Earlier this month, 68-year-old Mick Fowler and 74-year-old Victor Saunders pulled themselves onto the airy summit of Yawash Sar (20,532), becoming the first known people to stand atop the Pakistani peak. The two took a photo, frowned a bit at the mass of clouds blocking their view, and then turned around, descended the peak, and went home.

“We went to Pakistan, saw a mountain, climbed to the top, and came down,” Fowler joked. “Nothing much else to it, you know.”

Take the understatement with a grain of salt. The feat involved a weeks-long expedition into the Karakoram—the notoriously rugged range that borders the Himalaya and contains K2, the world’s second-highest peak—and seven days spent living on the side of the mountain.

On their best nights, the two slept in a tent wedged onto narrow shelves of rock and snow. On their worst, they slept sitting upright in their harnesses, with their legs dangling off the side of the cliff and tent draped over their heads for shelter. In between, they kicked steps and swung their ice tools up narrow ribbons of ice and walls of crumbling rock.

They had no map, no guidebook, and almost no route information—aside from what they’d managed to glean through their binoculars in the days before the climb.

Saunders and Fowler are used to such discomforts: both men are veteran alpinists, each with their own long resume decorated with first ascents and remote expeditions. But they’re also well past the age where most mountaineers hang up their boots.

Fowler is a cancer survivor, and Saunders is firmly in his mid seventies. So, what’s the secret? The two spoke to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű about their recent ascent, their long friendship, and their guidelines for living a long, adventurous life.

OUTSIDE: You two have been climbing partners for almost 50 years now. How did that friendship begin?Ìę

Fowler: Ha, well, when we first met, we didn’t quite get along. I described Victor as an irritating little squirt, and he described me as an arrogant twat. So, I’d say it got off to a pretty good start. But we had a week in Scotland together doing some good winter climbs in 1979 and that’s when we began to appreciate each other more and formed a friendship that has lasted nearly 50 years.

Saunders: I found I felt more comfortable with Mick on more serious ground than I felt with a lot of climbers on easier ground. I think we instilled a lot of confidence in each other from the get-go.

Fowler: Yes, and Victor is an exceptionally confident chap. It’s quite difficult to ruffle his feathers. Which is a very valuable trait in a climbing partner.

What about Yawash Sar struck you as a peak worth climbing?Ìę

Fowler: We’d probably first discussed it more than 10 years ago. There was a very small photograph of the mountain that had appeared in the American Alpine Journal taken by a Polish chap back in 2011. We both discussed it as a possible objective, but all sorts of things happened between 2011 and 2024—my health, the pandemic. All sorts of things.

Saunders: Aside from that photo, we didn’t actually see the route until we got into base camp. Until that moment, we’d seen the picture, but we didn’t know what it would really look like. We were both pleased to see that it looked shapely and steep.

Fower: We have a list of criteria before we climb a mountain. Ideally, it should have a wonderful unclimbed line that goes straight to the summit. It should be in an area neither of us have been to before, and in an area that’s culturally interesting. The climbing has got to be challenging for us but not too hard. Yawash Sar ticked a lot of the boxes.

When you mention your health, you mean your brush with cancer, which I understand was pretty brutal. How has that impacted your climbing?Ìę

Fowler: Ah, well, we were about to go on a trip a few years ago, and the doctor told me I had cancer of the anus, which is not what you want, really. So I did radiotherapy and chemotherapy and eventually the removal of my anus and rectum.

It’s not recommended, cancer. All that left me with a colostomy bag. Most people would think that’s the main problem, but for me the bigger problem was that I was too thin for the surgery to be convenient. So they had to remove all the fat from my buttocks and do plastic surgery, and that left me with no padding whatsoever.

That makes things like sitting down really uncomfortable. And then with the colostomy bag, the trouble is that on these big alpine climbs, you have your harness on all day and lots of layers of clothes. So it’s not so easy to maneuver when you start to have some output into the bag. But that’s just life, you know.

Saunders: On the other hand, in a tent, he doesn’t have to go out to take a poo. So there I am, having to hang on outside the tent in terrible conditions, tied onto the mountain somehow, doing my business off the side of the cliff, and Mick just laughs at me. He says “Ah, you should get one of these things, it’s much more convenient.” We spend a lot of time laughing it. We’re really just a couple of four-year-olds at heart, you see.

What was the biggest unexpected challenge of the climb?Ìę

Saunders: No bivouac sites. [Bivouacking means “ad-hoc camping,” typically on the side of a mountain.] There wasn’t any climbing that was outrageously difficult, but there were very few places to put a tent.

Fowler: Most of the time, we managed to arrange rocks in a vaguely flat way so we could pitch a tent over them. But we had one bivouac that was especially uncomfortable. It was a sitting bivouac, which was my worst nightmare, given the surgery I’d had. And it was very windy and the ledge we were sitting on was icy and slippery so we kept sliding off.

Saunders: We used the tent fabric without the poles and hung it over ourselves like a sack. It was a very cold night with just enough wind that, without the sack, we would have had hypothermia. I don’t think either of us slept more than a half-hour or so.

Many of the alpinists we interview for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű are in their thirties,Ìę forties, or even younger. What’s your advice for staying in the game so long and continuing adventures late into life?Ìę

Fowler: For me, it’s been very important to make time in my life to do what I love, which is to go mountaineering and go climbing. A happy father and happy husband is one who’s had his fill of mountaineering. But within that, I’m very careful with my choice of objectives and with my choice of climbing partners.

Choose a reliable, safe climbing partner like Victor, and more than anything, carry on having a good time and living the life. I think we’ve also always chosen routes that are going to give us the most pleasure. We’re not looking to climb things just because they’re the hardest—that doesn’t come into it at all.

Saunders: You grow up, you get less arrogant with age.

Fowler: I do?

Saunders: Yes, everyone does. Even Mick. You get the hard edges knocked off of you as you go through life. And you start to prioritize enjoyment, and the people you’re climbing with.

Fowler: I would also say that I don’t think this partnership is going to end anytime soon. We already have more plans.

Editor’s Note: The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

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Christina Lustenberger, Jim Morrison, and Chantel Astorga just skied the line of a lifetime. After a stymied 2023 expedition to the Baltoro Muztagh region of Pakistan, Canadian ski mountaineer Christina Lustenberger and American Jim Morrison returned to the Trango Towers this April to ski the line of a lifetime. On May 9, with American Chantel Astorga, they climbed and skied the 20,623-foot Great Trango Tower’s West Face, which has only ever been attempted before by Lusti, as she’s known, and her party.

Their original teammate Nick McNutt wasn’t able to join the expedition this time around—his wife is expecting a child—so the team tapped Astorga, an avalanche forecaster and ace ski mountaineer with a from Alaska to Nepal and beyond.

The team spent four weeks waiting in basecampÌęfor a weather window,Ìęmaking quick acclimatization trips from basecamp before storms rolled in and dropped significant amounts of snow.

Lusti was struck with food-borne illness and high altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE), but the turbulent weather actually helped her work with her doctor to recover before stable conditions allowed the team to safely reach their high camp.ÌęShe had fallen ill on their previous attempt as well.

We spoke to Lusti on May 17 to talk about her team’s historic ski descent.

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű: What was it like to go back to Pakistan?

It was a lot to go back, but we all thought it was important enough of a project to give it another shot. We believed it was possible. I spent almost eight weeks in Pakistan this spring. The first two weeks I was teaching backcountry skiing to six Pakistani girls, part of another project I was working on with The North Face. I then spent a week in Hunza waiting for the the Trango team to arrive. That time let me get grounded and comfortable in the country, instead of just racing up to basecamp.

That was just one of the ways I was able to take more pressure off myself in ways I couldn’t last year. I wanted to be successful on our line and our goal but also surrender to experiencing whatever the mountain would give us—allowing it to unfold. We were at basecamp for four weeks, and I got really sick again, diarrhea turned to HAPE symptoms. I was worried I’d have to descend again and the trip would be over. But the weather was unsettled and convective and so I had time to work with the expedition doctor and recover.

This team has shaken up a few times. How did you build the team that ended up summiting?

I first pitched this trip after our 2022Ìętrip to Baffin Island. Originally, the team was going to consist of Hilaree Nelson, Brette Harrington, and Jim Morrison. After Hilaree’s accident, I wasn’t sure Jim would even be interested in big expedition-style skiing. But after some time he came to see this as an alluring objective. Then, we tried to get a team together of myself, Kiwi skier Sam Smoothy, Morrison, and Nick McNutt. But Sam couldn’t get a visa for the Baltoro region. Sam Anthamatten, another ski mountaineer on the North Face team also had visa issues and McNutt had to drop out for the birth of his kid. After last year I really wanted another woman on the team, and there aren’t a lot of people with the skills or desire to climb a technical alpine line and descend with skis on. But Chantel had obvious strengths in ice and mixed climbing, so she was a perfect fit.

Tell us about the climb. How did you get past the crux crevasse this time?

After I recovered from that sickness and I was able to acclimate during these short weather windows I started to get really anxious about time. You start to feel the urgency of how much time you have left. Looking at the weather you start to feel pressure that maybe this won’t happen. But at the very end, almost the last possible day, we had a really amazing weather window. It cleared for three days before we went to high camp and we were able to ascend with a lot more confidence than we had ever felt in these mountains. Leaving high camp felt really good.

Before getting up to the crux, we had a team fly drones high on the peak so we could study the line. When we arrived at the crevasse below the summit we built a snow anchor and I led across the snow bridge and worked my way out onto a rib. I was able to place two ice screws, cross some snow, and build another anchor to fix a line the other climbers could ascend. The route through it on the climbers left has broken ice and seracs that constantly fall away from the face. At that moment it felt like nothing would be able to stop us.

Up on the hanging glacier, the snow was quite deep. We had really nice powder turns up there. On the ramp system below we skied lots of breakable and some supportive crust. Getting back to high camp was all refrozen loud survival skiing. On this kind of line where you ski through lots of elevations you’ll find every kind of snow imaginable.

Did you approach objectives like Mount Sir Sanford this winter with Trango in the back of your mind? What kind of training did you focus on for this objective?

To be completely honest, I’ve had a lot of things shift in my life. I wasn’t that interested in skiing this winter, I was leaning into ice and mixed climbing to shake things up and get my head out of skiing. I wanted to be mentally and emotionally ready to arrive in Pakistan to do what needed to be done. Taking a break from skiing was probably the best thing I could’ve done to prepare. The ice climbing was incredibly engaging and got my head into a better place while also leveling up my skills in the mountains.

I’ve been skiing my whole life and to get joy out of the experience it has to be pretty intense—you just can’t do that all the time.

Not forcing anything was really good for me. Not forcing myself, not forcing conditions.

How does it feel to put a project like this to bed? Is the comedown tough?

The three of us traveled home and we all got sick again. Being sick, plus the jet lag, has been kind of humbling. There’s always an adjustment coming back from these trips. I’m gonna spend time at my cabin, off the grid in the middle of nowhere, and let it all sink in.

I still have a ton of lines around Golden, B.C. that are really engaging and I’m inspired by, but I still want to lean into ice and mixed climbing because that will allow me to access really interesting skiing in the future.

I’m proud of this trip, I’m really excited for the film we’re going to make and the stories we’ll share. I have thought about going to Nepal this fall but honestly I need a break from basecamp life, with all the sickness. I plan to go to New Zealand this fall and do some ski mountaineering there. I want to roll into our winter here with a few lines in mind and continue that vision. I think there are a lot of opportunities to climb and ski in the Canadian Interior and the Rockies. There is still so much untapped potential.

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When her Kenya Airways flight touched down on Mahé Island in the Seychelles on October 6, Jessica Nabongo said it finally hit her.

“I’m done,” said the 35-year-old. “I’ve been to every country in the world.”

Surrounded by her family and closest friends, Nabongo was ebullient and humble. She began livestreaming to her 130,000 .ÌęPeople from six continents tuned in to watch, from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Finland.

Nabongo, who grew up in Detroit, Michigan,Ìęand is the daughter of Ugandan immigrants,Ìęestimates that she had already been to 105 countries when she publicly set her goal in April 2018. A dual Ugandan-American citizen, she spent time in East Africa as a child and teen, visiting her parents’ families. She moved abroad to teach English in Japan in her early twentiesÌęand then got a master’s degree in international development from the London School of Economics at the age of 26. She moved to Benin, in West Africa, to work for an NGO, then landed a job in Italy as a resource-mobilization consultant for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

There are 193 UNÌęmember countries, in addition to the Vatican and Palestine, which are nonmember states. That left 90Ìęplaces for Nabongo to visit when she set her goal.ÌęOver the past two years, she was on the road about three weeks a month, departing from Detroit. She supported herself through her travel business—a tour operator called Jet Black—as well as funding fromÌęa Kickstarter campaign and help from select tourism boards for on-the-ground expenses and hotels that comped stays.

I first met Nabongo at a coffee shop in New York City’s East Village in August. She arrived wearing a turquoise and blue shirt from Studio 189, a Ghanian brand. Adorned with rings from Kenya and bracelets from Botswana, she called herself a “walking passport.” Fresh off a weekend at theÌęAfropunk Festival in Brooklyn, she had a few days in New York before heading back to Detroit for a week of rest.

In the previousÌęthree weeks, she had been to Palau, South Korea, Mongolia, India, Bhutan, Oman, and Pakistan. She had four countries left: Venezuela, Algeria, Syria, and the Seychelles. NabongoÌękeptÌętrack of the countries sheÌęvisited on an app calledÌę,Ìęwhich notes each place on a list and a map. She’dÌęfilled upÌęthree passports in the past two and a half yearsÌęwith stamps from each country. Additionally, sheÌęposted photographic evidence of every country on her .

Even as a young child, Nabongo wanted to visit every country in the world. But it wasn’t until she read about Cassie De Pecol’s for the Guinness World Records’ fastest visit to all sovereign nations that she learned about country counters and came up with her own goal. A small but avid group of worldwide travelers, the country-counting community is tight-knit and shares information. Nabongo estimates that there are about 150 people who have been to every country. They connect in the Facebook group .

“I am trying to change the narrative about black people in the travel space,” said Nabongo. “When I am traveling in Delta One or domestically flying first class, people are like, ‘Oh, are you an employee?’ I am like, ‘No, but I am Diamond,’” referring to Delta Airlines’ top tier of frequent fliers.

“Some people have been critical and saying, ‘Oh you’re doing it too fast,’” said Nabongo. “I’ve been traveling my whole life. I almost look at this as taste testing.”

NabongoÌęaveraged around four days in each of the last 50 countries she visited. While that might sound like breakneck speed, compared to other country counters who tag some countries in a day, it is downright slow. While Nabongo isn’t averse to solo travel, she journeyed with many longtime friends throughout.

In the country-counting community, is the de facto gold standard for verification. The organizationÌęhas 5,000 members and verifies country visits by asking for proof of aÌęrandom 20 places.ÌęNabongo’s efforts have been confirmed by it. (Other groups, like the Travelers’ Century Club, mainly rely on the honor system.)

“A lot of people ask me which countries are safe for black people to travel,” Nabongo recently wrote on an Instagram post from the Seychelles. “This question typically comes from black Americans. The U.S. has perfected racism in a way that I’ve not seen in other countries, so I would urge you to travel WHEREVER you want to, no matter who you are and what you look like. I did it! And just because you hear one or two negative stories from someone doesn’t mean you should write a country off of your bucket list. We all will have different experiences and you shouldn’t allow your race to hinder you.”

As the celebrations in the Seychelles continued, Nabongo shared some of what she learned along the way to our reporter.

Getting in to North Korea and Syria

North Korea and Syria are tough countries for Americans to enter. While North Korea welcomes Americans, the U.S. government bans its citizens from visiting. This is when Nabongo’s Ugandan passport came in handy.

“North Korea doesn’t care if an American comes,” said Nabongo. “They knew I was an American, because my Ugandan passport shows that I was born in the United States, and because when I was exiting and going to China, I entered China with my U.S. passport, so they had to have both of my passports.”

While in North Korea, Nabongo was astounded by some of the messages she received from her American fan base. She attended the Mass Games, an annual synchronized-gymnastics and dance festival featuring 100,000 performers. After posting some photos of the event on Instagram, some of her followers commentedÌęthat she shouldn’t have visited the country at all. While Nabongo tries to remain apolitical about her journey, which at times causes issues with her followers, she was shocked by how many Americans were upset. After her trip, Nabongo told Nomad Mania: “I spent six days in North Korea, and aside from some quirky things, I thought it was surprisingly normal. We saw couples sitting in the park, we chatted with some college students, saw people drinking in a local bar, kids on school field trips, and people going to work on the subway. We never really see pictures or ‘normal’ life in North Korea, so this was very surprising.”

Meanwhile, Syria was a holy grail for Nabongo. Although now relatively safe in certain government-controlled areas, the country has restricted access for Americans. (One was recently released from detainmentÌęafter entering.)

Nabongo applied for a visa using her Ugandan passport and was denied. She tried again in Pakistan using her Ugandan passport, but her contact at the Syrian embassy in Pakistan wrote down that she was a journalist. She was told that her visa request would take a long time.

In the end, in September, Nabongo visited the occupied Golan Heights—which is recognized as Syria by the Guinness Book of World Records—via Israel.

How to StayÌęOrganized

Calling herself the visa whisperer, Nabongo admits that without her hyperorganizational skills, her accomplishment wouldn’t have been possible. She used Google Docs and Google Sheets to list her remaining countries by continent, so that she could organize flights based on regions.

One tool that Nabongo recommends for travelers is . It lists all nonstop flights into every airport in the world. “You can get to Paris from anywhere,” said Nabongo. “But when you’re going to Tuvalu?”

To acquire visa information, Nabongo recommends . The website offers an overview of visa requirements for every country based on nationality. As a dual citizen, Nabongo found it particularly beneficial, because it allowed her to compare access to a country for both her passports, noting that knowing geopolitical situations also helps when it comes to getting access to countries.

“I closed the tab today for Passport Index, and I got a little bit sad,” Nabongo told me in August. “That tab has been open on my browser for two years.”

She tried to travel on her Ugandan passport whenever possible to save money on visas—for example, for an American going to Nigeria, the visa is $160, but for Ugandans it’s just $2—and to bring awareness to the idea of Africans as tourists. “I want people to see a Ugandan passport literally just coming for tourism and leaving,” she said. Nabongo visited 42 countries on her Ugandan passport, saving an estimated $1,200.

The Top șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Countries

Nabongo found two unexpected adventure destinations: Jordan and Namibia. Nabongo was impressed with Jordan’s efforts to ramp up itsÌęoutdoor tourism, from camping in the beautiful desert escape of Wadi RumÌęto exploring Aqaba, a port city on the Red Sea.

Describing Namibia as “phenomenal,” Nabongo saw the Milky Way for the first time while staying in the Namib Desert at Sossusvlei, thanks to the miniscule amount of light pollution. She also climbed the huge nearby sand dunes.

Some of her other favorite nature experiences included swimming with humpback whales in Tonga, the Molinere Underwater Sculpture Park in Grenada, whale-watching in the Arctic Circle, surfing in Peru, and hanging out in the Devil’s Pool at Victoria Falls in Zambia.

Getting Around

Nabongo triedÌęto maximize her experiences by how she physically traversedÌęcountries, from train rides in Uzbekistan and Austria to helicopter rides in Senegal and South Africa.

One of Nabongo’s favorite ways to explore is with a hired driver and guide. Although she’s a proponent of local group tours—she estimates she’s been on about 40 in her time as a globe-trotter—she says that having a private driver allows for independence. On a recent trip to the country of Georgia, the tourism board provided her with a driver and a guide. After a wine tasting, they decided on a whim to stop and buy locally made bread at a local Georgian’s home.

“The way they make the bread was similar to how I saw it made in Yemen,” recounted Nabongo.ÌęShe showed the Georgian woman a video of a man making bread in Yemen.

The Most Challenging Experience

Most of the trouble NabongoÌęran into happened with immigration officers, like in Pakistan in September, where she was searched for drugs as she was trying to leave the country. Although she’s careful to note that she loved her visit to Pakistan, describing it as “pleasant and fun,” the immigration experience at the end left her traumatized. “I have more racist issues occur with immigration than with people [in the countries] themselves,” she says.

The Easiest Place to Be a Woman Traveler

Throughout her travels, Nabongo said that she found Muslim countries the easiest to be a woman tourist. “I felt very comfortable as a woman in Pakistan as compared to India,” Nabongo said.

“Americans don’t realize how conservative Americans are compared to the rest of the world,” she added. “Everybody wants to talk about how Muslim women are oppressed because they have to cover their heads, and I’m like, Look at the gender pay gap in America.”

The Thing She Never Leaves Home Without

Compression socks. Describing them as essential to her self-care,Ìęshe rarely flies without them.ÌęShe also loves Allbirds walking shoes and Flight 001Ìępacking cubes.

The Merits of LearningÌęa Few Local Phrases

In Japan, Nabongo prided herself on her basic language skills. She also speaks French, which has proven useful in her travels.

Everywhere she went, she tried to learn at least how to say hello, goodbye, please, and thank you.

But she wasn’t always able to communicate, especially in places with different alphabets. Still, Nabongo said,Ìę“I feel comfortable communicating with people, even if we can’t speak the same language. In Uzbekistan, we had a great timeÌęeven though we couldn’t speak [the language]. This one woman, we had a conversation. We were not using words either of us understood, but I still understood the meaning of what she was trying to tell me:Ìęthat I need to get married very soon, because when I get old I will be very ugly, and that I should have children soon. I was like, OK, thank you.”

Her Favorite AirlineÌę

After years on the road, Nabongo’sÌęfavorite airline is Delta, because she says it hasÌęthe best frequent-flier program and consistently good customer service.ÌęNow that she usually flies out of Detroit, a Delta hub, her allegiance to the airline is even stronger. She has Diamond Medallion status.

How to Extend a Layover

Nabongo has always been a layover hacker. The key, she says, is to plan.

“Long layovers are really great” to get a taste of what a country has to offer, she says. “What if you fly somewhere, you’ve spent all this money, and you don’t love it?”

National airlines often offer free extended layovers. Specifically, she recommends airlines like Emirates, Etihad, and Qatar, as well as Iceland Air.

“During the booking process, call the airline and just ask them for a free stopover,” said Nabongo, explaining that a stopover is usually one to two days. “A lot of airlines allow for it.”

Read the Reviews

“I read reviews, reviews, reviews before I pick anything,” Nabongo said. “You can cross-reference Google Reviews and TripAdvisor.”

Find a Good Meal

“The problem with guides is sometimes they want to take you to ‘the best restaurant’ that tourists love,” Nabongo said. “And I’m like ‘No, I don’t want to eat where other tourists eat. I want to eat where you ±đČčłÙ.’â¶Ä

The Most Difficult Place to Travel

“Oh my God. The South Pacific is a logistical nightmare,” she said. “No one island-hops in the South Pacific, and it is therefore incredibly expensive to fly, and flights are super infrequent. But there are definitely some gems there. Like, Tonga is phenomenal, swimming with the whales. It was a humpback whale and me. It was just right there.”

What’s Next

After seeing so many local marketers around the world flooded with made-in-ChinaÌęgoods (a notable exception was in Vanuatu, where the government mandates that all goods sold in the main market must be produced on the island), Nabongo wants to create an online store for select, locally produced goods from around the globe.

Calling it the Catch, she plans on launching it this fall. She also wants to sell sustainable goods, like collapsible cups for airport travel.

Nabongo is also galvanized to tackle the world’s plastic problem, after seeing its effects during her travels. Pointing out that the travel industry is one of the worst culprits, she wants to consult with hotels and airlines to help create solutions to the environmental nightmare.

“This is a single planet. Forget about national borders,” she said. “If you drop a plastic bottle in the water, it can end up anywhere in the world.”

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Arz e Pakistan, from , is a stunning glimpse into the country’s scenery.

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Who brought about the fall of Greg Mortenson? Was it CBS News and its award-winning program 60 Minutes? Author Jon Krakauer? Or should the Montana mountaineer and philanthropist get all the blame for his own undoing?

Such questions are at the heart of a new documentary, , created by Utah filmmaker Jennifer Jordan and her husband, cinematographer Jeff Rhoads. Subtitled Investigating the Rise and Ruin of Greg Mortenson, the documentary is a full-throated defense of Mortenson as a good but flawed man who didn’t deserve the rough media treatment he got starting in 2011. It’s set for a screening at the 2016 Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival, which opens in Canada on October 29.

3,000 Cups of Tea debuted in Jordan’s hometown of Salt Lake City last month, drawing a standing ovation and stirring up old tensions between Jordan and Krakauer, who, in Jordan’s telling, has something to answer for in the way he handled the story. At the premiere, Jordan claimed that Krakauer responded with hostility to her request that he answer questions for the project.

“I asked [Krakauer] for an interview, and he came back with a long personal and professional attack on me,” Jordan told the audience of more than 200, adding, “I don’t communicate with people who threaten me.” During the same discussion, Jordan did something that might raise eyebrows: she gave the audience Krakauer’s e-mail address, urging people to write him. “Tell him I sent you,” she quipped.

When informed by șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű that Jordan had done this, Krakauer said in an e-mail: “Sounds like Jordan has been taking lessons from Donald Trump.”

Krakauer has seen the film, and he said that nothing in it makes him question the accuracy or fairness of his work, which he has .Ìę“I was struck immediately by how little Jordan relied on hard facts to make her case,” he wrote. “Most of the film consisted of interviews with Greg’s most loyal supporters, during which they made highly emotional statements about his good intentions. Greg was portrayed as a victim almost from start to finish. These weepy testimonials and flashes of anger were intended to tug hard at viewers’ heartstrings, and they did.”

A week after the screening, Krakauer and Jordan , arguing about the truthfulness of Mortenson’s book Three Cups of Tea. One point of contention was whether facts really matter that much in this case, given that some of what Mortenson accomplished—like educating children in one of the roughest parts of the world—was ultimately positive.

“That he was able to build the number of schools he did was an incredible achievement,” Jordan said during the broadcast. “There are mistakes. Greg has owned them, the board has owned them. But the bottom line, I think, particularly given where we are in the world right now, is that the education of these villages, of these people, is crucially more important than trying to put an American sensibility on this area of the world.”

“Absolutely it matters,” Krakauer argued. “People need to believe. They need to believe that the leaders of [nonprofits] are telling them the truth.”

Published in early 2009, Three Cups of Tea was wildly successful. The story told of Mortenson’s accidental 1993 visit to the village of Korphe, Pakistan, where locals nursed the climber back to health after a failed attempt at scaling K2. Mortenson said the encounter spurred his school-building mission, which he wrote about in Three Cups of Tea, captivating readers worldwide, flooding the Central Asia Institute with tens of millions in donations, and earning Mortenson more than one Nobel Peace Prize nomination.

But then came the fall. In 2011, a and a simultaneous e-book by Krakauer, , accused Mortenson of lying about many of the heartwarming stories told in Three Cups of Tea; lying about the number of schools CAI had built and about the condition of some of them; and mismanaging tens of millions of dollars, thereby defrauding donors.

A 2012 investigation by the Montana attorney general’s office concluded that 60 Minutes and Krakauer were right about the oversight issues. The AG’s report said that CAI was plagued with financial-management problems and that Mortenson had spent donations on personal items such as “charter flights for family vacations, clothing, and internet downloads.”

No criminal charges were brought, but a settlement agreement required Mortenson to pay back more than $1 million to CAI and barred him from holding any future financial-management positions in the organization.

In a separate civil proceeding, plaintiffs from Montana brought a $5 million class action against Mortenson in 2011. The case alleged fraud, deceit, breach of contract, and racketeering on the part of Mortenson and CAI. It was tossed out by a federal judge in 2012, a decision later upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

As a journalist and a self-described fan of 60 Minutes, Jordan said she was dismayed by what she considered a one-sided story, so she was determined to figure out how Mortenson, her longtime friend, landed in the newsmagazine’s crosshairs. “I didn’t start this project to exonerate Greg,” Jordan says in the film, which she narrates. “I started it to see if the [CAI] mission was still viable and to look into how the report was investigated.”

To do that, Jordan and Rhoads packed up their cameras and headed to Pakistan to visit dozens of CAI schools and interview village leaders, students, and others familiar with Mortenson’s mission. Jordan says that people came from far and wide to talk to her about the “crazy American media scandal” that had branded Mortenson a liar. She also spoke with Mortenson, current and former CAI board members, and Mortenson’s family.

The result is a sympathetic portrait of Mortenson as a selfless visionary, a man who doesn’t function well within the constraints of Western business culture but worked tirelessly to bring education to remote corners of the world, often at the expense of his family life and health.

“He really does see things from outside the norm,” Mortenson’s wife, Tara Bishop, says in the film. “And in that is a lot of creativity.”

Beautifully shot, 3,000 Cups of Tea cost nearly $95,000 to make and was paid for with donations and proceeds from a life insurance policy Jordan cashed in. It’s loaded with images of dramatic landscapes and eager, adorable schoolchildren who sing and dance at Mortenson’s side. Watching him coach kids through their lessons, it’s hard to question his dedication as an educator.

Which is not to say that Jordan’s film presents a man without flaws. Mortenson admits to commingling the charity’s money with his own, and current and former CAI board members like George E. McCowan and Abdul Jabarr talk about the nonprofit’s problems.

“Things happened too fast. We were way too successful,” Mortenson tells Jordan. “It’s like a tree with too much fruit—it just fell over.
 I thought I could do everything myself. It was a very big mistake.”

Board members are quick to say that Mortenson was never a good money manager. Still, they say, he was “accountable to the children and the schools,” and they deny that any CAI donors were defrauded.

They also seem to downplay both the seriousness of the Montana AG’s findings and the falsehoods in Three Cups of Tea. Instead, board members and others, including Mortenson and Bishop, blame media reports for his fall and the subsequent dramatic drop in donations that has hampered CAI’s work.

On the advice of their attorneys, neither Mortenson nor anyone from CAI’s board was interviewed for the 60 Minutes piece, something that Mortenson says he now regrets. The documentary contends that 60 Minutes never took its cameras to Korphe and was guilty of shoddy reporting, including misrepresenting sources and failing to include interviews with Mortenson supporters or people who could corroborate his stories—such as Korphe residents who told Jordan they remembered him from 1993.

At the time of the initial controversy, șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű’s Grayson Schaffer investigated whether Mortenson’s Korphe story seemed credible. He concluded that it did not. Jordan contends that Mortenson’s version of events was truncated by a book editor and his coauthor, the late David Oliver Relin, who worked to cut hundreds of pages from his original manuscript. “And yes,” she says, “he owns the mistake he made in not insisting that they leave it as he wrote it.”

Jordan seeks to further alter the record through interviews with those she claims were passed over by CBS, including Mortenson’s K2 climbing partner, Scott Darsney, and two porters who were with the men in 1993. Another interviewee is Sabina Khan, a Pakistani American journalist who gives her own account of CAI’s successes in Pakistan, based on her own reporting.

Jordan told șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű that she visited 45 villages in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where she said most communities have some CAI representation, including a school, a trained teacher, a child with a scholarship, a water-sanitation program, or a women’s vocational center. “As our jeeps traveled through those villages, even in the ones we didn’t plan on stopping in, we were stopped by villagers eager to thank Greg for his work,” she said in an e-mail.

The film notes a rise in education rates in Pakistan overall but is short on statistical data showing the impact of CAI’s work. A check of the agency’s website says that it has 451 projects operating in three countries and helped more than 98,000 individuals in 2015 alone.

Krakauer maintains that the film is lacking something important: critical voices who might have assessed Mortenson more skeptically. “The list of obvious people Jordan made no effort to interview includes Governor [Steve] Bullock of Montana, who was the attorney general in 2011–12 and led the investigation of Greg,” Krakauer wrote. “Nor did Jordan interview any ex-CIA employees—five of whom, including four ex–program directors, have thanked me for writing Three Cups of Deceit, because it revealed the truth about how much waste and fraud there was at CAI.”

Jordan told șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű that she sought interviews with nearly two dozen of Mortenson’s detractors and critics, but many didn’t want to speak on camera and others didn’t respond. No one from 60 Minutes, including its reporter Steve Kroft, agreed to be interviewed for Jordan’s film. (In a statement provided to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, a 60 Minutes spokesman said the program stands by its story.) Krakauer also declined to participate. He says he made that decision because, after a series of e-mail exchanges with Jordan, he concluded that he didn’t trust her.

The film challenges Krakauer’s sources and reporting, noting that he’s never been to Korphe, and suggests that he maliciously sought to discredit Mortenson because he was jealous over the popularity of Mortenson’s books.

Krakauer rejects any such suggestions. In fact, the author says, he was so moved by Mortenson’s sincerity and commitment during CAI’s early days that he donated $75,000 and held a fundraiser for the group. He said he had heard as early as 2004 that Mortenson was misusing CAI funds and began to redirect his own charity dollars. When he finally read Three Cups of Tea in 2010, Krakauer said, the discovery of fabrications in the story left him troubled.Ìę

“Ashamed that I had helped persuade many thousands of people to give their hard-earned money to a charlatan,” he wrote to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, “I launched an investigation of the charity to make amends and resolved to stay on the case until things got back on track.”

During a Q and A session with the audience following the Salt Lake City screening, Jordan claimed that the “powerful” Colorado-based Krakauer had blocked some people from speaking to her for the film. She also said he threatened her in an e-mail when she raised questions about one of his Korphe-based sources. A still shot of the communication is shown in the film.

“I don’t know why he feels the need to threaten me,” Jordan told the audience, which responded with a few jeers. Asked about her decision to reveal Krakauer’s e-mail, Jordan now says that wasn’t her “finest” moment. She chalks it up to being carried away by the positive response to the film and by years of “bullying, intimidation, looming bankruptcy, backlash, and pushback” she experienced while making it.

Krakauer says he never tried to stop Jordan from making her film and encouraged other CAI critics to sit for interviews. But he also said he believes Jordan has long disliked him, though he doesn’t know why and doesn’t believe they’ve ever met.

And, yes, a few people from Jordan’s audience have written him. “They were not love letters,” Krakauer said.Ìę

Jennifer Dobner () reports on criminal justice and LGBTQ rights for the Salt Lake Tribune.Ìę

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A pair of alpinists from Utah who set off on a five-day climbing trip in northern Pakistan in late August became lost in a snowstorm and are missing.

Scott Adamson, 34, and Kyle Dempster, 33, began their ascent on August 21 up the 4,593-foot unclimbed north face of Baintha Brakk II (Ogre 2), a craggy 23,901-footÌępeak off the Choktoi Glacier in the Karakoram range. During the men’s ascent, their cook, Gahfoor Abdul, says he spotted their headlamps halfway up the peak. That was the last time anyone sawÌęthem.

Family and friends have initiated a search and rescue effortÌęwith the help of local authorities and a climbing team, and they created a Ìęon August 31 with a goal of raising $100,000. At press time on Thursday, roughly 3,400 people had pitched in more than $142,000 and the goal had been raised to $150,000.

“Please help these boys. With the initiation of the Search and Rescue we have also been required to transfer money for the helicopter rescue and porters on foot in search of Scott and Kyle,” reads the GoFundMe page. “With the unreliable weather we are needing more money everyday. Please consider the urgency of this situation and how thankful we are for your help.”

A global rescue helicopter was unable to fly near the route Monday night due to low clouds, according to Jonathan Thesenga, global sports marketing manager at Black Diamond Equipment, which sponsors Dempster.Ìę“There’s no wind or snow right now, but most of the mountain is cloaked in clouds,” Thesenga says. “They have held out until a better forecast in the weather. We need to have a solid weather window for the helicopter to fly in.”

A team of porters from the small town of Askole in the remote region of the Karakoram mountains have been hired to investigate the south side of the mountain, in case the climbers rerouted, says Thesenga.ÌęBlack Diamond is posting updates toÌę with details of the search and rescue efforts.

Last year, Adamson and Dempster when they attempted the north face of Ogre 2. They climbedÌęat least 2,696-feet, making it just shy of theÌęsummit. But then Adamson fell 100 feet and broke his leg, forcingÌęthem to descend. Several rappels down the snow-covered granite slab, the climbers’ anchor popped and they fell another 295 feet to the glacier. They were able to make it back to camp safely. Dempster that he beat himself up over the “mistake” and what he called “complacency” that nearly killed him and his partner.

Dempster twice won the Piolet d’Or, alpinism’s highest honor celebrating the most innovative ascents, in 2010 and 2013. His cousin, Drew Wilson, on Baffin Island in Canada.

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During one of the deadliest weeks on Everest, in May of 1996, a vicious storm overcame the three multinational climbing teams on summit day. Eight people died, and reports of the catastrophe, chronicled in șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű and elsewhere, called into question the dynamics of accountability among climbers attempting the world’s highest peak.

As any experienced mountaineer will attest, predicting who will reach the summit on Himalayan mountaineering expeditions and who will die trying is nearly impossible. But according to a new study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, you may have a higher chance of succeeding—or dying—if you come from a country with a rigid social structure. Anecdotally, climbers already have a sense that this is true. Expeditions from the former Warsaw Pact nations and from Korea have a reputation for pushing for the summit at all costs.ÌęConversely, the study also found that teams from more egalitarian countries summited less often and experienced fewer deaths.

“Hierarchy both elevated and killed in the Himalayas,” report the study authors, a doctoral candidate and a professor from Columbia Business School’s management department and an assistant professor from the Department of Organisational Behavior at INSEAD in France.

The researchers examined 5,104 expeditions—commercial and non-commercial— that took place on more than 100 mountains between 1905 and 2012, using data from the , an online archive of expedition records. They controlled for a wide range of variables, including the year each expedition took place and whether the climbers used supplemental oxygen. They elected not to include expeditions that were comprised of multiple nationalities, meaning that teams like the one Jon Krakauer traveled with during the 1996 disaster were excluded. (Krakauer, an American, was led by a guide from New Zealand and accompanied by a Japanese woman and other Americans. Monoethnic teams from 1996 were included in the study.)

Each country was rated on how rigid its cultural hierarchy is relative to others. (The calculus for this is derived from the research of contemporary social psychologists S.H. Schwartz and Geert Hofstede.) China was rated the most hierarchical, with Russia and India close behind. Norway was the most egalitarian, followed by Austria and Italy. The U.S., ranked in the middle of the pack, was rated as being slightly more hierarchical than Canada. The authors wouldn’t disclose which countries’ teams were responsible for the most deaths or the most summits out of concern for tarnishing reputations and peddling stereotypes. Anecdotally, climbers already have a sense that this is true. (Interestingly, the authors found that hailing from a country with a strong hierarchical culture did not have the same effect—good or bad—on solo climbers, who are rare but nonetheless present in the Himalaya.)

The findings confirm long-held beliefs among experienced climbers. “I think we kind of knew it from the seat of our pants,” American expedition leader said of hierarchy’s influence. “But it’s good to see it’s been proven.” They are also consistent with past research on social structure. “Hierarchy is an advantage but it’s also a disadvantage,” said Cecilia Ridgeway, the Lucie Stern professor of social sciences at Stanford University, who has studied hierarchies and collective action extensively.

In dissecting why more hierarchical groups are outfitted for both ultimate success and ultimate sacrifice, the authors take a scientific approach. “The academic literature would suggest decreased psychological safety, better group coordination, and decreased information sharing would all be factors in hierarchical cultures,” said study coauthor Eric Anicich. “I wouldn’t want a reader thinking that we can predict life or death or summiting probability based on which country they’re from.”

According to Ridgeway, the crucial factor to a hierarchical team’s success or failure is often the leader’s competence. Whether or not that competence is compromised by certain ingrained social structures is hard to say. What is clear, Rideway said, is that egalitarian teams are better positioned to survive in the face of potentially dooming conditions, which can overwhelm a single decision maker.

“The reason for that is when they hit these complex situations, under best circumstances they share their information, the ideas bounce off, and they come up with things that none of them would have thought of alone about how to survive,” Ridgeway said.

More than simply confirming suspicions and reinforcing past research, the results offer a stark warning for climbers to consider when assembling their teams, no matter what nation they hail from. Hierarchy is inherent in the relationship between expedition guides and the climbers they lead. Guides dictate the route taken, how fast and how far their teams go each day, and the altitude acclimatization process, among other things—all of which complicate an ascent or descent.

“The clients pay you for your judgment. I’m there to protect them,” says international mountain guide , who lives in Chile and has climbed the 26,906-foot Cho Oyu in Nepal. He isn’t convinced that culture is the key factor driving a team’s fate. “No way does it matter,” he said. After all, the Himalaya is a fluid and dangerous environment, not a vacuum. Success or failure is never the result of one factor, but many. “You still don’t know who’s going to summit,” Mujica said. “Some people can get sick. It’s one day at a time.”

The question then is how can a team find an optimal balance of egalitarianism within the inherent hierarchy of a guided expedition?

“The team would have to know itself well and all the members would really have to trust one another and be willing to go with their boss but also pull back from that in a kind of kaleidoscopic way,” Ridgeway said. “It’s not impossible but it wouldn’t be easy to do. It would depend a lot on the interpersonal skills, not just the climbing skills, of everybody involved.”

Anker has distilled Rideway’s theory into a simple method. “You have a Scotch every night. ‘How’d your day go?’ It’s the same with having a family,” he said. “You sit around and talk through things.”

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A place one can never return to grows in the mind. In mine, wind scours a scree field; a long-haired man peers down between the crenellations of a mud watchtower; a woman dozes on a wooden bed in an enclosed courtyard. The steep V of a mountain pass marks a half-remembered, half-imagined map. This is the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where there are few roads and many bandits known as badmash. Much of the land is tribal, and the laws of the nations to the west and east don’t apply. Between 2001 and 2004, I reported from the area with too much familiarity. Even though it was stunningly risky and illegal, I kept emerging unscathed, so I grew cocky. I thought I knew the place, because I found solace in its forlorn landscape and cherished the dark humor of the people I met. I believed I belonged. This was my first mistake.

IDP

Char-i-Qambar Camp, Kabul

Little

The IDP’s fled their homes in Helmand Province to escape the unrest and fighting between NATO forces and the Taliban.

Basbibi’s grandson.

One-armed

Jangora, North West Frontier Province

I arrived on October 7, 2001, . F-16’s roared westward overhead to launch air strikes against the Taliban. The tribesmen could hear but not see the fighter jets, so they fired their rifles into the sky. On my second visit, when an American photographer and I were staying in the tribal areas with a family we’d befriended, members of the local Taliban came and demanded, “Give us the Christians.” My hosts refused. We spent a sleepless night listening for fighters climbing the high earthen walls surrounding the home, then left at dawn. On my third visit, I traveled to South Waziristan, on the Pakistan side of the border, during a lull in fighting against a powerful mujahideen leader named Nek Mohammad, who was . I lay in the backseat of a taxi, pretending to be the sick wife of one of Mohammad’s fighters. In 2004, I traveled for several days with a friend and seasoned Afghan Newsweek reporter, , to meet a well-known Pakistani journalist named . As we drove the border’s steep mountain roads, Khan gave me his wife’s burka and flip-flops and put his two-year-old daughter on my lap so we would blend in. Khan was later assassinated for his investigative reporting, and his wife has since died in a mysterious bomb blast.

On that trip, I saw monkeys in pine trees. I saw women gathering wood who claimed to never have seen a car before. I saw the side of a mountain strewn with white rocks. Until several months earlier, they’d spelled out LONG LIVE MULLAH OMAR—. At the trip’s end, at the very moment I thought I’d made it to the relative safety of Bannu, we were detained by Pakistan’s military intelligence, blindfolded, cuffed, and bundled into the back of a car. The windows were papered over. There was a gun to my head. I was let go on an airstrip in the middle of nowhere pretty quickly, but Yousafzai was detained in prison for six weeks to serve as an example: You don’t travel with an American.

Until that point I saw myself as different, special, destined to work on this border. The contacts I had and the fact that I was a woman convinced me that I could navigate a landscape others couldn’t. I’d made my peace with risk, but until that point I hadn’t realized that I wouldn’t be the one to pay for my mistakes. The imprisonment of my friend changed that.

[quote]“Zama mashoom halek day,” I said—“I am having a boy.” The women all clapped and murmured. My host pulled her dress up around her breasts so that her bare stomach was exposed. “I’m not pregnant,” she cackled. “I’m sick!” She stopped laughing.[/quote]

After Yousafzai was released, I accepted that I could never return. If I did, I’d further jeopardize others—translators, drivers, friends. It was a painful decision made more so over time. At first, I didn’t realize how deeply the place had impacted me. It wasn’t about missing the rush; I didn’t long for the metallic taste of cortisol in the mouth, the aftermath of an adrenaline jag from one dangerous drive or another. I missed the stories. And the best came from women. I’d spent most of my time in villages lazing around on wooden beds called charpais, listening to people talk. The men discussed who had a new weapon, the going price for a cartridge. The women told remarkable stories—of the village’s blood feud, the heroin addict who’d come in search of safe haven. Men here may eat first, but women hold the power of story.

Women make up roughly half of the 42 million Pashtun people in the borderland. The kind of hardship they know is rare. Some are bought and sold, others killed for perceived slights against family honor. But this doesn’t render them passive. Most of the Pashtun women I know possess a rebellious and caustic humor beneath their cerulean burkas, which have become symbols of submission. This finds expression in an ancient form of folk poetry called landay. Two lines and 22 syllables long, they can be rather startling to the uninitiated. War, drones, sex, a husband’s manhood—these poems are short and dangerous, like the poisonous snake for which they’re named.

To ask a woman to sing a landay is to ask what has happened to her. If she agrees, in those two lines she’ll sing you the story of her life and of the places she comes from—places that, for me as for most of us, are impossible to go to. The lure of such danger may no longer drive me as it once did, but the fascination with borders, with traveling to the edge of a place, still has a pull. Before Thanksgiving 2012, I decided to return to the Afghan side of the border to collect landays. It was safer than the other side and as close as I’m likely ever to get to the region that haunts me like no other.

Along with , a photographer who has worked in Afghanistan for more than 20 years, I’d begin in Kabul, then venture as close to the remote Pashtun villages as it was reasonable to go. We’d give ourselves a month to gather enough landays to . Seamus and I met more than a decade ago, when he saved me a seat on a bus bound for northern Iraq at the beginning of the war. We’ve been close friends ever since. He’s an excellent guy to have on your side—kind, funny, virtually indestructible. We’ve kept a fierce pace while working together in Somalia, Nigeria, and Afghanistan, but this trip was different.

At four months pregnant, I was moving slower than usual. I threw up some mornings. It felt like an ant colony occupied my calves. Due to the exigencies of morning sickness, I was living on crackers, which are in short supply in Afghanistan. So I hauled several pounds of energy bars along with gifts: lipstick, scarves, and books of my own poems. (These proved unpopular.) In Kabul we met our translator, whom I’ll call Z. A tenacious young woman who has been her family’s breadwinner since her father died when she was a child, Z. belongs to a new generation of urbane Afghan women who’ve flourished with the influx of foreigners since 2001.

She met us in the Afghan home where we stayed with two friends: an American named Jean Kissell, who lives and works between Afghanistan, the Emirates, and Vermont, and her colleague, Mohammad Nasib. When the Taliban fell, Nasib, an Afghan-American who’d been living in Washington, D.C., and working with the United Nations, decided to do something about the rampant problem of drug addiction in Afghanistan. With the help of Kissell, he founded the , which, among other things, operates rehabilitation centers for addicts. WADAN’s ties to rural people run deep, so Nasib and Kissell know how to do unusual work, like collecting poetry in hard-to-reach places.

Refugee camps in Kabul seemed the right place to begin. There, farmers who’d recently fled tribal villages were trying to eke out an existence until it was safe to go home. We started at Charahi Qambar, a camp of 6,000 on the outskirts of Kabul. The previous winter, nearly two dozen people had frozen to death there. Traffic was worse than ever as we approached the camp. Toyota Corollas jockeyed for inches at roundabouts and waited for hours as convoys of U.S. military vehicles crawled east toward the Pakistani border, beginning the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The road to the camp was lined with boys hawking pomegranates. The fruit was rock hard, its flesh brown and green. Behind the market stalls, a tent city rose abruptly. We pulled in front of two tents that served as a clinic and a school. With WADAN’s help, we’d set up a meeting with the camp’s elders—there’s no way to talk with a group of Afghan women at home without speaking first to their husbands. Our hosts, a cluster of about a dozen men, did not look welcoming. Some appeared incredulous, others bored or stoned. They eyed us sharply, and one ushered us into the circle of broken chairs that served as their conference room. It can be rude to wander into a refugee camp. People are often forced to live private lives in public due to lack of space and shelter, so the illusion of modesty and propriety is important. Hoping for the best, we introduced ourselves and asked how the camp was faring.

“Nothing has changed since last year,” said one elder. Glassy eyes shone from a gray face. Since the tragedy of the previous winter, when the refugees had frozen, there’d been a spate of disappointing press visits. “People come to visit and do nothing,” the man said. “We’re still cold and we’re starving.” The aid program at camp seemed to work like this: Kids who went to school received bags of rice and wheat to take home. If the kids didn’t show up at school, the family didn’t eat. After a few minutes of general discussion, I asked about the poems we’d come in search of. I hoped the men might find it refreshing that we were interested in culture rather than the familiar woes.

[quote]To ask a woman to sing a landay is to ask what has happened to her.[/quote]

“We don’t know anything about poems,” the man snapped. “We’re uneducated people.” Many of the men began to wander away. But one, sturdy and middle-aged, with a smile in his eyes, pulled me aside. He led me into a warren of tarps and earthen alleyways. Heaps of garbage and human waste were piled among the narrow paths. I hopped over puddles of gray sewage in a pair of old sneakers while Z. proved perfectly nimble in high heels. Without saying anything, the elder deposited us in front of a blanket stitched with dust that served as the door to his home. Inside the makeshift shelter, his wife was dressing to go to a neighbor’s wedding. She was tall, with strong white teeth and gold wire earrings.

“I’m pregnant, too!” she cried, looking at me. She grabbed my puffy gray coat, then rubbed her hands over her protruding belly. Two twentysomething women in heavy velvet dresses appeared from two different blanketed doorways: her daughters-in-law. Then a half-dozen other women appeared out of nowhere.

“Zama mashoom halek day,” I said—“I am having a boy.” The women all clapped and murmured. My host pulled her dress up around her breasts so that her bare stomach was exposed. “I’m not pregnant,” she cackled. “I’m sick!” She stopped laughing. Her abdomen was swollen with a mysterious ailment. “Can you tell me what is wrong with me?” she asked.

She barked at a daughter-in-law, who disappeared behind a woolen blanket and reemerged with a white box of pills, which she handed to me. This was the medicine the clinic at the camp had given her: birth control. “What is this?” my host asked. “How do I take it?”

The directions were in English, so I read them aloud as Z. translated. “It’s birth control, “ I said. “This will keep you from having a baby.”

“I’m too old anyway,” she shrugged. “And something is wrong with me.” Still, she was grateful for my help and invited me along to the afternoon’s wedding. She grabbed my arm and pushed me under the blanket and back into the neighborhood’s alleyways. Soon we came to a compound made of dribbled mud: the bride’s home. Inside, the air was warm and heady with sun, sweat, hay, and the press of dozens of bodies. Weddings are segregated by sex, so there were no men. The women were chanting—growling, almost. One, with gold front teeth, was beating a hand drum. The dirge sounded more funereal than celebratory. I understood one word—Sangin—the name of an opium hub in the restive province of Helmand, from which these women had fled some months earlier. Z. translated for me: They were singing of war. One morning before dawn, as a NATO bombing raid raked fire over their village, these women had gathered up their children and fled. An old woman with a white braid said that a helicopter gunship had mistaken a dozen farmers for fighters and shot them all. Her husband was among them. Shrapnel had shredded her three-year-old grandson’s eye. Others, I was told, drowned when the swarm of terrified people surged onto a bridge too narrow to hold them all.

To the drum, they sang:

What should I do, oh God?

My homeland of Sangin is besieged by NATO helicopters.

It wasn’t easy to pry landays out of the women. After the wedding in Charahi Qambar, I tried to meet with the lead wedding singer, the woman with the gold teeth.

“This is impossible,” my host, the woman with the swollen belly, told me. “She must come from another camp, and she can only travel for weddings. If you go there and her husband finds out that she sang for you, he will kill her.”

She proposed an alternative. “There’s an older singer, a widow named Basbibi,” she told me. Perhaps, if I returned to the camp another time, Basbibi would sing. A few days later I returned. Once I was seated in my host’s home, she opened my bag and took my iPhone. She thought it was a voice recorder. I wasn’t to record any of the women, she said. I turned off the phone. Basbibi entered and tugged the burka from her head. She wore a white braid down her back and placed her three-year-old grandson on her lap. He had one scarred eye. She tried to give a fake name at first, but I recognized her from the wedding as the older of the two singers, whose husband had been killed by the NATO forces.

“There are too many sorrows to sing of,” she said. She’d lost her husband; her grandson was half-blind. Life in the camp was no better. Her brother had recently been arrested for killing another man in a fight over water. He’d been taken away to the infamous Pul-e-Charkhi prison, . She crouched and sang,

In Pul-e-Charkhi, I’ve nothing of my own

Except my heart’s heart lives within its walls of stone.

Each night I counted the poems I’d collected as if hoarding treasure. It was slow-going. Usually, when reporting, there is a midway moment when I realize I’ve got the story. That moment wasn’t arriving. There was something about the bubble of the capital that made us feel disconnected. Then there’s the fact that eight out of ten Afghan women don’t live in cities. We weren’t getting close enough to the mountains where these poems were born. We had to travel nearer to the border. But my calculus was different now. The choices I made had bearing on the person temporarily making his home inside me.

Seamus had already given our unseen friend a name: Puddin’ Jelly, after a poorly translated menu item at our favorite restaurant in Kabul. When we were sleeping on floors, he wordlessly handed over his mattress so that Puddin’ would have extra padding. He always gave me the last Snickers. After a bumpy ride, he’d turn to me and ask, “How’s Puddin’?”

His thoughtfulness reassured me, and we decided to head east to Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar province. One of the country’s largest cities, Jalalabad . Before Islam arrived, it was a sacred Buddhist region. The road from Kabul east to Jalalabad is less than 100 miles of switchbacks and tunnels blasted out of the rock by the Russians. Now the road was undergoing urgent construction to facilitate the Western pullout from Afghanistan. Winter was a bad time to drive it. This wasn’t simply a matter of militant roadblocks. It was a question of car accidents. Seamus and I decided to fly and bought empty seats on a flight that the Japanese government had chartered for its aid workers.

[quote]I felt no surge of relief, no sense of accomplishment. There was nothing finished about these poems, and I’d soon leave the women who sang them behind.[/quote]

This, too, comes with risk. Many flights to Jalalabad are greeted by Taliban gunfire. Our pilot dove steep and straight toward the airport, a military base, in order to avoid the threat of bullets. As we taxied, I spied two American soldiers in shorts going for a jog. Behind them, in a hangar, were two diminutive snub-nosed aircraft with propellers: space-age versions of remote-control planes kids built from kits. It took a moment before I realized they were drones.

In town we slept on the floor of an office owned by friends of Kissell and Nasib. (The hotels in Jalalabad are expensive and loaded with Taliban spies.) To keep a low profile, our hosts requested that I wear a burka outside at all times. I loathed the constriction, but there was a perk to stifling beneath that blue fabric: it earned me the right to study the market crowded with tailors and peddlers, the outdoor pool hall with snooker tables tucked under a tarp meant for refugees.

On our third day, we discovered a trove of landays in the person of Sharifa Ahmadzai, a fiftyish businesswoman who owns rug factories throughout the country, whom we met through a local professor. She couldn’t travel to her home village anymore, because the Taliban wanted her dead. For people who represent the modern world, it’s no longer safe to go home to villages now dominated by militants. Still, Ahmadzai loved the ancient poems. She recited one she’d heard by phone from a kinswoman in her village, the mother of a Taliban fighter named Nabi who’d recently been killed by a drone strike:

My Nabi was shot down by a drone

May God destroy your sons, America, you murdered my own.

We didn’t go into the borderlands, but we managed to reach them another way: a local women’s affairs office arranged for seven teachers from faraway villages to collect landays from girls. At week’s end, we hosted a small lunch for the teachers, paying bus fare for them and a family escort. They filed into the office with scraps of paper scrawled with landays they’d gathered from teenage schoolgirls. Listening to them and carefully recording the treasures they’d brought was a bit like a game of telephone. I taped them one by one, hoping I was getting the words right.

The next day, it was time to return to Kabul, so we tried to finagle cheap seats on a charter plane. There wasn’t one. We had to go by road. The night before we left, Seamus stayed up late watching a pirated copy of on his laptop. Through the office wall, I could hear Carrie’s hysterics. The next morning, around 5 A.M., the sound of a blast woke us. “Shit!” I uttered, sitting up fast and clutching my swollen belly. “BŸ±ČőłŸŸ±±ô±ôČčłó!” Z. said at the same time. About three miles away, a suicide bomber had blown himself up. Seconds after, another. The bombers .

A few hours later, Seamus, Z., and I climbed into an SUV owned by our host to run the winding gauntlet from Jalalabad to Kabul. Our driver was a mustached man in a leather coat who spoke no English. There was only one working seat belt, and I grabbed for it. “Sorry, I need the seat belt,” I said. Z. glowered beside me. She didn’t much care about the belt, but she had to sit in the middle, which was neither comfortable nor culturally appropriate, since she had to squeeze in leg to leg next to Seamus. I pretended not to notice. On both sides of the road, the jagged river valley rose over sheer rock faces. The walls looked too steep to harbor armed militants, but they did. The black mouths of the tunnels that the Soviets blasted in the eighties gaped at us. Entering them has always stopped my breath. This time my jaw was clenched too tightly for nausea. After a few minutes we emerged from the tunnels, and the landscape cut into sharp valleys that we drove through at top speed. Our driver exhaled deeply and picked up his phone to call our host once again and report that we had made it beyond the hairiest part of the drive. I pulled Diet Cokes from the plastic bag at my feet and handed them to Z. and Seamus.

I felt no surge of relief, no sense of accomplishment. There was nothing finished about these poems, and I’d soon leave the women who sang them behind. When the military convoys rolled out of Afghanistan on roads the Russians had built, what would happen to brash young women like Z.? The only world she knew was one where she was free to do as she pleased. When the international community was no longer paying attention, what jealous member of her family might rise up against her, claiming religion as his cause?

I thought of this landay, which one of the schoolteachers brought us:

When sisters sit together, they’re always praising their brothers

When brothers sit together, they’re selling their sisters to others.

I wondered, too, what the next year would yield in my life—whether I’d have the courage and capacity to return, or if, by necessity, I would leave this place behind.

Eliza Griswold’s is out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The post Landays: Cries of the Pashtun Women appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

On the evening of June 22, some 16 to 20 local villagers disguised as Gilgit paramilitary officers hiked into base camp on the Diamir side of Pakistan’s 26,660-foot Nanga Parbat, the ninth-tallest mountain on earth, shouting in English: “Taliban! Al Quaeda! Surrender! Some fifty climbers from many different countries were on the mountain at the time, and more than a dozen were hanging out at base, waiting for better weather and acclimatizing before heading up to higher camps. The intruders roused these mountaineers from their tents, tied them up, and forced them onto their knees at gunpoint.

Nanga Parbat, earth’s ninth tallest mountain.

The attackers first demanded money. Interviewed by Peter Miller for National Geographic, Sehr Khan, a one of the men saying, “We know you can speak English. Ask them who has money in their tents.” Khan continued: “Everybody was scared. We all said, ‘Yes, we have money.’ The foreigners said, ‘Yes, we have Euros. Yes, we have dollars.’ And, one by one, they took climbers to their different tents and collected the money.”

The intruders next destroyed all the cell phones, satellite phones, and two-way radios they could find. “[S]uddenly, I heard the sound of shooting,” Kahn recounted. “I looked a little up and what I saw was this poor Ukrainian guy, who had been tied with me, I saw him sitting down. Then after that moment, the shooting started in bursts. Brrrr. Brrrr. Brrrr. Three times like that. Then the leader, this stupid ugly man, said, ‘Now stop firing. Don’t fire anybody.’ Then that son of a bitch came in between the dead bodies and he personally shot them one by one. Dun. Dun. Dun. Afterward we heard slogans, like ‘Allahu Akbar,’ ‘Salam Zindabad,’ ‘Osama bin Laden Zindabad.’”

Several of the climbers pleaded, “I am not American! I am not American!,” to no avail. In the midst of the carnage, one of the few survivors heard an assassin proclaim, “Today, these people are revenge for Osama bin Laden.” Yet only one of the victims was an American citizen, and he was Chinese-born. Two others were Chinese, three were Ukrainians, two Slovaks, one Lithuanian, and one a Sherpa from Nepal. The cook was a Pakistani. In all, 11 people were killed.

Within days of the massacre, the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a Sunni Muslim branch unaffiliated with the Afghan Taliban, claimed responsibility for the deed. A spokesman said that the motive was revenge for the death, by an American drone strike, of the group’s second-in-command, and that the action had been carried out by a splinter faction of the TTP called the Jundul Hafsa. The Pakistani cook was apparently shot because the attackers assumed he was Shia. Sher Kahn believes he survived only because his name sounded to the killers like a Sunni cognomen, even though Khan is actually an Ismaili Shia.

In the more than two-century-long history of mountaineering, the murder of more than two or three climbers under any circumstances was utterly unprecedented. In fact, the killing of backcountry adventurers is so rare an event that the isolated examples resonate long afterward. In 1998, mountaineer and explorer Ned Gillette was shot and killed in his tent while trekking in Kashmir. But what was originally thought to be a terrorist act turned out to be a simple robbery gone wrong. Others were reminded of the four young American climbers who were shot out of their bivouac on a big wall in Kyrgyzstan in 2000, then taken captive, as chronicled by Greg Child in șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű and his book, . But in that case, the climbers were useful to the Kyrgyz insurgents who seized them only as hostages to be used as bargaining chips with the government—not as victims in a Muslim vendetta against the United States.

The Nanga Parbat massacre, however, bore spooky similarities to the 1995 kidnapping of six foreign tourists in Kashmir by a militant Islamic group called Al-Faran. In that case, one American managed to escape. The beheaded body of a Norwegian hostage was later discovered, but the other four victims were never seen again. A captured rebel not involved in the Al-Faran kidnapping later reported that he had heard that the four were shot to death after the kidnappers’ demands fell on deaf ears.

Nonetheless, the Nanga Parbat tragedy struck many observers as heralding a new and darker order of threat to adventurers afoot in Muslim countries. “It’s a game-changer, for sure,” claims one savvy observer of Central Asia.

“I found myself more disturbed by this tragedy than anything that’s come down in quite a while,” says Seattle-based climber Steve Swenson. “It’s the first time I’ve told myself, ‘Whoa, I’ve gotta pay attention now.’”

“I was deeply shocked and surprised,” adds Doug Chabot. “This came out of left field. But once I thought about it, I realized that this was a logical place for this sort of thing to happen.”

Swenson is a veteran of 11 mountaineering expeditions to Pakistan and is writing a memoir interweaving his climbs with the geopolitics of the region. Chabot, Swenson’s frequent partner, has gone on nine climbing expeditions to Pakistan himself; in addition, he is the co-founder of the Iqra Fund, an organization dedicated to furthering girls’ education in that country.

The impact on the Pakistan’ s tourism business, on which thousands of merchants and porters depend for their livelihood, promises to be both profound and long-lasting. “This is a great tragedy for Pakistan,” says Nazir Sabir, one of his country’s leading climbers and the head of Pakistan’s top trekking company. “I have talked to most of the operators,” reports Sabir, three weeks after the massacre. “Ninety percent of their trips are canceled.” For Sabir, it was a personal tragedy as well, for he knew the three Chinese climbers and the Sherpa well.

But many questions remain unanswered. If the Jundul Hafsa had struck to avenge the killing of Osama Bin Laden and American drone strikes on Sunni targets, why did they so readily kill non-Americans, even Chinese? Some observers speculate that the killers intended to disrupt the political bond between Pakistan and China, jointly planning a major dam project in the Diamir region. And there are strong indications that the Jundul Hafsa (or allied factions of the TTP) were responsible for a pair of attacks on buses in the Gilgit region in 2012, in which a total of almost sixty Shia were systematically identified and executed.

Others speculate that the poorly educated and mostly illiterate villagers who carried out the killings may have viewed all non-Muslims as “Westerners,” making little distinction between a Lithuanian or a Slovak and the Americans who launch drones against Taliban targets. As of July 22, the Pakistan government, under its new prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, appears to be making a concerted effort to round up the murderers. Sixteen have been identified by name, and four arrested.

Doug Chabot believes that the Nanga Parbat incident has little to do with Sunni-Shia enmity. Both he and Steve Swenson cite the numerous IED and suicide attacks in which innocent Pakistanis—many of them Sunni women and children—are killed along with the targeted victims. Voicing his outrage in an open letter to the the American Alpine Club, Manzoor Hussain, the president of the Alpine Club of Pakistan, wrote, “It appears that the mission of these enemies of humanity is to kill everyone living, including themselves, for reasons beyond our comprehension.”

Did the climbers at Nanga Parbat base camp just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? Does the massacre mean that the several dozen expeditions now ensconced on the Baltoro Glacier in quest of the summits of the four other 8,000-meter peaks in Pakistan are equally vulnerable? The Diamir base camp lies at an altitude of 13,000 feet, only a three-day hike up the valley. To reach Concordia on the Baltoro at 15,000 feet, near which climbers establish their base camps, requires a rugged six-day trek through dangerously glaciated terrain. That inaccessibility in and of itself may impose a margin of safety for the climbers on the Baltoro. In addition, as Swenson and Chabot point out, there are very few terrorists in that part of Pakistan, and their arrival there would not go unnoticed by the strong military presence in the region.

In the aftermath of the massacre, nearly all the climbers on Nanga Parbat were immediately evacuated, leaving only a Romanian team on the opposite Rupal side of the peak—safer ground and harder to get to. Proceeding with their attempt, the Romanians placed four members on the summit on July 19.

Meanwhile, it was business as usual on the Baltoro. As of July 22, a handful of climbers had reached the summits of Broad Peak, Gasherbrum I, and Gasherbrum II, but others had perished in the attempt, including the great Polish pioneer Artur Hajzer. Hope is giving out for three Iranians stranded without food, water, or tents at 25,600 feet on Broad Peak.

On the formidable K2, some climbers had reached Camp III at 23,600 feet, but all the expedition members are now biding their time as they hope for a good-weather window to make their summit bids. Among their number is Mike Horn, the accomplished polar explorer, who with his fellow Swiss partner Fred Roux hopes not only to climb the world’s second-highest mountain but to paraglide from the summit down to base camp. Ìę

Whether or not the Baltoro climbers are ignoring a new form of terrorism in Pakistan remains to be seen. Doug Chabot is not optimistic. “I’m worried that climbers are the new easy target,” he says. “We’re unarmed, we have lots of money, and we’re high-profile.”

According to Chabot, “The Jundul Hafsa are essentially a gang—like the Bloods and the Crips. There’s no overall leadership of the Taliban, and once the U. S. pulls out of Afghanistan in 2014, all these small gangs will be fighting for power and territory across both countries. It’s going to be a free-for-all. With the Nanga Parbat killings, the Jundul were saying, ‘We own this place.’”

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