Kazakhstan Mtn. Fiasco
This entry starts in Novosibirsk. I'm 22 and feeling well adjusted; on the Novosibirsk State University ski team and in two time-consuming clubs. My accent is, according to most people I meet, patently Estonian.
My first-ever climbing competition 10.10. The semi-final.
A heat. Given that the main problem with climbing is patience --what a joy to just hurl yourself at the wall on toprope.
According to my most recent figures, the Russian postal system defeats the Greenland system 80% to Greenland's 50%. (percent of letters reaching their destination)
'Strelba': The ski team takes Mondays for target practice in a sprawling underground pellet-gun wonderland.
A weekend in the Altai with a Swede from the foreign-students floor of dorm 8--I want a camera that can handle gloom.
What happened for the last three pictures was, I lost my headlight and we were forced to escape from the bottom of the giant pitch black cave taking a picture with flash, studying it, taking 3 steps, doing it again.
In October I hear that the NGU outdoor club is organizing a 2 week climbing trip to the Zailiskij Krebet in Kazakhstan--I excitedly sign up and go on all the weekend camping trips ('training sessions').
Oh Russia. I feel like I heard somewhere that this can happen with the jumar in the first position....as for the carabiner, there is no good excuse.
Two uninspired trips to the consulate in Omsk to get a Kazakh visa--return the second time to winter in Siberia. October 17-- 2 feet of snow fall, and all the furry hats come out.
October 24th outside the old sports complex. .
On Halloween we board a train for Almaty. We're 13, planning an easy alpine traverse through the Tian-Shan mountains. Arrival in Almaty, registration and some first-days pictures. Spirits very high.
On the first pass, still not so far from civilization. These were ruins of what looked like an innovative wind power station--the turbines were vertical, so as to take advantage of air flow in any direction.
The group is focused and well trained, but there's a definite ability gap, and after a few days it becomes obvious that we'll have to get creative to make it along our planned route in time. An idea is floated to cache our supplies on a pass before heading back down for an attempt on a peak in another valley; I do not raise any particularly strident objections.
Between the first two passes. Kazakhstan is gorgeous.
Just walking. I had some persistent camera trouble.
Carrying supplies. Cooking.
On the hike some cultural differences became very clear to me. Russia is definitely a polychronic country (polychronic meaning, culturally collectivist and focusing on the human network much more than the rules of structured society), and it was interesting to see what that meant in an alpine context. Some things--two giant group sleeping bags for 8 people, a constant focus on the mood of the group as a whole--rubbed me well. Other things started to grate on me right away.
Turning back from our stuff.
On our radial. On the glacier below (hidden in fog) we hit our turn-around time and don't end up making it anywhere in particular. A really swell breathe-to-the-bottom-of-your-lungs kind of day.
Lyosha Laptev. An extremely solid guy.
Roma Gerasimov. Also solid.
Ski-bounding during lunch for some reason. Outdoor sports are enough out of the mainstream here that they've grown into more or less a full-fledged counterculture. Hikers and climbers have their own songs, dress code, folklore etc. I wanted to find some new distractions coming to Russia, but in such a bleak and honestly oppressive monoculture falling into a group of good people who did things I already liked....it was really welcome.
Zhenya Bichkov. Kind of a class clown.
Anton. A strange one. I have personally never found this very effective for cold feet.
The nature of our hike changes drastically when we wake up on our 5th day to find that 6 feet of snow have fallen overnight. We joke as we dig out our tents and put on our home-made snowshoes.
The situation becomes clearer later in the morning: there are avalanches everywhere. We can't get back to our supplies, we can't go forward, and we can't go out the way we came.
We decide to follow the frozen river in the gorge. It leads off the edge of our map, presumably to a village named Talgat. It's not clear quite how far it is or what the gorge is like. We have between us a half-kilogram of rice, a can of sardines and half a canister of white gas. Spirits are still high.
At first the valley is not bad to walk down. After two more days of breaking trail without almost no food, though, everyone is in a pretty bad mood.
Lower down the river is open and we can drink. It's getting really cold.
The gorge got quite rough--there'd be long ascents and rappels off the sides, and twice we hit impasses and had to cross the river.
My snowshoes are flying off every half our or so and we're moving so slowly I feel like I've got to break trail about half the time. On this day I decided that if Russia and America were ever to go to war, I would happily enlist for my country.
Ilya Zemlyanskij. A titan. On the 4th morning without food, we are still all good friends.
We get below the thick snow. Anton and I forge ahead, looking for a way through the bush. We see some horses. We know we are close.
It being Kazakhstan, we are quickly apprehended by the police for being unregistered in this ranger district. (Turns out that it is also a border district with Kyrgistan, so things are especially strict). When the officers find out that we have between us 30 rubles and no way to pay their fine, they insist that we all dine together and then all together get us fantastically drunk. I learn 4 Kazakh toasts. It's 11am.
The police post. The rest of the group arrives and is rounded up outside an hour later. They have trouble understanding why we're so cheery.
Afterwards, I met up with Jacob the Swede and we played tourists around Almaty for a few days.
In Kazakhstan, I was just gripped by the brightest feeling of the future. The steppe is gorgeous, the people are incredibly nice, you can talk to anyone in Russian--I feel like these central Asians are finding a better compromise between our 'thrusting western industrial monoculture' and their own traditions than many other peoples. Maybe it's because we haven't really paid them any attention--or maybe it was the trying experience as a Soviet republic. This picture (taken at some personal risk) is of smugglers packing the ceiling compartment of our train as we left for Novosibirsk.
I was somehow taken with the sky above the train station in Palatensk.
This photo is badly out of order. It's probably worth noting that I would never post anything really interesting to an online journal--it could impact your future.
On the way to Greenland I was flown to Washington DC to accept this scholarship --I think I was too embarrassed to post this picture at the time, but whatever reason I had then I've since forgotten.