Before I ever went to Frano Valley, I had already been there many times in my father’s voice.
He used to tell me stories from his childhood, and in every story, there was Kesar. As a kid, I could not really follow these stories. They felt long, dramatic, and never ending, like a movie that just kept going. I used to wonder how does this big, wild story connects to us? To a small valley I had never even seen.
I did not understand it then. Some stories are not meant to be understood right away. You just carry them with you, until one day that finally makes sense of them.
That day came in November 2018. My father and I walked to Frano together on foot, the way he always used to travel there as a kid. I was seeing the valley for the very first time. He was seeing it for the hundredth time, but I could tell it felt new to him too.
Then I saw the rocks in the fields.
They were not normal rocks. They had shapes carved into them like snakes, made on purpose, clearly old. And suddenly, Kesar’s world, my father’s long dramatic story felt real. It wasn’t just a story anymore. It was history, sitting quietly in a field.
I asked the local people about these carved rocks. What they said surprised me. Most people did not really know what these stones meant. And worse, some said the rocks might be removed one day, because they were “in the way” of farming. I told them these rocks were important, part of our history. I do not think I fully convinced them.
Even Pakistan’s own Department of Archaeology and Museums has this exact site on official record rock carvings in Frano dated to the 9th or 10th century CE, over a thousand years old. But its legal status is listed simply as “Not Protected.”[i] Even our own government has confirmed this history is real and still left it undefended. Their answer that day left me with a question I still think about: why do we see our own history as a problem, instead of a treasure?
Part of the answer was waiting for me at Frano Higher School. Inside, there was one small room. In that room, someone had kept old, simple things from everyday village life a pola, handmade local chapal (shoes), a wooden comb, a folpa (for Agriculture used, a Chilim (smoking device). Nothing fancy. Amazingly simple things. But these simple things told a big story. They showed how our elders lived smartly, using only what the mountains gave them. This was not a room full of treasure. It was a room full of knowledge.
Standing there, I finally understood my father’s Kesar stories. They were never just fun stories. They were memories passed down in the form of a legend about how our people learned to survive and live well in these mountains.
If that room holds the memory of a culture, the Apo Ali Shah Bridge is its living proof. I saw it properly again last year, and this time I understood what I was looking at. It was designed by a man named Apo Ali Shah himself, with the support of a local Islamic leader, Syed Qasim Ali Shah, and construction began in 1936. For five years, in a time with almost no modern resources, people built it plank by plank across the Shyok River connecting Frano village to Thang without using a single nail. It finished in 1940. For over three decades, until 1973, it was the only bridge crossing the Shyok River between these villages. Even now, engineers who study it are amazed at how something built with such limited means has lasted this long. It has outlived the people who built it because it was never fighting its environment. It was translating it.
I am a Balti, but I grew up in the city. Like many people my age, I got pulled toward phones, technology, and city life. Slowly, we started forgetting our culture remembering it only through food. A recipe survives. But a skill like bridge building? It quietly disappears. A dish gets passed down. A carved stone in a field gets called a problem.
But Frano taught me something simple and important: our culture and our environment were never two separate things. They were always one. Our shoes were shaped by our mountains. Our bridges were shaped by our rivers. Even Kesar’s long, dramatic story was shaped by a landscape big enough to need such a big story. Our indigenous knowledge hidden inside our stories, tools, and structures.
This means something serious: when we are losing our environment, we don’t just lose nature. We lose the proof that our people once lived in a smart, self-sufficient, and deeply connected way with these mountains. Climate change and fast modernization are not separate from our identity they are attacking it directly.
Frano is just one valley. There are many more like it across Gilgit-Baltistan quiet, unknown, and slowly disappearing, one bulldozer at a time. We need to look at these places differently. Not as forgotten villages, but as living libraries full of local knowledge, local skills, and local wisdom shaped by nature itself. We need to document this culture properly before climate change and modern life erase what has left of it.
My father’s stories finally made sense to me the day I stood in Frano. I do not want the next generation to need a trip to a dying valley to understand where they come from. I want the valley and everything it knows to still be there, waiting for them.
