The door to the cockpit swung open and a Russian voice emanating from somewhere inside a camouflage jacket shouted “Where do we go?” 

It made my heart sink. I had not been concentrating on where we were going at all. Instead, I had been joyfully sticking my head out of the porthole of the humungous Soviet chopper, taking photos of the team’s wind-blasted faces. It had been a lot of fun!

We had been in the air about 10 minutes, heading toward the Djangart Range in Kyrgyzstan, or so we thought. I assumed that showing our maps to the navigator and giving him a latitude and longitude would be all that was required. Not so. I looked out of the cockpit’s bulbous windshiel,d not recognizing anything from photos or maps. This was not the place. “No, no, no!” I said. Damn and blast! The helicopter started to turn round. What to do now? Do we go back to base and start again? The chopper was clearly lost. They might not let us fly again without paying more.

In the end what we did was get our GPS, manually program in our estimated base camp location, and literally point the massive machine in the direction of where we wanted to go The pilot gained altitude and flew over some 3,500m mountains and a couple of valley systems, then dropped sharply into the correct valley. In the end we landed at a near perfect base camp exactly where we had planned. Phew.

Liz Holley, Stuart Lade, Paul Padman, Jill Plummer, Alex Reid, Max Stretton, Zoe Strong, Stuart Worsfold, and I had come to tackle climbs in the last few valleys of unclimbed peaks in the Djangart. These lie in the far east of the range. Base camp was in a beautiful valley by a river (41°45’36.57”N, 79°0’43.51”E). The next day we split into two groups and went exploring. Both groups headed east up the main Debnoy Valley: my group with a 4,837m peak in mind, the others going farther to look at a mountain on the Chinese border marked as 5,112m on the old Russian maps. The latter we thought might be the highest unclimbed peak in the range.

On August 6, Jill, Liz, Stuart Lade, and I headed up the unnamed glacier branch west of the Debnoy. It was dry and posed no problems. We climbed a boulderfield to a shoulder, then a 300m snow slope, and finally a very loose rock ridge to the top of 4,837m, which we named Peak Jis. In the meantime, Paul, Alex, Max, Zoe, and Stuart Worsfold established a high camp on the Debnoy and next day climbed Peaks 4,575m, 4,586m, and 4,612m on the border with China before returning to base. These five returned to their high camp a few days later and climbed four more peaks: two just east of the Debnoy, and two on the border at the western head of the glacier. The two at the western head were 5,052m and 5,112m on the map; the latter measured at 5,123m GPS and was provisionally named Peak Pinney.

On the 12th, Liz and I traversed Peaks 4,542m, 4,597m, and 4,639m on a ridge leading toward the summit of Peak 5,032m, now the only remaining unclimbed 5,000er in the range. These lay closer to base camp, on the western rim of the next main glacier west of the Debnoy. Jill and Stuart Lade put up a 500m rock route (D+) above base camp.

In total we made 11 first ascents and found no evidence of any previous climbing in this area, despite two teams having passed through. However, as always in this part of the world, Soviet records remain a mystery. We used Tien Shan Travel and would highly recommend them.

Download the complete expedition report.

Jamie Goodhart, U.K.