Sabakh 2015:
How we went Kyrgyz
that winter

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A story about a winter expedition in 2015 to Ala-Archa and Ashat: a warm-up in Ala-Archa and a first-ascent attempt on Sabakh Peak, 5,300 m.

That summer, after descending from Svarog, we were sitting in base camp beneath the mountain, waiting for the horseman to come and collect us. As always after a climb, the conversation drifted toward plans for the coming winter.
Normally, winter meant the same thing every year: Ala-Archa, Free Korea, and new routes there or on one of the neighboring peaks. We'd been doing that year after year, and honestly, we wanted something different.
The weather that day was perfect, and the Ashat Wall looked incredible—beautiful, intimidating, and irresistibly inviting. Someone suggested trying Peak Sabah in winter, following the ice runnels that seemed to cover much of its north face. We liked the idea, talked it over, and then quietly shelved it for later.
In December, Kostyan and I met again and finally decided to make it happen. Just the two of us—no one else was able to join.
We chose the end of February, thinking the weather would be better, the days longer, and the temperatures a little more forgiving. We couldn't have been more wrong.
Kostyan suggested warming up in Ala-Archa first—there's simply no escaping Ala-Archa in winter. The plan was to establish two new routes: one on Semyonov-Tian-Shansky Peak, and another on the Sixth Tower of Korona. He had been eyeing both lines for quite some time, and now we finally had the chance to give them a try.
That settled it. We bought the tickets and packed our gear.
Several of Kostyan’s friends were also heading to Ala-Archa. Kostya and Natasha planned to climb a few mid-grade routes, and they also hoped to join us for the first ascent of Semyonov-Tyan-Shansky Peak.

On February 13, we all met at Bishkek Airport and headed to Ala-Archa together, with Artur Usmanov behind the wheel. He had warned us about the snow conditions in the area! We stopped at the Narodny supermarket to buy food and then drove straight to the camp. After sorting and repacking all our gear, we immediately climbed up to Racek Hut. What a climb that was! We were carrying enough hardware for two first ascents, one of which was expected to include a mixed section near the top, plus food for ten days. It took us quite a while before we finally reached what climbers jokingly call "the end of the suffering." We spent the night in the hut, and by morning we already felt much better. Taking our time, we continued with all our gear toward Nauka Hut.

We reached it by evening because from halfway up the route the snow was already knee-deep. That didn't discourage us much, and the next day we set off on the Akimov Route (Grade 3B) on the First Tower of Korona. Kostyan and I moved quickly up the ice face, while Natasha and Kostya climbed a little more slowly, but overall everything went smoothly and without incident. The weather stayed overcast but dry, which made us incredibly happy. The following day was a rest day. Kostya and I climbed the small knoll opposite Semyonov Peak and studied our planned route through a telephoto lens. It turned out that the entire line was ice, exactly what we had hoped for. A narrow couloir was clearly visible all the way up to a ledge, while the summit tower appeared to be bypassed on the left, although the exact line disappeared from view.

So we decided to leave at 5:00 a.m. as a team of four, carrying only snacks and no bivouac gear. Skipping the bivouac equipment turned out to be a mistake. We started on schedule, and by the time we had finished breaking trail through the couloir to the beginning of the ice, daylight had arrived. The weather was excellent, and climbing went smoothly. We climbed as two independent rope teams. Three pitches below the ledge we reached mixed ground. Kostyan and I fixed a rope there for the second team and continued onto the ledge carrying only one rope.
That turned out to be another mistake. Kostya and Natasha fell behind and didn't reach the ledge until almost two hours later. Together we decided that starting an unknown number of pitches toward the summit at five in the afternoon made no sense, so we began a relaxed descent down the ice slope toward Baychechekey Glacier. We reached the hut after dark. On the way down, Kostyan and I decided to make another attempt as a team of two after a rest day. Kostya and Natasha planned to climb the Plotnikov Route.

After taking a day off, Kostyan and I left at 4:00 a.m.. We quickly moved through the now well-packed lower couloir, reached the ice, and simul-climbed the frozen runnels to the ledge, arriving there by 1:00 p.m. Without stopping, we climbed another five pitches of ice and two pitches of loose mixed ground below the summit. We stepped onto the summit at three o'clock. And what a view it was! After all, this is the highest peak in the area. We took the usual summit photos, shot a few GoPro selfies, and celebrated with a chocolate bar—without tea.

Then we started carefully making our way down the frozen runnels toward the main walking couloir. It turned out to be much farther away than it had looked. Along the way we made several rappels over cornices and icefalls. Kostya always went first while I managed the rope—our well-tested system. The rope never got stuck, even though many of the rappels went around corners. At last we reached the walking couloir. We took our time descending through waist-deep snow and returned to the hut thirteen hours after leaving it. It turned out to be a beautiful and logical Grade 5A route on a magnificent mountain: plenty of ice, a little mixed climbing, and a huge amount of fun. We got back before dark and spent the rest of the day watching our friends descend from the Plotnikov Route.

The next day we crossed over to Korona Hut through the notch in the Korona ridge. What a crossing that was! Heavy packs, waist-deep snow, and a steep slope made every step hard work. On the glacier we met a team from St. Petersburg and realized the hut would be crowded that night—but at least it would be warm.
That evening we packed our gear for the next day's objective: a first ascent of the Sixth Tower of Korona via the couloir between the Fifth and Sixth Towers. We also listened to Vitya Koval telling stories about his winter expedition to Nanga Parbat, while Lyosha Lochinsky shared stories from Thamserku. The guys were planning to climb the Semiletkin Route on Free Korea. Our friends Natasha and Kostya were getting ready for the Grade 4B route on Dvurogaya Peak. And so, as one big group, we left Korona Hut at four in the morning. The weather was, to put it mildly, far from climbing weather. The wind was howling, and the blizzard was so intense that even with headlamps we could barely see anything. We broke trail toward Medvezhy Ugol (Bear's Corner) in complete darkness, navigating only by the faint outlines of Free Korea and Baylyan. At the foot of the Sixth Tower we split up. As soon as we entered the couloir, they started—powder avalanches. They poured continuously from the walls of both towers, funnelling straight down our very narrow couloir. In bad weather, the place looked especially grim.

The ice climbing itself went smoothly and without major delays. But as soon as we reached the base of the chimney, things became much more complicated. Kostyan tried climbing a frozen runnel no wider than 15 centimeters. The rock walls of the couloir were so narrow that he couldn't fit into the chimney properly and had to climb sideways. That meant resorting to aid climbing on hooks, all while an endless stream of snow kept pouring down and growing stronger by the minute. After an hour he had gained only about twenty meters, and we decided to retreat. There was nowhere to spend the night, and we had brought neither bivouac gear nor enough food. Fast and light, after all. Cursing the entire couloir, Kostyan hammered in a rappel anchor, and we descended together with the flowing snow. By the time we reached the bottom of the mountain it was already dark. We spotted the lights of our friends descending from Dvurogaya near the entrance to the couloir and headed toward the hut. Naturally, all our tracks had already been buried, so we had to break trail all over again. I remembered another night years earlier when a friend and I had struggled back from Bear's Corner in almost exactly the same weather. Back then, in January 2012, I had sworn never to come back here again. And yet, here I was. Late that night we finally reached the hut, navigating by a lantern the climbers from St. Petersburg had left hanging outside for us. They had abandoned their own climb because of the same avalanche conditions—and they had made the right decision, because the following day the weather turned out to be perfect. As for us, we headed down to Bishkek to rest and dry all our gear. Artur drove our whole team back to the apartment we had booked, and with that our Ala-Archa warm-up came to an end.

According to our original plan, we were supposed to fly from Bishkek to Batken, then drive to Ozgorush, where the trek into the Ashat Valley begins. In the end, however, we found a private taxi driver who agreed to take us all the way across Kyrgyzstan to Batken in his bug-eyed Mercedes—and for a very reasonable price. It saved us money and spared us the hassle of packing all our gear for a flight. While still in Bishkek, we took care of everything we needed to do, spent some time at an internet café, bought food for Ashat, and searched unsuccessfully for a waterproof shell jacket for Kostyan. He had broken the zipper on his jacket while climbing Semyonov Peak and was pretty worried about it, but in the end decided to climb wearing two insulated jackets instead—a Polartec fleece and a synthetic insulated jacket—which also helped us save some money. We ended up needing every last bit of it.
We left Bishkek at four in the morning and headed toward the Turkestan Range, catching up on sleep while enjoying the incredible scenery along the way. At one point a rockfall blocked the road, but together with several other drivers we quickly cleared the rocks to the roadside and continued on. We reached Batken late that evening. After collecting our border permits from Zhunusbek, we transferred into a vehicle from Batken Travel Service and drove into the mountains to the village of Ozgorush. Our horseman, Nuridin, who also owned the house where we stayed, welcomed us warmly and treated us to a great dinner. After eating, we went straight to bed, planning to set off at 9:00 a.m. the next morning.
We slept incredibly well. At nine o'clock, after a hearty breakfast and loading our gear onto two horses, we started toward the Ashat Valley. The weather that morning was excellent, which gave us confidence despite the less-than-promising forecast. Sure enough, by the afternoon low clouds had covered the sky, light snow began to fall, and the temperature dropped. We made good time to the entrance of the valley, where we met a team from Krasnoyarsk coming down after an unsuccessful attempt on Svarog. They had plenty of horror stories to tell—and videos to match. Three weeks of bad weather in the valley. That certainly didn't boost our optimism. But turning around wasn't really an option. Besides, bad weather couldn't last forever... could it? With those less-than-cheerful thoughts, we reached the first shepherd's camp by evening and spent the night there. The horses stopped a little lower down, so we still had to carry our loads another five hundred meters ourselves. As it turned out, horses don't cross avalanche gullies... or perhaps it's the horsemen who don't want them to.

The next morning we packed up the main load and headed toward the wall. The approach was long and exhausting, although it would have been much worse if the Krasnoyarsk team hadn't already broken trail for us. We were truly grateful for that. There was a huge amount of snow in the valley, and fresh graupel kept covering the track. On the bright side, the weather began to improve. Blue sky appeared above us, we caught sight of Svarog in the distance, and our spirits immediately lifted.

We carried our loads almost all the way to our Advanced Base Camp (ABC) and then quickly descended to the base camp below. We were exhausted, but tomorrow we would only have a small amount of gear left to carry. After that, there would be no more trips down—only up.
The next morning greeted us with almost perfect weather. The sky was completely clear, there wasn't a breath of wind, and the cold felt crisp rather than unpleasant. We packed quickly, hid the remaining gear beneath the nearest tree—remembering the strange collection of items that had been stolen from our camp below Svarog the previous summer—and headed uphill toward the north face of Sabakh.
The views were simply breathtaking under the bright sun and the perfectly clear sky. To this day, I still think Ashat is the most beautiful valley I have ever visited in the mountains. I had exactly the same thought the previous summer.

We moved upward easily and reached our ABC before dark, pitching the tent beneath a huge boulder only about three hundred meters from the start of the route. But while we were sitting at the site of our previous summer base camp, a massive avalanche thundered down from Sabakh. The entire valley echoed with the noise—apparently a cornice had collapsed from the summit ridge—and the avalanche swept directly down the line we had planned to climb. That certainly gave us something to think about. Maybe we should spend a day below the mountain and watch the snow-and-ice slope we intended to climb? Besides, it would give us a chance to recover from carrying loads. So that's exactly what we did.
We spent the whole day watching the mountain, breaking trail toward the bergschrund, organizing our climbing gear, and simply lying in the sun whenever it briefly appeared—first disappearing behind Svarog, then behind Sabakh again. There wasn't much sunshine at our camp, but at least that day we had some. And with it, the good weather came to an end.

We never saw any more surprises from the mountain, so we planned to leave at 3 a.m. the next day. After preparing breakfast in advance, we crawled into our super fast-and-light BD Firstlight tent. Damn that thing! A condensation generator in absolutely any conditions. (Anyone interested in buying an excellent tent? Cheap. We have two.)
Back home, we had drawn two possible route lines on a photo of the mountain. One went straight up the center of the face; the other followed the snow-and-ice slope to the rocks, then climbed a corner system and continued up a series of ice runnels to the summit. But that was based on a summer photograph. Once we were actually there, studying the face through a telephoto lens, we saw far less ice than we had expected. The route looked much more mixed than we had planned, with several bivouacs on the mythical ledges we hoped would exist. Reality turned out to be completely different.
Early the next morning we quickly covered the section where we had already broken trail, crossed one bergschrund, then another, and reached the rocks. Up to that point there had been nowhere to place protection: the snow slope was too steep, and we couldn't reach any solid ice beneath it. Getting onto the snow-and-ice slope proved much more interesting than it had looked from below. We had to climb some surprisingly difficult rock sections and smooth slabs with our tools. Rock anchors held only rarely, and everything was buried under snow, which slowed us down considerably.
At last we reached the slope, ready to start moving quickly—but not so fast. There was no solid ice at all, only a steep avalanche-prone snow slope that had to be traversed directly beneath the fracture line of the wind slabs. We never managed to dig down to the ice. We climbed several rope lengths simultaneously without protection until we reached the rocks, then followed about twenty meters of rock along the right edge of the slab before finally reaching good ice.
We clipped into our fifis and took off... for about fifty meters. Then it was snow again.
By the end of the day we had climbed roughly ten pitches without any protection at all. Every small patch of ice was a real gift because it meant we could finally place an ice screw. Over nearly twenty pitches on that slope, we managed to place only about ten screws.
Oh yes—the weather. It had deteriorated. Completely. Then the avalanches began.
By the second half of the day the rivers of snow no longer stopped, and they were coming down with real force. But by then we had no desire to retreat the way we had come up. At around 6 p.m., after crossing a third bergschrund and building an anchor with three ice screws, we reached the base of the rock wall. Large powder avalanches were pouring down the gully above us, making any climbing on the rocks impossible that day. It was getting dark anyway. And, as it turned out, there was no mythical ledge on that seventy-degree slope leading into the rocks.

We had no choice but to chop out our own tiny ledge in the ice. It turned out to be just big enough for one and a half people. The problem was that there were two of us. And the ledge kept getting smaller as we worked on it. Paradoxically, the avalanches were filling it with snow just as fast as we were digging it out. We were thoroughly sick of those avalanches.
Somehow we managed to pitch our condensation-generating tent on what little remained of the ledge, naturally dumping plenty of snow inside in the process. We crawled in and tried to make ourselves at least somewhat comfortable for the night. But the space inside kept shrinking as fresh snow relentlessly compressed the tent and pushed everything inward.
Eventually we gave up on organizing camp. We decided to eat and get some sleep—tomorrow would be a long day of difficult technical climbing.
But then something completely unexpected happened.
Kostyan handed me the MSR Reactor pot and said, "Fill it with snow—but be careful, the handle is about to fall off."
I took the pot, reached outside the tent... and, well, that was the end of our pot.
Just like that, we no longer had anything to boil water in. Fast and light, after all.
The last time we'd had tea was at three o'clock that morning.
So the experimental phase began: how do you boil water without a pot?
First we heated water in a plastic cup and dissolved vitamin C tablets in it. To speed things up we tried heating small amounts of water on a spoon, inside an ice screw, and in a few other improvised "containers," but it was painfully slow and the portions were tiny. We still had to cook dinner somehow.
Then I had a brilliant idea.
We had brought two gas canisters. By the end of the climb we were only supposed to have one left anyway.
After drying everything we could over the stove and producing an impressive amount of condensation, we punctured the empty 230-gram gas canister. After burning off the remaining gas and heating the metal thoroughly, we ended up with a surprisingly good little pot for boiling water.
Once we'd boiled plenty of water, eaten dinner, and had our tea, we climbed into one sleeping bag feet first, pulled on the brand-new down jackets from our partners at BASK, and slept surprisingly well until morning.
When we woke up, we had to push the tent walls outward—they had collapsed inward under the weight of the snow. As we discussed what to do next, our plan was simple: if the avalanches eased or stopped, we'd continue climbing through the night, reach the summit, and spend the night there. We only had one gas canister left now.
But one look outside the tent made the decision for us.
The snowfall had increased by at least fifty percent overnight, and so had the avalanche activity. At that rate we'd be lucky to climb two pitches in an entire day. We only had two days' worth of fuel left, and the next possible place to dig another ledge was eight to ten pitches higher.

So we bailed. We decided to rappel down the opposite side of the buttress. The descent began promisingly enough, following a beautiful strip of ice, and for a while we even thought we should have climbed this line instead—it offered excellent ice climbing.
But the ice runnel soon ended beneath an overhang, and beyond it waited six full rappels down vertical slabs with overhangs... and avalanches...

You're probably tired of reading about them by now, but avalanches were what defined our entire time on the mountain during this attempt. So you'll have to forgive me. At around 5 p.m. we finally crossed the lower bergschrund and stumbled back to ABC on foot.

Kostyan didn't even bother coiling the rope—he simply dragged it behind him across the snow. I remember thinking how much I wanted to clip myself onto it and let him tow me the rest of the way. After pitching the tent, we made a second pot from another empty gas canister (we had left a couple of spare canisters at ABC before starting the climb). After drinking our fill of tea and fruit kissel, we went to sleep—wet, exhausted, but alive and uninjured.
The next day we packed up all our gear and started carrying our now soaked and much heavier loads down to the first shepherd's camp. The weather was good during the first half of the day. It seemed to be mocking us: by noon the fog and clouds closed over the Ashat Wall once again and never lifted. Looking back, I'm convinced we made the right decision to retreat. We still would have had to find an unknown descent from the summit in that blizzard and fog. Besides, our plan had always been to make a fast ascent, not to settle into siege tactics.

The following day Nuridin met us with two donkeys, and we quickly and uneventfully made it back to the village. From there we headed straight to the glorious city of Osh, where a hot shower, a dry bed, and proper plates were waiting for us—instead of gas canisters.

We haven't given up. Next winter we're coming back to make another attempt at the first ascent of a new route on Sabah.

Original text: Dmitry Skotnikov
Translation: Aleksandra Markevich
Photos: Konstantin Markevich