Climber makes adventurous first ascent in Afghanistan

By SCOTT McMILLION Chronicle Staff Writer

Talk about an excellent adventure.

Doug Chabot recently returned from one of the most remote corners of Afghanistan, a nation so tumultuous and isolated that all but the most intrepid of travelers have scratched it from their destination list.

He had an AK-47 thrust in his face by a screaming soldier. He hiked and rode horses for 80 miles after the dirt roads petered out. He spent five days in the custody of soldiers from neighboring Tajikistan.

And along the way he made a first ascent of a mountain nearly 20,000 feet tall.

The peak is called Koh-e-Bardar. It measures 19,941 feet, rising from the floor of a valley called the Wakhan Corridor, a thumb-shaped extension that juts east from the raised fist of Afghanistan.

Marco Polo was the first westerner to explore the valley, and not many have made the trip since.

The valley has a long history as a sort of no-man's land, and for more than a century served as a buffer between the hostile empires of England and Russia. Tajikistan borders the north side, while Pakistan abuts the south.

The valley floor stands at 10,000 to 12,000 feet, and is settled by sparse populations of herders, farmers and opium growers.

"They're hardy, that's for sure," Chabot said of the natives. Some of them live in mud huts. Others live in yurts.

"It looked like we were in the Madison or Paradise Valley, before anybody got there," said Chabot, 41, who runs the Gallatin National Forest Avalanche Center in the winters and guides climbers in the Tetons in the summers.

Chabot credited Doug Mortenson, executive director of the Bozeman-based Central Asia Institute, with making the trip possible. For the past 12 years, Mortenson has been building schools in remote villages in Pakistan and Afghanistan and has a network of relationships there.

"To do this trip without his contacts would be almost impossible," Chabot said in his Bozeman home, a tidy place packed with climbing gear and memorabilia.

The region is run by local warlords and chieftains, he said.

Traveling safely there means understanding and following local customs, Mortenson said in a phone interview.

"If you want to survive over there, you have to be sensitive to local cultures," he said. "If you're their guest, they'll protect you with their life. If you just go crashing in, it could go the other way."

In addition to local warlords, the opium economy blossomed under the Taliban, Mortenson said, and is dominated by Chechen smugglers with connections to al-Qaida and former Russian KGB agents affiliated with mobsters.

"They're dangerous characters," Mortenson said, adding that he is "very selective" about helping people arrange trips to the region.

Chabot was accompanied by photographer Teru Kuwayama and Mark Jenkins, a columnist for Outside magazine, which helped finance the journey.

"They're all very seasoned travelers and very tough," Mortenson said, and Chabot's savviness -- and his willingness to spread his knowledge of avalanches -- made him "a good ambassador" to the region.

Still, the trip took what could have been a miserable turn.

After Chabot and Jenkins bagged the peak, they rejoined the photographer and the three men walked over the unguarded Tajikistan border, aiming for an international airport in China, four days travel away. But Tajik soldiers got them before they could hire a Jeep.

"There were some shots in the air to get our attention," Chabot said. "I'd like to think they weren't aimed at us."

The travelers then spent the next five days in the custody of the ragtag Tajik army, which was feeding itself with wild game it killed.

"We weren't formally arrested," he said. "But we weren't free."

Every day they were driven to another town, interrogated by a different commander, then sent down the road. The men were never mistreated, he said, and there was some swapping of American coffee for local vodka.

Meanwhile, nobody knew where the men were being held.

Mortenson had notified the U.S. State Department after a quick satellite phone call from the climbers had alerted him to their predicament shortly after it began. American embassies in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Tajikistan were pressuring the Tajik government to keep the Americans safe.

"There was a huge effort from three countries," Mortenson said. "The Tajik government denied even taking them."

The climbers all had visas for Tajikistan, but the soldiers were cautious about three strange Americans along the busiest heroin smuggling route in the world.

"I'm glad they didn't get shot at the border," Mortenson said.

Chabot said he and Jenkins spent months poring over maps, arranging travel visas and making other arrangements prior to their trek.

Just getting to the Pamir mountain range would daunt most people.

It takes two days in an airplane to get to Kabul, followed by 40 hours of rough road in a four-wheel-drive. Then it's five or six days on horseback.

"Then a day or two on foot and you get to where they were," Mortenson said.

The trip began in Kabul on April 17 and lasted through May 25.

The climb only lasted two days.

The small crew set up a base camp at the 10,000 foot level.

"We just picked the coolest looking peak and said 'let's climb it,'" Chabot said. "We were standing on the summit within 48 hours of leaving base camp."

He described the ascent as "moderately technical," although it included one knife-edge ridge. "It's definitely what I call 'don't-blow-it' terrain. You fall and you die."

But once at the summit, Chabot and Jenkins found themselves surrounded by 20,000 foot peaks, all of them unclimbed.

Chabot said he doesn't expect them to remain unscaled forever.

The local people don't climb because they're too busy trying to scrape a living from the mountain soils. And the area has been off limits to outsiders since 1980, when the Afghan-Soviet war broke out.

Then came the Taliban occupation, which Mortenson said was never fully complete because of the fierce resistance of the locals. That fighting went on for years and kept the area closed. Now, things are beginning to open up as former mountain fighters try to rebuild normal lives.

Chabot hopes to return next year and scale some more peaks before somebody else gets to them first.

"Five years from now, you'll have all kinds of people going over there," he predicted.

Mortenson said he has mixed opinions about ecotourism coming to the area.

"I'm not so sure the infrastructure is ready for that yet," he said, adding that he hopes the locals can be trained in skills like guiding, Jeep driving and cooking before an influx of foreigners arrives.

Native traditions run deep, he said. For example, just three weeks ago, a couple was convicted by a local court of adultery. The man was sentenced to 100 lashes. The woman was stoned to death, buried to her waist and then pelted by 60 men with stones no bigger than a walnut.

"They threw stones at her for two hours until she died," Mortenson said. "The man got off easy."

All the high-tech gear in the universe won't keep you safe in that world, he cautioned. Your best equipment is an ability to understand the local culture, and that's something that doesn't come quick or easy.

The best adventures are the ones you return from alive.

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