Building the Pamir Trail

The locals call this place Bam-i-Dunya or the Roof of the World. It’s one of the most remote, inaccessible and complex mountain ranges on earth. You’d be a fool to try and thru-hike these mountains. Right?

For me it all began in 2009 when I paid my first visit to Tajikistan with my wife Carrie. We planned to cycle across the southern Pamirs, close to the border with Afghanistan. Although it was October, rather late in the season, we were keen to do some hiking along the way.

Plotting a route was not easy. During our research we discovered Soviet-era maps when topographers had mapped out the entire Soviet Union in great detail, including remote regions such as the Pamir mountains. The maps were never updated but they have been digitised and made available online.

We also found a brilliant map of the Pamirs created by Swiss cartographer, Markus Hauser. This is an absolute gem featuring all the backroads in the Badakhshan region as well as a number of trekking routes. However, the map’s scale of 1:500,000 makes it fine for cycling roads, but less suitable for navigating a hiking trail.

Further searches failed to turn up a suitable short hike that was close to our cycling route. Our last resort was Google Earth. After poring over the satellite imaging for hours, I finally noticed a line in the landscape close to the main road in the Wakhan Corridor. It led to the base of the colossal 6,507m high Pik Engels. We decided to give it a go, following what turned out to be a perfect trail along an irrigation channel with the best mountain view I had ever seen in my life.

Across the Wakhan Valley another mountain range dominated the skyline, the Hindu Kush, shared by Afghanistan and Pakistan. As we ascended, a towering block of ice and granite emerged from the narrow valley. We couldn’t believe our eyes. This was a world class hike, less than a day from the road, and we discovered it using Google Earth!

“This is it!” I thought, “I’m writing a guidebook on trekking in Tajikistan!”

I returned in 2010, intending to spend four months trekking and climbing in the greater Pamir region. Armed with a stash of laminated Soviet maps, a GPS tracker and enough freeze-dried meals to last for weeks, I headed into the mountains north of Tajikistan’s capital Dushanbe for my first research trip. I roamed the network of trails that had been there for centuries and drank tea with the shepherds who still use the pathways to herd their livestock. I learned that many of the trails joined up, even across the tall, and at times, difficult mountain passes. You could hike here for weeks on end without crossing the same trail twice.

In the following years of mapping trails and trying to finish the guidebook, two serendipitous events occurred that cemented the idea of creating the Pamir Trail. In 2014 I met Jeff Haack who had just established the Transcaucasian Trail spanning Armenia and Georgia. I was instantly hooked on the idea of creating such a trail across Tajikistan.

Then, a couple of years later, I was sipping a beer in Sam’s bar in Kathmandu, waiting for my friend Ade, who happened to be in town. He brought along a friend he thought I should meet, Robin Boustead.

Robin was the creator of the Great Himalaya Trail that runs for 1,700 kilometres across the Nepali Himalayas and beyond. By then I had already mapped out a number of trekking routes in the Tajik mountains that linked up several sub-ranges. Talking with Robin about the GHT re-ignited this lingering idea of mine to stitch up the routes I had done while researching for my guidebook. We even joked about how cool it would be to connect the GHT to a long-distance hiking trail across Tajikistan.

And so, over the past four years, I and a small army of intrepid trekkers have been scouting the missing route connections throughout Tajikistan. While some sections were relatively easy to connect, other areas were extremely hard and wild. Our trail explorers came back with gripping tales of adventures and invaluable reports, even if they didn’t manage to cross a certain pass or river.

In September 2024, as we connected the last stretch of the Pamir Trail, I made the following entry in my notebook:

Ahead of us we see the glare of the glacier that sits on top of the 4,450 metre Odudi pass. The terrain is pathless and we’re discussing which line to take to reach the pass. Heading up the lower part of the glacier itself is out of the question. A small icefall with wide crevasses blocks the way. The only way up is the moraine wall on the right. We zigzag up a steep slope littered with boulders and a full view of the glacier unfolds. On the top, the glacier levels somewhat, allowing us to cross without crampons. After hopping across a couple of narrow crevasses we reach the Odudi Pass, the missing piece of the puzzle that is now called the Pamir Trail. Roughly 1,300 kilometres of trails and passes across the mountains of Tajikistan are now stitched up, accumulating into the world’s latest and possibly wildest long distance hiking route.

You might ask yourself why? What would possess a team of strangers to chip in their time and effort to chart a trail through such unknown and difficult terrain?

There are some obvious tangible reasons of course: documented long distance trails become economic opportunities for mountain communities who can open homestays, supply pack animals, or guide hikers over mountain passes. And if the Pamir Trail becomes a recognised route, we hope it could relieve pressure from some of the more popular trekking regions in Tajikistan and beyond.

But beyond the tangible, for me, there’s something undefinable about a project like this. We did it because it was there and it hadn’t been done before. And in a world where it feels like there’s nothing left to discover, even while camped on a freezing mountainside eating freeze dried chili, I can’t think of any greater luxury.