Dusk had long settled over the Moskvina Base Camp. Under the shelter of night, around 2 a.m., Davide Donadio and his climbing party departed from the group of green tents nestled in a rocky confluence between two glaciers in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan. Already, the group was at over 14,000 feet elevation, but there was plenty of mountain left to climb. Roughly 10,000 feet, give or take.
“The reason why we started in the night is that on the way to camp one of the Ismoil Somoni Peak, you walk under a steep slope with hanging glaciers,” said Donadio. “When the sun hits, ice or rocks fall, so you don’t want to be there when it’s warm.”
Over the next 10 hours, Donadio and his party scrambled over loose rocks, scaled snowy faces using ice axes and crossed crevasses with ropes. The work was strenuous and the temperatures, even in July, were well below zero.
Around noon, Donadio and the party arrived at Camp One. But it was still just the start of the trek. There were four more camps to climb to until the mountain’s peak at 24,590 feet. Summiting successfully would take the group more than a week.
What Is high-altitude mountaineering like?
Donadio, a professor in the Department of Chemistry at the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis, has been interested in mountaineering since his teenage years in Varese, Italy. Varese lies in the shadow of Monte Rosa, a mountain range part of the Pennine Alps. Always an avid hiker, Donadio joined the city’s mountaineering club around the age of 16. As he learned climbing techniques, an obsession with type 2 fun, the kind gleaned from hard-won experiences, grew inside him. That passion persists to this day.
Donadio spent one month this past summer scaling two mountain peaks in Tajikistan, the aforementioned Ismoil Somoni Peak and the Korzhenevskaya Peak (23,311 feet). Donadio and his party summited both during their July expedition. After acclimating at base camp, they first tackled the Korzhenevskaya Peak, which Donadio playfully referred to as “training” for the Ismoil Somoni Peak.
“The main challenge in high-altitude mountaineering is dealing with prolonged efforts at low oxygen pressure, up to 60% lower than at sea level,” Donadio said.
How do you train for high-altitude climbing?
But summiting Korzhenevskaya Peak was far from the only training he did.
Before the expedition, Donadio spent six months preparing through a mixed training protocol of running, cycling and climbing. He packed on weight, a calculated move since he’d be burning between 5,000 and 6,000 calories daily. By the end of the expedition, he had lost 20 pounds and suffered frostbite in some fingers and toes.
“It feels like paperboard,” Donadio said when looking at his frost-bitten fingers. “No sensation on the skin, but it is tingling.”
And yet, Donadio smiles at the memory of the endeavor, his motivation driven by a belief expressed in a quote by climber and explorer Reinhold Messner: “The art of climbing is the art of survival.”
“When you’re on the mountain, you’re focused on surviving, and I like that state,” said Donadio. “You are shutting down everything and focusing on going up, staying alive and doing the stuff you have to do: climb, rest and melt snow.”
What is the Snow Leopard challenge?
By summiting the Ismoil Somoni and Korzhenevskaya peaks, Donadio has now scaled three of the five peaks of the Snow Leopard Challenge, which involves climbing the five highest peaks of the former Soviet Union, all above roughly 23,000 feet. Only about 700 climbers have accomplished the feat, including three Americans and one Italian
“Four of the five are certainly doable, and we’ve done three now,” Donadio said. “There is one of them, Peak Pobeda, that is extremely dangerous with an 8-10% fatality rate. I’m not sure I want to go there.”
The dangers of mountaineering
The dangers of mountaineering are ever-present in Donadio’s mind. He approaches each expedition meticulously and carefully. That said, tragedy can still strike. Matt Dawson, a climber Donadio met and spent some time with while staying at the Moskvina Base Camp, later fell to his death before reaching Camp 3.
“He died on the mountain when I was already coming back home,” Donadio said. “We had several conversations on strategies for how to climb the mountain. Dawson was experienced, and he was climbing to raise money for ALS.”
“It’s factored in,” Donadio said about the dangers. “You know it can happen, but you also know it’s not going to stop you.”
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