If You Can’t Find It, Build It

Elbrus4Alpinists plans to bring sustainable alpine tourism to the remote valleys of the Karachay-Cherkess Republic of Russia

By Rob Kyte | March 23, 2022

By his own admission, Matt Johnson, 46, is not a trained mountaineer. He works as a truck driver out of Madison, Wisconsin, hauling mail as a USPS contract driver—and he “loves it.” In fact, when we spoke, he humbly referred to himself as a “complete outsider” with regard to the mountaineering community. Or, at least he was before 2011, when he decided to do an unsupported summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro, and a solo, unsupported traverse of Aconcagua shortly thereafter in 2012.

Now, through his newly-founded Elbrus4Alpinists project (E4A), he’s leading a culturally-diverse and talent-stocked expedition to attempt a rarely-taken route up the Northwest face of Mt. Elbrus—and that’s not all. Johnson plans to use the climb not just for the sake of first ascents for each team member’s respective home country, but as part of a larger mission to bring attention and, eventually, a self-sufficient alpinism industry to the remote villages of the Ullukam Valley on the west side of Europe and Russia’s tallest peak.

The Project

In 2018, Johnson was searching for his next climb when Mt. Elbrus came to mind. At 18,510’ (5642 meters), Elbrus is one of the Seven Summits, making it a highly sought-after peak. Most access it via a ski resort on the South Face. A somewhat recent proliferation of ski and mountaineering equipment and infrastructure (such as snowcats, chairlifts, and warming huts) has made the climb via the south side relatively easy-going, all things considered. 

After finding the level of support offered by most outfitters who climb the South Face to be incongruent with his hopes for something closer to “a true alpine route”—complete with inherent risk, danger, and extreme conditions—Johnson started investigating whether anyone climbs the mountain by other means. His search led him to the websites of Russian expedition companies. He reached out to Sergey Baranov, who owns the guide company at mountainguides.pro. Baranov provided Johnson with Alexander Eliseev, an accomplished mountain guide with an array of notable ascents including, but not limited to: K2 (8611 meters), Manaslu (8163 meters) without oxygen, Lenin Peak (7135 meters), three ascents of Aconcagua (6967 meters), and more than 100 ascents of Mt. Elbrus, with at least 15 in winter. 

In June of 2018, Johnson, Eliseev, and Eliseev’s son Andrei traveled to the foot of the Northwest Face of the mountain, where there is an alpine route occasionally climbed by Russian alpinists. Upon arrival, however, Eliseev proposed a change of plans. He wanted to spend three days traversing high passes from the NW side of the mountain to the foot of a glacier on the SW side of the mountain, where he claimed to know of a route that was not advertised even by Russian companies. Johnson thought that this sounded like a good adventure and agreed. On June 30, 2018, the trio successfully summited Elbrus by climbing a steep glacial ramp up to the Western Plateau and then traversing to the NW ridge, which they followed to the West Summit. They then descended by way of the standard south route. 

Afterwards, Eliseev surmised that Johnson may have been the first non-Russian to make the summit of Mt. Elbrus via this route. To date this claim has yet to be disputed. Johnson subsequently posted details of the climb, calling it Elbrus from the West(ish) - Unusual SW Route, which can be found on summitpost.org. Over the next couple of years, Johnson kept thinking about the villages he traveled through on the west side of the mountain and the NW route that he was yet to climb, of which few foreigners were even aware. Realizing how much an intentionally and conscientiously-formed alpine tourism industry could benefit locals in the region, Johnson’s vision for E4A began to take shape.

The Place and its History

A pristine and seldom-visited swathe of land decorated by soaring mountain ranges, lush agricultural valleys, and a handful of small villages, the Ullukam Valley (the local name for the Kuban River valley) is home to the indigenous Karachay people of the semi-autonomous Karachay-Cherkess Republic. The Karachay are not ethnic Russians, but Sunni Muslims and descendants of the Kipchaks, a nomadic Turkic people from Central Asia who settled there some three to four thousand years ago near the end of the Bronze Age, between 2500 and 1200 BCE. Today, they adhere to a clan system largely unchanged from when their ancestors first settled there. 

In 1941, Nazi Germany invaded and occupied western parts of the Soviet Union, including what is today the Karachay-Cherkess Republic. The Nazis etablished a relationship with the Karachay people, and promised to restore autonomy to the region in exchange for having a small brigade of fighters join forces and fight with the Wehrmacht against the Red Army. Few took them up on the offer. Far more Karachay fought in the Red Army against Nazi Germany. During the Nazi occupation, the Karachay suffered under the rule of the gestapo and anti-Soviet rebels.

When the Soviets regained control of the region in 1943, the entire Karachay population underwent a forced deportation as punishment, though only a small percentage (roughly 3,000 Karachays) collaborated with the Germans, whereas more than 20,000 Karachays served in the Red Army. Stalin and the Soviet government refused to acknowledge their service, and the Karachays were suddenly and violently forced to leave their homelands and possessions and settle elsewhere across Central Asia, mostly in Kazakhstan, Kirghiz (now Kyrgyzstan), and Turkey. Famine and disease from the forced deportations cost the lives of approximately 20% of the Karachay population. 

In 1957, under Nikita Khrushchev and his campaign of de-Stalinization within the Soviet Union, the Karachays were allowed to return to their homelands, and as much as 85% of the population were repatriated. Still, there now exists a number of sizable Karachay diasporas in Turkey, Uzbekistan, the United States, and Germany.

The People

Today, only a small percentage of the Karachay population lives on the ancestral homelands in the Ullukam Valley. When I spoke with Magomed Kodzhakov, a native Karachay from Khurzuk, one of the three largest villages in the valley, he estimated that perhaps only 1,500 Karachay remain there, dispersed between Khurzuk and the two other main villages of Uchkulan and Kart-Dzhurt. Today, Kodzhakov lives with his wife and three children in Essentuki, a Russian city 132 kilometers from Khurzuk.

“Karachay people used to live in the valley,” he explained. “But since there are no jobs, only farming, there is no business or anything around Khurzuk. Young people go to the cities and find a job. Life is difficult in the mountains. If you compare mountain life here with, for instance, Aspen [Colorado, United States], the infrastructure here is very poor.” 

In traditional Karachay culture, it is the duty of the youngest son to stay and care for his parents as they age. Now, nearly all children must leave the valley for work, and the culture is eroding as a result: “People are concerned about losing the culture,” said Kodzhakov. “I have been bilingual since birth, since we started off speaking our own language. But once you go to school, it’s in Russian. Some kids, they don’t even know Karachay now.” 

Kodzhakov then described a way of life that today seems to exist only in small, community-based cultures such as the Karachay: 

Kodzhakov, in his own words, has had “the chance to travel the world,” living and working in different places across Asia, Europe, and the United States, including Aspen, Colorado. He is familiar with the wealth of infrastructure and amenities available in these places, including the massive tourism industry on the south side of Mt. Elbrus. Kodzhakov figures that replicating that infrastructure in the Ullukam and Ullukhurzuk Valleys would, however, be difficult, since the landscape is much more rugged. As such, a road connecting the tourist destinations on the south side of Elbrus to the rural valleys on the mountain’s west side would require massive investment and significant human labor, most likely involving a tunnel through the mountain. 

“I don’t think it would be economically interesting for anyone,” he said. “I think there’s a project to build a road from here to Sochi, and alpinists could be interested in that.” Sochi, a developed city in Russia that hosted the 2014 Winter Olympics, is more than 10 hours (560 kilometers) from Khurzuk by car.

The Vision

Johnson’s mission through E4A, therefore, is to bring alpine tourism directly to the heart of the Ullukam Valley. The Elbrus climb itself will follow the route up the Northwest Face, with a documentary film to be made about the expedition to drive further exposure to the climbing world. More importantly, the ultimate goal is to highlight a true alpine route on Mt. Elbrus and thus provide an incentive for alpinists to choose an adventurous and unfamiliar side of the mountain, begin to grow a sustainable, self-sufficient industry, and create job opportunities for locals outside of farming and herding. 

Right now, Johnson estimates that inhabitants of the Ullukhurzuk Valley earn roughly US$3,000 per household, per year. With plans to stay after the climb and build basic infrastructure such as toilets, wells, and bunkhouses, E4A aspires to listen to and collaborate with local actors to create the foundations for a climbing industry that will, from the start, be grown and cared for under the direction of local authorities. 

“Instead of rich foreigners saying what’s going to happen, we’ll use our resources and our money, and ask them what they want,” said Johnson. 

The Team

Following his initial visit in 2018, Johnson knew that gaining the support of those already deep in the worldwide climbing scene would be key to realizing his vision. After returning home, Johnson learned of an event hosted by the Chicago Mountaineering Club featuring Nathaniel J. Menninger. Menninger is the director of the 2020 documentary The Porter: The Untold Story At Everest, a film featuring himself as the first foreign-born porter to support an Everest expedition. In doing so, Menninger became intimately familiar with the extreme and often harrowing challenges faced daily by mountain workers and those native to the Khumbu region, home to Mt. Everest. They often do the majority of the work necessary to reach the roof of the world, but receive little recognition for their efforts. Over time, this has created a growing tension between those who visit to climb, and local residents.

Menninger’s film inspired the International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation (UIAA) to establish the Mountain Worker Initiative (MWI), which seeks “to establish, disseminate and support guidelines for ethical trekking and mountaineering practices worldwide with a focus on the lives of mountain workers.” 

Johnson reached out to Menninger via email, hoping to align his project with the MWI. He pitched an approach based on questions regarding the locals: “If they want [a climbing industry], how do they want it? What is their preferred model?” 

Menninger agreed to help, and together they started to expand their network of local contacts in the upper Ullukam Valley. Johnson reports that initial feedback from clan elders was very positive. The importance of guests, Johnson learned, is deeply rooted in the local culture. The valley's inhabitants consider it an unforgivable sin to treat guests and outsiders with anything but an unyielding sense of honor, respect, and hospitality. The level of respect shown to guests is directly correlated to how far they have traveled, and so it is considered an incredibly high honor to host an overseas visitor. 

Encouraged by initial discussions, Johnson collaborated with Mark Higton, Mountaineer of the Soviet Union First Class and Royal Geographical Society Fellow, and Gregg Kane, former president and current librarian for the Chicago Mountaineering Club, to form the Elbrus Alpine Foundation (EAF). The group will oversee fundraising, provide business expertise and mentoring to locals, and build a website and reservation system to be maintained by local guides and workers, who will receive 100 percent of the profits. E4A also will partner with other nonprofit organizations to facilitate the development of a climbing and tourism industry, as well as scholarly research in the region. “If you can imagine a culture like that, that needs employment, and has alpine [opportunities] in their backyard … but there’s no infrastructure,” said Johnson. “So I thought: if you can’t find it, build it.” 

Johnson and Higton traveled to Khurzuk recently in September of 2021, where they were introduced to the community at a cultural festival and announced the goals they hoped to accomplish in partnership with the valley’s residents. Their proposals were well-received, and many stepped forward with offers to volunteer or with ideas to expand the options in the valley for visiting tourists. Following their time in the valley, Johnson, Higton and Eliseev completed a new variation on the SW route that Johnson and Eliseev completed in 2018.

Johnson has faith that his project will succeed due to the quality of potential routes, support of the local community, and thirst of alpinists for unknown and unclimbed mountain ranges. Climbing near the Russian-Georgian border, Johnson recalls, “is like climbing the Alps in the 1800s. It’s untouched.” 

The Future

Climbing is by no means a significant aspect of Karachay culture. People know about it only as they interact with the few climbers, mostly Russian, who pass through the villages on their way to base camp. From Kodzhakov’s perspective, “Climbing is for people who have their finances figured out; have time and money. For most locals, it's not that interesting or available.” 

In our conversations, Kodzhakov expressed his support for the E4A project, but also showed a degree of skepticism toward overall impact. 

“It’s in everyone’s best interests to have the infrastructure. [But], I don’t think the locals will gain as much as they could unless the government [becomes] interested. For the foreigners coming into the region, to make things interesting, you have to invest so much money. Recently, we are seeing things getting a little better. But even if 100 tourists come every year, the season for alpinism is a very short time frame. What will the locals gain?”

Kodzhakov believes, nonetheless, that E4A is a step in the right direction. He hopes that larger tourism industries, such as the ski resorts on the south side of Mt. Elbrus, will soon take interest in what the people and the landscape of the Ullukam Valley have to offer. 

Alpinism as a sport, however, has a mixed history in terms of clashing cultural relations, such as the evolving situation on Mt. Everest and other 8000m peaks in Nepal and Pakistan, where the local populations often bear the majority of the weight required to support a full-fledged expedition. I asked Johnson how he sees E4A taking a different approach to what is, inevitably, the commercialization of a remote region and a rural community. 

“I was really worried about how an influx of foreigners might affect the local culture and communities, and I wrestled with that for a while,” he replied. “My concern about that is a problem in and of itself: me being paternalistic, assuming I know what’s best for these people. In the end, it’s their choice. They’re going to control what happens. If they only want room for 30 climbers, that’s all that will be there. The decision is theirs. I have no right to tell them how much they should or should not allow this to affect their village.” 

“What is your measure of success for the project, then?” I asked. “What is your vision for Elbrus4Alpinists in 5 years? 10 years?” 

“My metric for success is to work myself out of a job, where I have no involvement,” Johnson explained. “We start small, building huts, toilets, wells. We’ll build up a website for them, like explore-share, where individual guides can advertise their services.” 

Kodzhakov concurred: “Most of the time, those who invest money don’t really care about the locals, or what they think. When [E4A] comes, they will come already prepared. They will just need a place to stay, and something to eat … I don’t think the project will threaten any aspects of local life. People come in with large backpacks, they climb the mountain, they look for a place to stay. You have to see to understand. I think even Matthew has only a small idea of Karachay hospitality.” 

Johnson hopes that E4A will further serve as a call to action for others in the industry. “I am a complete outsider, and I said, ‘here’s a thing that should happen.’ If a truck driver from Wisconsin can do this, there’s no excuse for a climber not to start making phone calls and emails and turn something into reality.”

To continue his vision of growing a community and ultimately relinquishing control to the locals, Johnson plans to meet with leaders of the American Alpine Club and the Russian Mountaineering Federation in an effort to connect them with Karachay leaders and clan elders. Additionally, Menninger has expressed that after initiating Phase 1 of the Mountain Worker Initiative in Nepal, the UIAA plans to focus Phase 2 on the Karachay-Cherkess Republic and the Ullukam Valley. 

To stay up to date on E4A, follow @matthew.c.johnson1 on Instagram. Click the button below to donate to E4A and support the growth of an alpine tourism industry in the Ullukam Valley. 

Furthermore, if you believe you have something to contribute to E4A, or would like to partner with E4A for development and/or research purposes, contact Matt Johnson directly at m.johnson@elbrus4alpinists.org.

Click here for a complete list of the E4A team.

EDIT: Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the resulting humanitarian crisis, E4A has decided to delay the climb of the Northwest Face and the making of a documentary film by one year, to be attempted in June 2023. Instead, a smaller team consisting of Johnson, Kane, Higton, Menninger and a few others will travel to the Karachay-Cherkess Republic in June 2022. They will again meet with clan elders, representatives of the Russian Mountaineering Federation and, potentially, representatives from the Ministry of Tourism. The group will purchase livestock and host a village-wide meal, where they will begin laying the groundwork for the construction of climbing infrastructure.