Alpomish, Uzbekistan
April 2026
On our first night, we fell asleep to wolves howling.
We were in Tajikistan to climb Uzbekistan’s highest mountain. Why? Because the Uzbek approach is off-limits, littered with landmines.
That day, we’d walked over brown bear tracks, seen marmots, and follows wolf tracks. Now, after 2 years of setbacks, including my bags (once again) getting delayed by 3 days (narrator: “they’d get lost, again, on his way home”) I was finally climbing toward Alpomish.
Only named Uzbekistan’s highest peak in 2023, when American Eric Gilbertson climbed it and the previously-thought-to-be-highest nearby Peak 4643 (incorrectly known as “Khazaret Sultan”), it’s had my attention since he released stories from his experience. After struggling to find partners, I ultimately ended up with the best partners I could have imagined: Layne Peters and Daniel Birdwell, both working on community development in Tajikistan. Together, we chose a slightly different approach than Eric, and enjoyed six days in the mountains together with very, very heavy backpacks.
On day 3, we crested a ridge and skied into Uzbekistan, yet another imaginary international border. The next day, while Daniel stayed at camp 3 with altitude illness of sorts, Layne and I skied up the glacier on day 4, climbed up and skied over a notch, and finally laid eyes on Alpomish. Or what we thought was Alpomish. While we’d been living-and-dying by our phone GPS for the previous days, we didn’t even glance at it after getting to the base of the mountain. Our (my) confidence was so high that the couloir we stared at was our objective, that it wasn’t until after climbing the couloir, hitting the ridge, and climbing a few mixed pitches to the “summit” did I finally look to my north and say, “Layne? That thing is way higher than us.” We’d climbed the wrong mountain.
While the couloir offered stellar skiing as steep as 57 degrees, I was hugely disappointed to have come so far and made such a stupid mistake. But as we crossed the glacier back toward our pass—now oriented with our surroundings and our intended line—I noted to Layne, “Hey, so, it’s only 12:30…”
With renewed conviction, we climbed the proper (more than twice-as-long) couloir (which Eric has called the NW Face), roped up in the afternoon sun, and climbed some quite technical pitches on the west face in winter conditions. Finally we stood beside the summit gendarme (having stopped at its base, about 5’ short of standing on the summit, because it was a solid granite slab that we were not going to get up, covered in verglas), realizing that enough motivation can apparently add an entire extra summit into your day.
We descended 45-50 meters from the summit via rappels, put on our skis right on top of the couloir, and enjoyed an uneventful descent in much worse snow (than our first, incorrect line) as the clouds finally parted.
Our short climb back to the pass was absolutely atrocious, wallowing in waist-deep facets beneath breakable crust. We skied the long glacier back to camp in mostly a cloud, closely hugging the track that we followed on my watch. A final climb back to our camp, where Daniel awaited us, ended within minutes of needing headlamps. What a day.
Two days later, we were back in the small mountain village of Sarytoq (various spellings), and that same day back in the Tajikistan capital of Dushanbe, where I enjoyed eating quorotob with my hand.
