Last August and September photographer Teru Kuwayama joined Outside field editor Kevin Fedarko on an epic journey to the 21,000-foot front lines on Kasmir's Siachen Glacier, where the armies of India and Pakistan have faced off for 19 years on the world's highest battleground. Kuwayama, 32, has worked in Himalayas before and also some rough locales like Nepal and Afghanistan, but says he was unprepared for the beauty of the peaks towering above the Siachen—or the mountains of garbage surrounding the remote military outposts.
"To see these incredibly pristine mountains and the glacier and then to look down at your feet and for kilometers around you and just see nothing but this completely apocalyptic wasteland, it is really shocking," says the New York based photojournalist. "And it's really surreal, and sad, mostly." In this exclusive online gallery of outtakes from his assignment to Kashmir with audio narration, Kuwayama exposes the human cost and environmental fallout of a brutal military conflict in one of the last great swaths of unexplored terrain on the planet.
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