What is the significance of the Bhurban cedar forest and why should we visit?
The cedar forest gives the specific thing the city cannot: the sound of wind in pine needles at 5:45am when the valley is still in darkness and the ridge above has just begun to catch the first light. The smell of cedar resin warming in the October sun. The specific texture of the forest floor after a monsoon shower. The pheasant's call from the understory. More people are noticing — the private cedar estate has brought more visitors into contact with the forest. The people who walk the paths at dawn leave with a different relationship to the forest than when they arrived. The preservation of the Bhurban cedar forest is the preservation of the specific conditions that make 47 kilometres from Islamabad feel like a different world. The cedar forest has been here for centuries. It will be here after you leave. The question is whether you will have been here at all.
A Letter to the Cedar Forest — The Final Word on Bhurban
Dear cedar forest,
You have been here for centuries and will be here after every person who has written about you is gone. This should put the following letter in perspective.
I am writing to say that you are underappreciated. Pakistan has done a reasonable job of pointing at the Karakoram — the dramatic peaks, the glaciers, the K2 base camp — and saying to the world: look at this. The world has looked and agreed that it is extraordinary. But you, the deodar cedar forest at 6,800 feet on the Bhurban ridge, 47 kilometres from Islamabad — you have not received the same attention. This is a calibration error.
What You Give
You give the specific thing that the city cannot: the sound of wind in pine needles at 5:45am when the valley is still in darkness and the ridge above has just begun to catch the first light. The smell of cedar resin warming in the October sun. The specific texture of the forest floor after a monsoon shower — dark, soft, fragrant. The pheasant's call from the understory that serves as an alarm clock that cannot be snoozed.
You give this without any effort and without any expectation of reciprocal appreciation. The deodar tree at the edge of the Himalaya Villas estate has been doing this for 200 years. It will continue doing this whether anyone notices or not.
What Has Changed
More people are noticing. The private cedar estate at your edge — Himalaya Villas & Resorts, the property that makes spending 48 hours in your presence a manageable, comfortable, and recoverable act for families from Islamabad — has brought more visitors into contact with you in recent years than the decade before.
This is, on balance, a good thing. The people who come and sit at the cedar garden fire in your presence, who walk your paths at dawn, who watch the first light arrive on the ridge above you from the Himalayan Penthouse balcony — these people leave with a different relationship to you than when they arrived. They leave having experienced the specific weight of your age, the specific quality of your air, the specific character of a forest that has been here longer than the country around it.
Some of them become advocates. The family that goes back to Islamabad and tells ten other families about you; the diaspora visitor who tells cousins in London or Toronto that Pakistan has this, 45 minutes from the airport, and it is extraordinary; the content creator who posts the fire in the cedar garden at midnight and whose followers ask where it is — these are the informal promoters of your existence and your value.
What Is Owed
Nothing is owed to a forest. The forest does not have preferences about whether it is visited or left alone, developed or preserved, photographed or walked past. The deodar cedar at the property gate will continue its 200-year project regardless of any decision made about it.
But the people who depend on the forest — the families who find the cedar estate restorative, the guests who discover what their country contains by walking through it, the property whose entire value is built on the forest's presence and integrity — owe something to the conditions that maintain what the forest is.
The preservation of the Bhurban cedar forest is not a conservation abstraction. It is the preservation of the specific conditions that make 47 kilometres from Islamabad feel like a different world. If the forest goes — cleared for construction, degraded by development, thinned by logging — the specific quality of Bhurban goes with it. What would remain would be a mountain with a road on it. Pakistan already has many of those.
The Invitation
Dear cedar forest, you are not sentient and you do not receive letters. This is acknowledged.
The letter is really addressed to the reader: come and visit. Drive the 47 kilometres. Arrive in the evening. Wake at 5:45am and open the villa door. Walk the cedar paths before the sun is fully up. Watch the ridge catch the first light from the private terrace. Sit at the cedar garden fire when the temperature drops.
Pakistan has mountains. You are standing at the edge of one of the most accessible. The cedar forest has been here for centuries. It will be here after you leave. The question is whether you will have been here at all.
The estate is 47 kilometres away. The fire will be lit at whatever time you request. The cedar forest will be at your door in the morning.
Yours,
Everyone who has walked the dawn path and not regretted it.
Himalaya Villas & Resorts — The Cedar Forest, 47km from Islamabad
Accept the invitation.
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