Jesse Burkhardt reports on an epic trip to Tajikistan. With support from a McNeill-Nott Award, a grant offered annually by the AAC, the team was able to tick of several impressive first ascents. Read on for the full story!

Over the course of roughly one month the team of Darren Benton, Jesse Burkhardt, Robert (Bo) White and Chris Weidner successfully completed first ascents of four different peaks in the GBAO region of eastern Tajikistan and completed a handful of… [view report]

Peak Communism in evening light. The Borodkin route ascends the rib on the right to the large plateau at 6000m. The route then follows the righthand skyline up Peak Dushanbe (6900m) and just beneath the rocks to the summit (7495m). Peak Vorobiova (5700m),

I descend Korzhenevskaya’s summit ridge during a 23-hour single push ascent

The past few years, I've been perfecting the art of piggybacking mountaineering trips on my PhD field research. This summer, following four weeks of paleoclimate fieldwork in Mongolia, I headed Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to attempt the three 7000m "Snow Leopard" peaks of the Pamir Mountains. The trip began with Lenin Peak (7134m), supposedly one of the world's easiest 7000ers. Lack of acclimatization, terrible snow conditions and tremendous storms made the ascent anything but straightforward. From Lenin, I traveled to remote and chaotic Tajikistan, which sees only 4000 visitors per year. After several days of waiting, a diverse group of international climbers and I hitched a ride on Tajikistan's only helicopter to the heart of the Pamir, home to the world's… [view report]