By ELSIE DENTON
News Intern
June 25, 2007

Warm summer days and leisure time aren’t in the forecast for local middle school teacher Lisa Rust.

Instead, she will be strapping on her best climbing boots and heading for the snowy hills of Pakistan. With a team of five other American mountaineering guides Rust will be instructing at Pakistan’s very first Women’s Climbing Camp.

Rust and the other guides — Janet Bergman, Kirsten Kremer, Molly Loomis, Sonja Nelson and Heidi Kloos (the expedition’s leader) — will be across the ocean from July 16 through Aug. 12. Also accompanying the expedition are photographer Sallie Dean Shatz and cinematographer Cherie Silvera.

This team is special. They aren’t headed to Pakistan to assail the country’s highest peaks, even though the country boasts the second-tallest mountain in the world, K2. This all-female team of mountaineering guides is headed to the uplands of Pakistan to teach 150 Pakistani women how to belay, scale walls of ice and extract themselves from treacherous situations.

Rust says that the trip is designed to help empower Pakistani women with the tools to liberate themselves from the oppression they often face in their home country.

“In Pakistan, only men climb,” said Rust. “Women have been unable to learn due to cultural norms. Women can’t speak to men they are not related to, so the men can’t teach them.”

To give women access to both the joy of conquering the peaks of their homeland and to the financial independence that could come from acting as guides for western expeditions, the initial boost had to come from the outside.

“These women wouldn’t get this opportunity if we didn’t come teach them,” said Rust. “That is why they (the Alpine Club of Pakistan) are inviting us.”

This venture will be Rust’s first time climbing in Pakistan. Due to past political instability she had done most of her high-altitude ascents in nearby Nepal. The situation in Pakistan has stabilized and Rust is confident that the team will run into no difficulties.

“We have really good assurance from the Alpine Club of Pakistan,” Rust said. “It is bad to target tourism. The government wants to make sure K2 is inviting. If the political situation is directed at tourists then they would lose that.”

After 15 years of guiding, Rust knows a thing or two about teaching folks how to scale mountains, but this will be the first time she has ever worked with such a large group.

“When guiding on Mount McKinley in Alaska we typically have a ratio of three guides to nine climbers, so three to one,” said Rust. “Generally, the higher the peak, the smaller the ratio; on Everest it is even smaller.”

Interest among Pakistani women is so high that Rust’s team of six guides will be juggling 25 people each.

According to Rust, when the group makes its attempt on 19,619-foot Kusheikh Peak at the end of the month-long training camp, the women will have to progress through stages. When the team makes camp for the night the guides will have to decide which of the Pakistani women are skilled enough to progress up the next stage of the climb.

“It is going to be hard,” said Rust. “We are giving these women opportunities they may never have had and we are going to have to tell them to turn back.”

Guides and instructors aren’t the only things the mountaineering camp will be short on.

“The effort is still in need of gear and equipment, or monetary donations,” said Rust. “Right now our photographer has paid for our plane tickets with her credit card, just hoping the money will come in. Not only are we (the guides) volunteering our time, but we might be looking at substantial contributions ourselves, if we don’t get more support.”

Rust is looking forward to the trip but she does expect one difficulty:

“The toughest part will be leaving my 2-year-old daughter,” she said.

If you are interested in following along with Rust on her journey in Pakistan the team will be keeping a blog. You can follow the climb or see what sort of unusual situations the team runs into by visiting http://www.behno.blogspot.com — or, if you’d rather catch everything at once you can wait for the documentary to come out. Emmy-winning cinematographer Silvera will be accompanying the guides during their groundbreaking work with Pakistani women.

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