild and dry; winters are not. Published accounts put winter temperatures below −25°C, and wind on an open sand plain removes whatever margin you thought you had. Snow lying on dunes is the photograph that made Skardu's cold deserts famous, and it is real — but the people who get it are dressed for a glacier, not a desert.

Once a year the quiet plain becomes the loudest place in Gilgit-Baltistan. The Sarfaranga Cold Desert Rally has run annually since 2017, and it has grown from a regional motorsport event into a multi-day festival the provincial government now treats as a tourism fixture.

The scale is worth understanding before you book around it — or away from it. At the fourth edition in October 2022, Dawn reported 50 jeep racers including five women in a qualifying round over a two-kilometre course, with 60 jeep drivers and 25 bikers contesting a 30-kilometre final. By the fifth edition a year later, over 100 racers from across the country were running an 80-kilometre track, with 18 local drivers including three women, 135 stalls selling local food, gemstones and handicrafts, and around Rs 23 million of private-sector business across three days. Arab News put the figure at $825,994.

Around the racing sit a motorbike race, a zakh raft competition on Blind Lake, free-style polo, sword dances, tent pegging, paragliding and the Mayfang fire festival — which is genuinely the more interesting half if you are not a motorsport person.

Recent editions have fallen in the first half of October, and the organisers' own material advertised 6 and 7 October for the 2025 event. We are not going to print a date for the next one, because at the time of writing no confirmed date has been published, and a wrong date on a page like this sends somebody across Pakistan for nothing. Check the organisers directly, and ask us — we hear about it in Skardu before it reaches the internet.

What it means practically. If you want the rally: book accommodation in Skardu early and expect the valley to be full. Rally week is the single busiest stretch of the Skardu year outside the summer peak, hotels of every standard fill, and the flights from Islamabad fill with them. This is not the week to arrive hoping to find a room. If you want empty dunes: avoid that fortnight entirely. October is otherwise one of the best months in Skardu — clear air, gold poplars, the crowds gone — and the rest of the month gives you the sand to yourself.