@ Mountaineer
At last after surfing on the net for many days and making a lot of phone calls, I was able to talk to a person who has done this trek in 2008. Now I am able to finalize my own plan and share info with you.
You can travel on a a local jeep or hire your own ( Rs. 2000-2500 approx ) from astore to Rattu Cantt ( Via Gurikot ). Its about 2 hours drive.
From Rattu travel further to Chand wali, The last village enroute which is about an hour drive on jeep. Camp overnite at chand wali.
Try to get a guide either from Astore, Gurikot, Rattu or Chand wali and arrange horses or mules from chand wali to carry your luggage.
Start your trek as early as possible next morning. you will be able to reach Shounter top after about 3 hours if you have horses but if you are carrying your luggage yourself then it will take more time. the guide & horses will take you till the shounter top and return back after showing you the way to shounter village.
From top it will take about 4-5 hours to descend and reach shounter Village.
From Shounter Village , you will get local jeeps to Kel which is about 2-3 hours drive. You can also hire a special jeep and it will cost you 2000-3000 again.
So the total time from Astore to Kel is 2 days. You may be lucky to do it in just one day if the jeep road is open from Chand wali to shounter Village which usually remains closed due to land slides.
Routine camping equipment, food ( for atleast a couple of days ) is required.
Keep your Original C.N.I.C with extra photocopies since you cant submit the original one as you won't be coming back the same way.
About the beauty of the route and the area, Its worth seeing.
Hope this info will help you. for more info, u can call me at 0300-7608877