Part One

Heading east across Iraqi Kurdistan toward the and the border with Iran, we pass from a land of sand and dust into the green prairies of Mesopotamia. For an hour, we cross fields of barley and watermelons, and orchards of figs and pomegranates. Reaching the foothills, we follow a tumbling cloud of swifts, like a hundred tiny crossbows, into a canyon that plunges to the heart of the massif. After a while, the gorge arrives at a natural rock amphitheater enclosing the small frontier town of Tawella. And there, saddling his mules in front of a warehouse just off the bazaar, I find an old highlander in a jacket, cummerbund, baggy trousers, dress shirt, and dress shoes who agrees to tell me about the smuggling.

The boxes his four grown sons are humping from the warehouse are 70-pound air conditioners, the man says. They鈥檙e wrapping them in gray and orange plastic sacks to keep out the rain and dust, then strapping them four at a time to the mules. Once the animals are loaded, his boys will lead them up a zigzag out of Tawella鈥檚 ravine. Avoiding border patrols and 40-year-old mines left over from the Iran-Iraq War, they will slip through terraces of walnuts and almonds, then copses of wild oaks and pistachios. Above that will come crevices and caves where Neolithic families once lived, now home to bears, eagles, wolves, and leopards. Above the tree line, the men will risk open ground鈥攆irst thistly yellow-grass hillside, then shale, then scree. After several hours and 2,000 feet of climbing, they鈥檒l reach a patch of bare earth beneath the snowy peaks that the map on their phones will identify as the point where Iraq meets Iran. This is the bargah, where Iraqi Kurds hand off their sacks to Iranian Kurds known as kolbars, after the Kurdish for 鈥渂ack鈥� (kol) and 鈥渓oad鈥� (bar). Evading their own patrols and mines, the kolbars will lug the loads five hours down their side of the mountain to the town of Nowsud. There they will stack them onto trucks, to be driven through the night to Tehran, arriving in time for the morning market.

The smuggling has its roots in the clumsiness of rulers who for hundreds of years have taken the thousand-mile Zagros range as the boundary between Arabia and Persia but ignored how Kurds live on both sides. Petty smuggling between cousins has existed here forever. But trade soared after 1991, when the U.S., the UK, and France created a no-fly zone to the west of the mountains to protect Iraqi Kurds from gas attacks by Saddam Hussein. The new area became Iraqi Kur颅distan, an autonomous enclave of five million that today is stable, open for trade, and tolerant of alcohol and sexual freedom. That liberation contrasts with the restricted lives of 84 million Iranians to the east鈥斅璱ncluding eight million Iranian Kurds鈥攚ho are cut off from the world by and Iran鈥檚 own prohibitive taxes and inhibited by strict laws against alcohol and sex. The chief effect of this juxtaposition, the old man says, has been to ensure that 鈥渢he Iranians want everything鈥� that the Iraqi Kurds have.

So it seems. Walking around Tawella, I find hundreds of houses built to the same unique design: comfortable villas with balconies and roof gardens on the first floor, overlooking cavernous warehouses at street level. Inside the stockrooms, I spy more air conditioners, plus towering stacks of washing machines, televisions, refrigerators, boxes of tea, cigarettes, pet food, beer, whisky, and lingerie鈥攖he secret shopping list of an entire nation. The old man says that on busy days the line of men and mules snaking up the hills can be a mile long. On the Iranian side, where discrimination against Kurds leaves them few alternatives to kolbar work, it can be several miles long.

And that鈥檚 just Tawella. Along the Zagros lie hundreds of villages and towns devoted to high-altitude smuggling. The estimates that around 300,000 smugglers per year are humping appliances and contraband over these 14,000-foot peaks, mostly for about $15 per load, or $20 to $25 for Iranian kolbars desperate enough to cross the border and make the entire journey themselves. The Iranian parliament puts the value of all that trafficking at $25 billion, roughly the same as Iraqi Kurdistan鈥檚 GDP, or the annual trade . Later, looking at satellite images of wide, dusty mountain paths, I realize that this is smuggling you can see from space.

The scale of the business ensures its terrible human cost. Iraq鈥檚 police largely tolerate it, apparently appreciative of the legal precision of Iraqi Kurds who, since most never set foot in Iran, are not technically breaking the law. It鈥檚 a different story in Iran. Last year its border guards shot dead 43 kolbars and injured 151, while arresting untold numbers. (Iran does not publish statistics on kolbar detentions, but the frequency with which kolbars report them suggests thousands each year.) Those figures were down from 55 and 142, respectively, in 2019, and 71 and 160 in 2018. The violence provides more evidence of Iran鈥檚 anti-Kurdish racism. It also has a lethal secondary effect: persuading kolbars trying to dodge patrols to set out in poor weather or on dangerous routes, leading to dozens more deaths and hundreds more injuries as they fall from steep paths or drown under loads or step on land mines or perish in snowstorms, such as the five young Kurdish Iranians this past January.

To Western ears, a town where old men dress up to go smuggling, in a mountain range called the Zagros, in an imaginary country called Kurdistan, which historians say doubles as an approximation for Eden, can all sound a little unreal. To place this phenomenon in more familiar context, then: several times more people die in the Zagros in a typical year than are killed on all 14 eight-颅thousand-meter peaks in the Himalayas and Karakoram combined.

The difference between dying in the mountains for glory and dying there for twenty bucks a day should give any climber pause. Just as arresting: the realization that the on which the reputations of a K2, a Denali, or an Eiger are built are nothing next to a single season in the Zagros. Half the elevation of the Himalayas, all but unknown to the outside world, almost never summited, these are by far the deadliest mountains on earth.

The post The World鈥檚 Most Dangerous Mountains appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

The months apart were not kind.

When we finally track down our motorcycle on the outskirts of Erbil, the capital of Iraq鈥檚 semiautonomous Kurdish region, the engine is dead and all three tires are flat. The sidecar has become a trash can, strewed with empty beer bottles, newspapers, and a splash of motor oil. 鈥淪orry, old girl,鈥� sighs Carmen Gentile, my traveling companion and the bike鈥檚 owner. He slumps in the saddle for a while, head bowed, a little heartbroken. 鈥淚鈥檓 sad, dude,鈥� he says. 鈥淭his bike deserves so much better.鈥�

In the summer of 2017, while reporting on a campaign by Iraqi forces to purge the Islamic State from the city of Mosul, Carmen had found the bike鈥攁 Russian-made Ural鈥攂uried under the rubble of a mortar strike, its gas tank crushed, its fenders shot through with bullet holes. An incurable moto enthusiast, he launched a salvage mission that involved jury-rigging parts and schmoozing his way through countless checkpoints on the 50-mile drive east to Erbil. The bike was then left with a friend of a friend, who apparently didn鈥檛 share Carmen鈥檚 affections.

Nearly a year later, with the jihadists on the run, we鈥檙e back to explore Iraqi Kurdistan鈥檚 potential as the Middle East鈥檚 next great adventure destination. Our plan is to dust off the Ural and ride with photographer Balazs Gardi, who鈥檒l rent a car, traveling from the sunbaked plains up to the mountains that flare along the Iranian border鈥攁n alpine wilderness that鈥檚 home to virgin peaks, raging whitewater, and the region鈥檚 first national park. It鈥檚 not far from where a group of American hikers were taken prisoner nine years ago by Iranian border guards, an incident that muted the media hype that Kurdistan was the next big thing. But I鈥檓 in contact with a guide who knows the terrain well, and several high-octane travel dispatches I鈥檝e seen online (鈥淭aking on Kurdistan鈥檚 Wildest Mountain River,鈥� 鈥淚raqi Kurdistan: Intrepid Skiers Break New Ground鈥�) suggest that a serious outdoor scene is emerging in the high country. We want to check it out.

The Ural won鈥檛 get us there, obviously, so we head to a bustling moto market in a different part of town. Rows of cheap Iranian 125cc four-speeds fail to rouse our spirits, but we have no choice. We settle on a pair of Honda knockoffs, slap on some stickers of Che Guevara for good luck, and ride down to the old city center to buy last-minute provisions.

I鈥檝e been here before. On my first visit to Kurdistan, in 2007, the Iraq War was raging full tilt. It was the deadliest year yet for U.S. troops. Sections of Baghdad and the southern cities were no-go zones, terrorized by suicide car bombs and sectarian death squads. In contrast, Erbil, a city of around one million, was a bastion of calm guarded by the fearsome Peshmerga (鈥渢hose who face death鈥�), the Kurds鈥� national fighting force.

Having a U.S. passport in Kurdistan was a bonus. Soon after the end of the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. enforced a no-fly zone over the region that helped stop Saddam Hussein鈥檚 brutal counteroffensive against the Kurdish rebellion, and Kurds have never forgotten that. I was invited to a wedding, ate free meals, and celebrated the Muslim New Year with friends and fireworks beneath the towering walls of the ancient citadel of Erbil, one of the oldest continuously occupied settlements in the world. It鈥檚 hard to believe that two wars have happened since my last visit.

Carmen and I park next to a glitzy new plaza that fronts the citadel and hike up to the viewing platform. The skyline bristles with shopping malls, cranes, and half-built condominium complexes thrown up by developers from Turkey and Dubai. Swarms of package tourists from Baghdad shamelessly snap selfies around us, but I don鈥檛 see any Westerners.

Kurdish authorities have tried hard to promote Kurdistan as 鈥渢he other Iraq,鈥� but to most foreigners it鈥檚 still a land synonymous with the bloodshed and beheadings that have stigmatized the rest of the country. In September 2017, flush from victory in their three-year battle against Islamic State militants, Kurdish leaders made matters worse by holding an independence referendum, in defiance of Iraq鈥檚 central government. It backfired catastrophically. Iraqi forces retaliated by seizing swaths of oil-rich Kurdish lands and banning international flights to the region鈥檚 airports. We arrived just weeks after the embargo was lifted.

Following a stroll through another market for supplies, we return to our bikes. This time mine won鈥檛 fire up. I stomp the kick-starter again and again, issuing a flurry of f-bombs and drawing a small crowd.

鈥淓ngine too much gas,鈥� a mustached man says when I stop to catch my breath.

I grunt out a yes. Inevitably, he asks me where I鈥檓 from.

鈥淎h, Amreekah friend,鈥� he says when I tell him. 鈥淩ambo number one! Bush good also.鈥�

Another man squats down to my right and starts stripping the plastic off my ignition cable with his teeth. He pulls out a knife to finish the job, twists the bare copper threads into a braid, and taps the spark plug. On his cue, I give the bike a sharp kick, and it starts with a whimper, then revs to life. The group erupts into trilling, high-pitched ululations that send us off.

Kurdish hospitality is as robust as ever, but the early signals are clear. Nothing will come easy on this trip.

In the morning, we ride northeast up Hamilton Road, an old British-built highway that snakes some 110 miles from Erbil to the Iranian frontier. Near the city limits, a series of Peshmerga checkpoints give way to rolling hills dotted with farmhouses and stone fortresses dating back to the tenth century. Balazs is following us in a chase car, but it鈥檚 not long before we鈥檙e chasing him.

Just as the landscape opens up, my bike starts to flag. I pin the throttle, to no effect. A cling-clang of loose metal rattles around in my engine. 鈥淢an, this is not good!鈥� I shout to Carmen, who鈥檚 having gear problems of his own. The predicament is made worse by Kurdish motorists who seem hell-bent on running us off the road. We sputter on, past a billboard honoring the 鈥渋mmaculate precious bodies鈥� of all the Peshmerga martyrs who鈥檝e fought and died to defend this terrain.

Kurdish history is a catalog of tragedy. Blessed with natural beauty and cursed by location, the ancestral heartland straddles a tangle of ethnic, religious, and geopolitical fault lines where conflict has ebbed and flowed for centuries. During the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, when Allied powers divvied up the region, plans to create an independent Kurdish state never came to fruition. Today some 30 million stateless Kurds are spread across four countries鈥擳urkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. In Iraq, decades of ruthless government persecution have hardened the Kurds鈥� drive to carve out a homeland of their own.

Two hours, many stops, and maybe 35 miles up the road, we pause to rest at the edge of a sprawling farm valley outside the town of Shaqlawa. A pair of aging freedom fighters in traditional Kurdish costume鈥攂aggy pantaloons, vest, cummerbund, head wrap鈥攁re thumbing prayer beads in the dusky light. They say as-salaamu alaikum (peace be upon you) and touch their hearts. I introduce myself and say what a beautiful place it is.

鈥淵ou should have been here in 鈥�74,鈥� says Qasim Abdullah, the taller one, warming up to tell a story. 鈥淪addam鈥檚 fighters were up there and we were over there, firing artillery back and forth.鈥� He points across the valley to where he was. 鈥淎t night we sometimes had to cross minefields between us. Too many men died here.鈥�

In the 1970s and 1980s, Saddam tried to Arabize Iraq鈥檚 estimated six million Kurds. More than 4,000 Kurdish villages were razed and entire communities forcibly relocated. When Iraqi Kurdish fighters sided with Iran during the Iran-Iraq War, which lasted from 1980 to 1988, Saddam launched a scorched-earth campaign of bombing and chemical attacks that claimed at least 50,000 lives. Ahmad Mustafa, the shorter, stouter man, says that 20 of his neighbors were rounded up and executed. An additional 120 were taken from the next village. 鈥淣o one knows what happened to them,鈥� he says.

Like most able-bodied Kurdish men, Qasim and Ahmad fought with the guerrillas for several years. But with families to look after, they eventually fled to Iran, part of the more than one million Kurds who left the country in waves that lasted into the early 1990s. A 1991 uprising ultimately evicted Iraqi forces from the north and led to de facto self-rule, thanks largely to the U.S.-enforced no-fly zone that targeted Iraqi jets flying over Kurdish airspace, but not before a bloody crackdown by Saddam. Rival Kurdish factions then turned against each other in a civil war that ended in 1998, splitting the government in two. The groups did not merge again until after Saddam鈥檚 ouster and the drafting of the 2005 constitution.

As Iraq plunged into chaos, Kurdistan became the paradigm of peace and prosperity that American leaders had envisioned for the entire country. Qasim and Ahmad came home to try and realize the dream of a free and independent state. But that dream is fading. Clashes with the Iraqi army following the hasty independence referendum saw the vaunted Peshmerga concede to Iraq a reported 40 percent of the disputed territory they had controlled since the 2014 fight against the Islamic State. This area includes the city of Kirkuk, whose oil fields drive the Kurdish economy and would be the lifeblood of a state. Turkey is launching cross-颅border attacks against Kurdish rebels and talking about a ground invasion, while Iran is targeting Iranian Kurdish opposition bases inside Kurdistan. 鈥淲e鈥檝e never been comfortable in our lives,鈥� says Qasim. 鈥淭his peace won鈥檛 last.鈥�

Back on the highway, the knocking in my engine seems to be amplified by the darkness, and the bike stalls out on a steep, potholed descent. My rear wheel slides, and I almost crash before skidding to a stop. Balazs is somewhere up ahead in the car, so I wait for Carmen. A half hour passes before I walk back down the road and find him talking with a Peshmerga officer at a checkpoint. Turns out his front tire went flat and I鈥檇 left him behind. 鈥淣early lost it,鈥� he says. 鈥淲hat happened to you?鈥� He bursts into lunatic laughter when I tell him I鈥檝e stalled.

The motorcycle trip is becoming a fiasco. Waiting for a flatbed trailer to haul our broken bikes back to Erbil, Carmen decides to fold and go home to Croatia early. He has just published a war memoir about getting shot in the face with a rocket-propelled grenade in Afghanistan, and he needs to prepare for a book tour in the U.S. Balazs and I will head deeper into the backcountry in pursuit of wild mountains and rivers. But first we need to find our guide.

鈥淢an, we're gonna do some crazy shit together,鈥� Nabil Musa told me the first time we connected on the phone. Nabil was recommended by an American friend who used to live in Kurdistan, with the caveat that he鈥檚 an environmentalist, not a backcountry guide. I took his gonzo talk as just that: talk.

As Iraq鈥檚 lone representative for Waterkeeper Alliance, a global advocacy group based in New York City, Nabil is tasked with protecting waterways that flow through Kurdistan. This involves a mix of protest stunts and derring-do: multi-day swims across freshwater lakes that are being poisoned by industrial pollution, kayak trips to highlight the threat of multiplying Turkish dams, and so forth. More recently, an antidumping campaign had him doing headstands by the oil pools outside Sulaymaniyah, his birthplace and Kurdistan鈥檚 second-largest city. Balazs and I detour to meet him there.

Nabil is 41 but appears a decade older, with the road-worn look of a chain-smoker who鈥檚 spent his life on the move. Wearing sandals, shorts, and a tank top that reveals a strong build, he cooks us dinner at his apartment and riffs rapid-fire about his plans to raft and trek in the mountains around Choman, a gateway town near the Iran-Iraq border. He鈥檚 been stuck in Sulaymaniyah for more than a month, and his restlessness verges on manic. 鈥淚 just need to get out,鈥� he says in a faint British accent picked up abroad. 鈥淚 go mad if I don鈥檛 get outside enough.鈥�

In the morning, we load his pickup from a garage full of kayaking and rafting gear, and soon we鈥檙e back on the road, climbing past sawtooth ridges and burned limestone canyons, with 鈥淕uantanamera鈥� blasting out of his speakers. In a cloud of smoke, Nabil recalls how, back in the mid-1990s, during the civil war, the two main Kurdish political factions鈥攖he Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), led by Masoud Barzani, and Jalal Talabani鈥檚 Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK)鈥攅xchanged mortar and artillery fire on the strategic heights above us. Thousands died in the fighting, and Kurdish hopes for self-determination nearly perished with them.

Like most Kurds of his generation, Nabil has seen violence. As a teenager during the 1991 uprising against Saddam, he witnessed the death of his two best friends during a battle for the Iraqi Intelligence Service鈥檚 Sulaymaniyah headquarters, a former torture chamber that鈥檚 now a bullet-pocked museum. In 1996, during the civil war, he fled overland to Turkey, then to Europe. He spent several years busking on the streets and joined a traveling theater group in the UK before returning home permanently in 2011 to take the Waterkeeper job.

In the time Nabil had been away, a population boom and rapid development had taken a toll. Trash and toxic runoff choked the river he grew up fishing. Nabil had dreamed of this river while in exile, and he was angry that no one seemed to care. 鈥淓veryone here is obsessed with security and making money,鈥� he says. 鈥淭he environment didn鈥檛 have many defenders.鈥� A friend told him about the Waterkeeper gig, and he decided to become 鈥渁 voice for the rivers.鈥� He has tattoos of the organization鈥檚 logo, a sturgeon mosaic, on his calf and shoulder.

About 20 miles past the resort town of Rawanduz, Nabil pulls over near a bridge spanning the Azadi River, one of Kurdistan鈥檚 fastest. Or so he says, and I鈥檓 taking his word for it. My online searches yield no details on the waterway, and there are no legitimate outfitters in the area for us to consult. Nabil figures that the stretch of rapids we鈥檙e sizing up are Class IV-plus, though he admits he can鈥檛 be sure. To his knowledge, no one has ever run them. He wants to be the first.

A stocky fire-brigade rescue swimmer named Khalil Mahmoud walks over and asks what we鈥檙e up to. When we tell him, he says, 鈥淵ou are not right in the head. It鈥檚 full of trash, and there are hidden currents鈥攖his is a death river.鈥� Every year, 15 to 20 people drown, he says, adding, 鈥淔our days ago I pulled out another man.鈥� A government placard behind him states the obvious: SWIMMING HERE IS DANGEROUS.

Nabil starts pacing back and forth, taking long pulls on his cigarette. 鈥淔uck it,鈥� he finally says. 鈥淟et鈥檚 do this.鈥�

I like Nabil's can-do attitude, but our combined experience running hardcore rapids is limited. On the drive up, he told us about the last time he paddled a portion of the Azadi, in 2014, as part of an anti-dam campaign. One of the men in his group had his hand cut open by underwater debris. My whitewater experience includes a few Class IV rafting trips in the Himalayas, all with internationally recognized outfitters.

鈥淵ou鈥檙e free to do whatever you want鈥擨 just have to warn you,鈥� Khalil says. But he鈥檚 also a little excited by the turn of events and offers to stand at the water鈥檚 edge to save us if we flip. He points to the opposite bank, where a nasty concrete shelf juts out beyond the crux of the whitewater, bristling with shafts of rebar. 鈥淚f you make it through, you must avoid that!鈥� he says.

Balazs hangs back with Khalil to photograph our passage through the crux. Nabil and I drive a few miles upriver, inflate a big raft, and don helmets and vests. 鈥淛ust follow my lead,鈥� he says, 鈥渁nd when I say paddle, give it everything you got.鈥� We push off, me in the front, him driving at the rear, easy drifting. The cliff to our left soars more than 300 feet and, at intervals, hangs over the river like a roof, lined with tumbledown vines that glisten from the last rainfall. On a day like today, it鈥檚 hard to believe that there鈥檚 no one else out here.

Suddenly, Nabil shouts 鈥�Hard right!鈥� We鈥檙e too late. An eddy catches the edge of the boat and we whipsaw around, bouncing backward off the rocks. I turn to look at Nabil, alarmed.

鈥淥K, that was my bad,鈥� he says. 鈥淚 fucked that one up.鈥�

We shake it off and keep drifting. The next rapids are slippery smooth. Rounding a wide bend, the flow starts to surge, the roar of the water becomes more deafening. I thought I had a good read on the rapid from above, but at this level, the line through the boulders is invisible.鈥淲hich way?鈥� I shout back. 鈥淲hich way? Nabil?鈥�

The current has a grip on us, and all I hear is 鈥�笔补诲诲濒别!鈥� In an instant, we smash straight into a rock and spin sideways into an adjoining chute of whitewater that almost throws me from the raft.

As we slide deeper into the churn, I see Khalil, poised in a wrestler鈥檚 crouch, ready to jump in to save us. Balazs is right behind him, tracking us with his lens. At that moment we鈥檙e swept left and shot into the bank of broken concrete. The side of the raft shrieks against the metal spikes. Somehow it doesn鈥檛 burst. We spend the last leg of the trip gliding in silence, soaked and shaken.

鈥淚f this raft were Chinese, we鈥檇 be dead,鈥� Nabil says as we step onto the riverbank. My jaws are clenched.

With no footpath to speak of, Khalil and another man help us scrape the raft up the canyon face. Down the road, a flatbed truck is backing up to the river鈥檚 edge to dump a load of rubble. 鈥淟ook at this bastard,鈥� says Nabil. He jogs over and turns on his camera to shame the driver. The driver stares back at him, confused. Tons of rocks go crashing down the bank, adding new complications to the rapid we just passed through.

Night is falling听when we pull into Choman. Erbil, around 100 miles west of here, seems a world away. The main street is empty and quiet, except for the patter of yellow and green political banners that flap in a crisp breeze. Up ahead, Mount Halgurd鈥攁t 11,831 feet, the highest peak situated entirely inside Iraq鈥攊s socked in by clouds.

During the drive, I asked Nabil if it would be possible for us to climb Halgurd. Ever the optimist, he said we鈥檇 have to speak to his friend Bakhtyar Bahjat, acting director of Halgurd-Sakran, the first national park in Iraqi Kurdistan. I鈥檇 been told that the roughly 460-square-mile park鈥攕et high in the border triangle of Iraq, Iran, and Turkey鈥攃ontains unclimbed peaks and dense forests prowled by bears, wolves, and Persian leopards. It鈥檚 also home to armed guerrillas whose presence both protects an extraordinary natural bounty and keeps part of the park off-limits.

The next morning, Bakhtyar meets us at the visitor center. He鈥檚 a hale man with a buzz cut and the earnest gusto of a schoolteacher (his day job). His crisp suit and upbeat attitude are at odds with the dereliction around us. The park鈥檚 carved entrance sign has been pulled from the ground and leans sideways against a wall. The courtyard fountain is dry, and the faux-log-cabin-style offices鈥攃rammed with topographical maps, pastoral nature paintings, and creepy taxidermy鈥攁re covered by a sheet of dust, remnants of a grand dream now forsaken. 鈥淯nfortunately, we are facing some challenges at the moment,鈥� Bakhtyar says.

Background information on the park is scarce, but some articles about it say that the vision for a national park came to Choman鈥檚 former mayor Abdulwahid Gwani after a 2010 trip to Austria. Gwani mobilized a team of international experts to draw up boundaries and a multiyear growth plan to transform one of the most land-mine-

ridden areas in the world into a nature reserve. Backed by a million-dollar grant from the Kurdish government, he expanded the park to include Mount Halgurd and other peaks, brought in teams of designers, and hired dozens of rangers, mostly Peshmerga veterans, to crack down on illicit hunting and tree felling. With time, Bakhtyar says, many locals began to 鈥渟ee tourism as a future.鈥�

And then came the Islamic State.

In June 2014, the jihadists stormed across the Nineveh Plains and eventually made it to within 20 miles of Erbil. Every one of the park鈥檚 rangers dashed to the front lines. Islamic State bombs and booby traps stymied their counteroffensive, and demining teams working around the park were called in to help. Globally, oil prices crashed, slashing the salaries of park employees. Bakhtyar went back to working full-time as a teacher. His codirector left for a job in Erbil. Poaching resumed, and locals hacked trees to replace winter fuel they could no longer afford. Worse, in mid-2015, a three-decade-old conflict reignited between Turkey and the Kurdistan Workers鈥� Party (PKK), leftist militants whose territory overlaps with the park, bringing regular air strikes and artillery barrages that reportedly have killed civilians. A final blow came last year when Gwani died.

鈥淩ight now, Halgurd-Sakran is just a name on paper,鈥� says Bakhtyar.

With park visits down about 80 percent in 2018 compared with the year before, Bakhtyar is in an accommodating mood. No matter that we want to climb Iraq鈥檚 tallest mountain on a day鈥檚 notice and don鈥檛 have any gear. We stop by the local mountaineering club and enter a dank basement, where Bakhtyar starts digging through milk crates. In short order, I鈥檓 equipped with a yard sale鈥檚 worth of secondhand climbing gear from Eastern Europe: a neon snowsuit, trekking poles, gloves, and bent crampons. Balazs, who stands a brooding six foot five, is issued black pleather gaiters that rise to his knees and might have seen previous action in an S&M club.

Up on the mountain the next day, a drift of leaden clouds obscure the summit, dimming our chances of reaching it. But I鈥檓 more concerned about what鈥檚 underfoot. Mount Halgurd鈥檚 flanks are littered with land mines and unexploded munitions from conflicts that date back four decades. Kurdish fighters based in these mountains have alternately faced off against Iranian attackers, Iraqi jets armed with Saddam Hussein鈥檚 chemical weapons, Turkish commandos, and each other during civil war.

Scanning the wind-raked slope we鈥檙e crossing, I see bits of shrapnel, mortar shells blasted into rusty flower shapes, Soviet anti颅personnel mines, and the melted husks of American-made 鈥渢oe poppers.鈥�

鈥淒on鈥檛 worry, I鈥檝e been up here too many times,鈥� Bakhtyar says, reading our minds. He assures us that the route we鈥檙e on has been cleared by experts, though we don鈥檛 see any sign of a trail and demining efforts around here seem to be scattershot at best.

Earlier that morning, on the drive up the Iraqi-army-built supply road, we passed a government warning sign about land mines that had been bulldozed by locals. Bakhtyar explained that land appropriation is on the rise, but there鈥檚 nothing he can do since the park has no rangers left to enforce the rules. Farther along, red metal posts topped with white skull-and-bones symbols line the road. These indicate mines still to be removed. But it appears that rockslides have shifted the positions of some of the posts.

Less than 30 minutes into our trek, we see other posts higher up the slope, which we鈥檙e traversing single file. Several feet to my right, I spot a beige plastic disc in the gravel.

鈥淚s that what I think it is?鈥�

Bakhtyar is in front listening to music on his phone. He turns and squints at the mine, a bit confused.

鈥淗mm鈥� Someone must have thrown it,鈥� he says.

鈥淪o this is not a minefield, but there are mines everywhere,鈥� Balazs deadpans.

Bakhtyar is already walking again, lost in thought or pretending not to hear us. Nabil looks unsure.

Balazs and I exchange a glance. Both of us spent many years covering the war in Afghanistan, often hitched to U.S. combat units in the badlands of Helmand province, a Taliban hellscape. Firefights in 100-degree heat were bad, but nothing was worse than the improvised explosive devices that routinely took lives and limbs. After starting a family, Balazs had sworn off war zones. I鈥檇 done the same, but it took a couple of years before I could stroll through a park without reflexively appraising the ground.

Now I鈥檓 trying to walk in Bakhtyar鈥檚 footsteps, to minimize contact with uncertain terrain. My legs feel sluggish, the trekking poles an added liability.

I tell myself that I鈥檓 being melodramatic. But a familiar low-grade dread is setting in. As we pick our way through the final stretch of rocky dirt, heading for the snow line, Kurdistan is starting to feel a lot like Iraq.

It's well past noon when we reach the shoulder; clouds sheath the entire peak, which is under a fresh layer of snow. We pull out our crampons and lace up. Bakhtyar reckons that it will take at least another four hours to reach the summit, maybe more. Given our late start, we were kidding ourselves that we could reach the top and get down in a day.

I hand out energy bars, and Nabil shares a story about the last time he tried to climb Halgurd. A macho American guy in his group insisted that he knew a better route up the south side. Soon the climbers found themselves wandering lost through waist-deep snow, with mine posts sticking up now and then. After telling us this, Nabil says his foot hurts, so he鈥檚 going to head back to the truck, taking a roundabout route to avoid encounters with unexploded ordnance. 鈥淵ou guys enjoy,鈥� he says.

Balazs and I follow Bakhtyar up a steep bowl toward the base of the rock face. The going is slow. For the next hour we crunch and stumble, the warped crampons sliding off my feet. We eventually stop at the edge of a couloir scattered with ice fragments. The passage is technical; thick snowfall dims visibility. Go any farther and we鈥檙e pushing our luck for no good reason. It鈥檚 time to turn back.

鈥淲e have a saying,鈥� says Bakhtyar, trying to lighten the mood. 鈥淭ouching the top is not like touching the stone of Kaaba,鈥� a reference to a sacred shrine in Mecca. I catch my breath. Balazs tightens his gaiters while Bakhtyar takes selfies. Then we turn and start down.

The going is smooth until the ice runs out and we鈥檙e on rock and scree. Bakhtyar decides we鈥檒l follow a different route down, one that leads us through an alley of loose, rain-slicked rock. Clumsy steps send a jackrabbit scrambling up the opposite side of the ravine, giving me a jolt. To keep my mind occupied, I take a cue from Bakhtyar and look for wild mushrooms, which are plentiful this time of year.

And then I spot another mine. I warn Balazs to give it a wide berth. We shuffle down the scree with active feet, nervous and hyperalert, studying the ground obsessively. Bakhtyar is way ahead of us, singing along to folk songs about PKK martyrs. He has supreme confidence in his memory鈥攐r a cool fatalism I don鈥檛 share.

Nabil is sucking on a cigarette when we reach the truck. Butts dot the ground. Apparently he strayed from the 鈥渟afe route鈥� he intended to follow, an error he realized only when he looked up and saw skull-and-bones markers staring back at him. 鈥淢an, I nearly shit myself,鈥� he says. He swipes his phone to show us the highlights, including an unexploded 82-millimeter mortar round.

The sun dips behind us on our drive back to Choman, casting shadows on Mount Sakran, across the valley. Beyond it lies the Iranian frontier, where in 2009 three young American hikers were arrested by border guards and imprisoned鈥攐ne for 14 months, the others for more than two years. This foreboding stretch of land is seeded with land mines and the bones of countless Iranian troops who parachuted into paradise during the war. To this day, snipers stationed at the high army posts take potshots at Kurdish shepherds who wander too close. At night their floodlights glare down like menacing eyes.

Near the bottom of the mountain, we pass a scruffy Western backpacker on foot. Nabil throws the truck in reverse and we greet him. He says his name is Kaspars, that he鈥檚 from Latvia, and that he plans to climb Halgurd at dawn. 鈥淪ome locals are going to meet me at the top,鈥� he says. 鈥淭hey told me it鈥檚 easy. Just follow the path.鈥�

鈥淲ho told you that?鈥� Bakhtyar says, scowling.

The kid can鈥檛 remember their names but assures us: 鈥淭hey are nice guys.鈥�

鈥淵ou know, there are mine fields up there,鈥� I say. 鈥淣o joke鈥攚e just walked out of one.鈥� Everyone chimes in, and the Latvian seems to reconsider. We wish him luck. For the rest of the drive, Bakhtyar grumbles about who Kaspars might have talked to, the dangerous ignorance of some people in Choman, and the general lack of order since the park project fell apart.

By definition, war is the enemy of development and tourism. Sometimes, though, it鈥檚 nature鈥檚 friend. According to Bakhtyar, the only part of Halgurd-Sakran National Park where poachers and tree cutters don鈥檛 operate with impunity is the roughly 20 percent under the control of the PKK, which is considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. government. 鈥淭hey are hardcore fighters, but they also care a lot about nature,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 at the heart of their philosophy.鈥�

I want to meet these conservationist rebels. Their stronghold is just a short drive from Choman, one valley over, in the Qan颅dil Mountains. Trouble is, since fighting resumed with Turkey three years ago, air strikes and shelling attacks there have escalated. And with the presidential elections coming up in Turkey, the military has been ratcheting up bombardments to please its Islamist nationalist base.

My first e-mail query to the PKK came back negative. Near the end of our stay in Choman, I follow up. We don鈥檛 need a formal reception, I write鈥攚e just want to make a quick stop at a martyrs鈥� museum and cemetery that Nabil visited several years earlier, to take pictures and learn more about how the PKK is protecting its homeland from pollution, poaching, and overdevelopment. This time the guerrillas鈥� contact, nom de guerre Zagros, agrees.

鈥淵ou can visit the Museum,鈥� he writes. 鈥淵ou can also visit the site of the Zargali massacre. As I told you, the guerrillas cannot accompany you. Better not to stay in the area for too long. Because both of the sites have been bombarded before.鈥�

Twenty minutes south of Choman, we reach the turn to the Qandil Mountains. The sign at the junction gives no indication of where we are, as though the valley road does not exist. Nabil gets out at the KDP checkpoint to register our names with local authorities, who tell us we鈥檙e on our own. We wrap around a ridge and a lush green vista unfurls in front of us. A couple of miles on, two PKK guerrillas emerge from the trees in traditional Kurdish shawls, Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders, their vests sagging with the weight of hand grenades. They wave us on.

We鈥檙e waiting by a destroyed hillside portrait of Abdullah Ocalan, the group鈥檚 founder, when Zagros pulls up and extends a hand. 鈥淵ou are most welcome in Qandil,鈥� he says. I thank him and ask about the drones from Turkey. 鈥淭hey are not here at the moment, but when they see guerrilla clothes, armed men, they call in jets, which arrive in less than 15 minutes. The past few months have been especially bad鈥攖hey hit this road three days ago.鈥� Zagros suggests we head toward the museum. 鈥淎lso bombed,鈥� he adds with an apologetic smile.

I鈥檓 eager to move. Balazs and I join Zag颅ros in his truck, and it dawns on me that we鈥檙e going to be driving 30 miles on a road that is regularly targeted by air strikes. With Nabil trailing us, we鈥檙e in what amounts to a convoy. In his blunt, Hungarian manner, Balazs voices what I鈥檓 thinking: 鈥淭here are no other cars on the road.鈥� Farther along, the charred wreckage of a family vehicle destroyed by a Turkish strike offers a visual we would rather not see.

Zagros drives with the beatific expression of a man who has surrendered to his fate. Handsome, with a strong, dimpled chin and a brushy black mustache, he says he used to be a high school teacher in western Iran, living a comfortable middle-class life. But he was haunted by the persecution of his people. When Ocalan was captured during a joint U.S.-Turkish operation in Kenya in 1999 and placed in solitary confinement in Turkey, Zagros came to view him as something like a Kurdish Nelson Mandela.

鈥淭hrough him, I felt the isolation of the Kurds, that the Kurds have no friends in the world,鈥� he says. He left Iran for the mountains, later joined by five students鈥攖wo of whom have since been killed. 鈥淢y concern is not for myself but for my people,鈥� Zagros says. 鈥淧KK is not only a party, it鈥檚 a new way of life, a new world vision.鈥�

He ticks off the movement鈥檚 basic goals: the right to self-determination, the liberation of women, and the protection of the environment. He says that respect for the land and ethnic diversity were destroyed by modern nation-states like Turkey, the militants鈥� archnemesis, which has tried to erase the identity of its 15 million Kurds, in part by repressing the Kurdish language. 鈥淚f real democracy is achieved in these countries, the Kurdish question will be resolved,鈥� he says. 鈥淯ntil then we will fight, as long as it takes.鈥�

Women make up more than 45 percent of the PKK鈥檚 ranks, from foot soldiers to commanders. Cruising along, we pass giant billboards that show photographs of female guerrillas who were killed in battle against the Islamic State, draped in ammo belts and thick hair braids. Some are buried in the martyrs鈥� cemetery, where the rows of gravestones are lined with roses and grouped according to the battles they were in: Sinjar, Al Hasakah, Kobani. The museum that stood here at the time of Nabil鈥檚 last visit is now just a hole in the ground. An unexploded bomb rests in the adjacent crater.

Near the end of the valley, Zagros stops at a Kurdish nomad camp. We spread out on a tattered kilim in the shade of a tree, and a woman with facial tattoos brings us a pot of hot tea and sugar cubes. Her sons are out grazing their flocks on meadows that run up the valley鈥檚 ridges. Moving with the seasons, living off the land, they are the embodiment of an ideal Zagros is ready to die for. For now the air trills with birdsong, rent by the barks of fighting mastiffs. The mountains brim with life.

They also take it.

The explosion echoes across the valley late in the afternoon, when demining teams around Choman are no longer working. Bakhtyar, Nabil, Balazs, and I are on a ridge outside of town, photographing the mountains, and it鈥檚 close enough to startle us. Bakhtyar texts around and learns that a local man named Haidar Shwan accidentally set off a mine near the Grmandil Mountains, one of the bloodiest battlefields of the Iran-Iraq War. He was blown to pieces.

Under a full moon, we drive up to a cemetery overlooking town. A single streetlamp lights a backhoe digging Haidar鈥檚 grave, a reminder that nighttime burials are not uncommon. I meet the victim鈥檚 brother, who shows me a picture of Haidar: soldier, father of four, and the sixth member of his family killed by a land mine. He suspects Haidar was taking the mine apart for the gunpowder, which sells for $45 a pound on the black market. 鈥淚t was one of his hobbies,鈥� the brother says.

Packs of men file in from the darkness and gather around the grave, murmuring, until the crowd numbers more than 400. A few shed tears, but most remain stoic, partaking in a ritual of shared grief that has affected families in Choman as far back as they can remember. They鈥檝e all been here before, and they will be here again.

The casket is lowered and spades are handed out. Young men take turns furiously shoveling dirt into the hole, as though Haidar鈥檚 safe passage to heaven depended on their speed. Five hours after he was killed, he鈥檚 underground. The imam offers a prayer, and everyone goes home.

Our last day in the mountains is May Day, and for Kurds that means picnics. Nabil, Balazs, and I take the valley road out of Choman toward the Iranian border, until the pavement ends. We park by a stream too fast to ford, and a group of friends from Erbil wave us over to their fire for chicken skewers and fermented goat鈥檚 milk. We eat our fill and talk about why the U.S., staunch ally of the Kurds since the Saddam era, didn鈥檛 back last year鈥檚 ill-fated independence bid, considering all the social and economic progress and stability that Iraqi Kurdistan has achieved compared with the rest of Iraq. I don鈥檛 have a good answer.

As we get up to leave, one man warns half-jokingly: 鈥淒on鈥檛 walk too close to Iran.鈥� We hike across a moraine and crest a small ridge to find a potbellied man in pantaloons bent over, staring at the ground, an AK-47 strapped to his back. Kayvan Ezzat, a 37-year-old policeman, is mushroom hunting and invites us to tag along. 鈥淚鈥檓 fat, but I can climb the mountains all day,鈥� he says with a toothy grin. 鈥淲alking out here will make all your troubles go away.鈥� Though with wild animals around and hostile Iranian soldiers within firing range, he always brings the gun. 鈥淚t鈥檚 like having 50 men with you,鈥� he explains.

I ask how he knows where to step. 鈥淚 know because I鈥檝e been walking in these hills since I was a boy,鈥� he says. 鈥淗ere is OK, but there and there,鈥� he adds, tracing lines with his hand that I can鈥檛 begin to see, 鈥渁re not OK.鈥�

The mind starts to play its games. My time in Kurdistan has shown me that even confident, in-the-know locals have their blind spots, and missteps can be fatal. I鈥檝e also come to understand that the Kurds鈥� nature-loving ways are inseparable from the threats that seed and surround their homeland. Living at danger鈥檚 edge has a way of magnifying the essential. And in the moment, these haunted mountains sharpen my senses, quicken my pulse, and whisper vast possibilities to be explored. The old expression 鈥淜urds have no friends but the mountains鈥� has a new layer of meaning.

I take in the breeze and exhale. I鈥檒l just follow the policeman鈥檚 tracks. And try to think of mushrooms.

Jason Motlagh () wrote about the Afghan sport of buzkashi in November 2017.

The post My Crazy Kurdistan Road Trip appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

It started with one question, “Should we go?” Skiers听and 听answered “yes” and traveled to Iran to find new ski terrain, and to explore听the social impact skiing has on the country. Some parts of the culture are indistinguishable from that in Jackson Hole or Whistler, but听for local skiers, it's a careful navigation between two worlds. Find more from Arc'teryx and the project .

The post Arc’teryx’s ‘A Skier’s Journey’: Iran appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

In its final season, A Skier's Journey听explores the far reaches of skiing and the places it exists. This year has a peculiar combination of locations including Iran, China, and British Columbia. Find more from Arc'teryx , Gore-Tex , and visit British Columbia .

The post Searching for Skiing in Iran, China, and British Columbia appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

Each year, we send our editors and writers on a mission to find the destinations on the vanguard of the travel. The major takeaway from our 28 favorites of 2016?听The entire world is getting more adventurous. Travelers are pushing boundaries, from听seeking out newly accessible Cuban bars to touring North Carolina breweries鈥攂y canoe. In years past, a cruise around the Antarctic involved lots of gawking at icebergs. Today, the same cruise has you booting up and ripping untouched snow with mountaineers Andrew McLean and Chris Davenport.

But don鈥檛 think for a second that this trend is limited to far-flung and expensive trips: small towns like Bentonville, Arkansas, are investing in world-class mountain bike trails鈥攎aintained by professional crews!鈥攁nd innovative, hard, and fun-as-hell races like Quincy, California鈥檚 Grinduro are popping up just about everywhere. There's never been a better time to get out there鈥攁nd this is the definitive guide to a year well traveled.

1. Jamaica

We know what you鈥檙e thinking鈥攔eggae and ganja. But there鈥檚 another reason to head here: Blue and John Crow Mountains National Park just earned World Heritage Status in 2015.听This 65,000-acre tropical rainforest鈥檚 two mountain ranges are a Caribbean biodiversity hot spot, with 1,357 species of flowering plants plus endangered birds like the yellow-billed parrot. On the clearest days, 7,402-foot Blue Mountain Peak offers views of Cuba, 130 miles to the north. Arrange an overnight or long-haul backpacking trip with Kingston-based (from $230). For easy access to the park, book the brand-new, six-bedroom (from $2,750), which sits on a lush hilltop near the northeast beach town of Port Antonio. 鈥�Stephanie Pearson

2. Bentonville, Arkansas

Yes, the home of Walmart鈥檚 corporate headquarters. The retail behemoth鈥檚 presence means the town is flush with cash, and a lot of it has gone toward creating a premier mountain-biking destination. There are now some 23 miles of singletrack just three miles from downtown. Even better: Arkansas employs the only professional mountain-bike-trail maintenance crews in the U.S. But don鈥檛 just take our word for it. The booked it for this year鈥檚 World Summit in November. 鈥�Bryan Rogala

3. Basecamp Hotel, Tahoe City, California

In 2012, Christian Strobel turned a decrepit motel in South Lake Tahoe into , a boutique lodge for adventure travelers, with fire pits and GoPro screenings. Now he鈥檚 giving Tahoe City a Basecamp of its own, with a yoga studio, in-room bike racks, and concierges with climbing beta鈥攁ll located less than 20 minutes from the slopes. 鈥�Megan Michelson

4. Iran

Look past the complicated politics and the dark image of the country鈥檚 leadership; intrepid travelers who鈥檝e trailblazed here come back with tales of lively culture and the overwhelming friendliness of the people. Skip the canned tours and start with a DIY circuit of Tehran鈥檚 museums, caf茅s, mosques, and the Unesco World Heritage site of ancient Persepolis, in Shiraz. Then hook up with British outfitter to summit Iran鈥檚 highest peak, the 18,464-foot, still-active volcano Mount Damavand (from $3,675). Located just 45 miles northeast of the capital, Damavand is a nontechnical but demanding five-day ascent, with views of the Caspian Sea to the north and barren desert to the south. 鈥淒amavand has the challenge of other more famous treks like Kilimanjaro but without the crowds,鈥� says Exodus鈥檚 Emma Garrick. 鈥淣ot encountering other groups for the entire route is practically guaranteed.鈥� 鈥�Graeme Green

5. Ladder Ranch, Gila Mountains, New Mexico

Media mogul Ted Turner has impeccable taste in real estate. Take , a remote five-bedroom home that opened to guests in September and sits on 160,000 acres of Turner鈥檚 private land on the edge of the Gila Mountains and the Chiricahua Desert. Guests spend days mountain-biking, spotting bighorn sheep and elk, and visiting ancient petroglyphs. $6,000 for four people, all-inclusive. 鈥�Kate Siber

6. Nihiwatu, Sumba Island, Indonesia

After a long search for the perfect surf spot, Claude and Petra Graves knew they were finished when they saw the reef break 100 yards off Nihiwatu Beach. The couple built the by the wave鈥攊t鈥檚 an hour鈥檚 flight east of Bali and comes complete with spear-fishing guides and an equestrian center. But the focus is still on surfing, and less than 80 guests per day means you won鈥檛 have to battle for a spot on the huge, hollow left. From $1,000, all-inclusive. 鈥�Jen Murphy

7. Quincy, California

Think of the as a soulful gran fondo for mountain bikers on hardtails and gravel-grinding nuts on cross bikes. The folks at Giro invented it as a new kind of race, combining the timed segments of endurance mountain biking with the luxe food of a century ride and inviting everyone to camp at a fairgrounds high in the Sierra Nevada. And while the resulting vibe is laidback, the course鈥攈eld on fire roads in the Plumas National Forest鈥攊s definitely not: riders gain 7,500 feet in 60 miles, half of which comes in a brutal five-mile dirt climb that averages 12 percent and reduces many to walking. October 8. 鈥�Scott Rosenfield

8. Pemberton Music 颅Festival, British Columbia

Picture Bonnaroo without the sweltering heat and mosquitoes and you鈥檝e got . Last year 115,000 people saw Kendrick Lamar and the Black Keys headline, and things got weird. (Think: an adult-size ball pit and waterslide.) Plan to stay a couple of extra days to ride Pemberton鈥檚 abundant singletrack, which you can roll to directly from the village. July 14鈥�17; passes from $295. 鈥�Graham Averill

9. Ethiopia

Ethiopia is an outlier. It follows a calendar different than the rest of the world. It harbors some of the world鈥檚 last subsistence tribes, one of the harshest deserts on the planet, and (if you believe the locals) the Ark of the Covenant. It鈥檚 also one of the fastest-growing economies in Africa, and recently it has made efforts to improve conditions for visitors. So tackle the Northern Historical Route, a rugged overland trail that leads past ancient stone churches and roaring waterfalls. Or book a few nights in the airy (from $140). It opened in March in the Simien Mountains, which are threaded by trekking routes and populated by animals, like Ethiopian wolves and gelada monkeys, that are found nowhere else in the world. 鈥擪.S.

10. Portland, Oregon

Specifically the Central Eastside. Once an industrial zone packed with old warehouses, it鈥檚 now one of the city鈥檚 coolest spots. Yes, that sounds like a setup for a Portlandia sketch. But the stunning new location of outfitter is giving the area adventure cred. And after you browse skis, you can catch acts like Neko Case at , a remodeled brick high school, or get the four-course chef鈥檚 menu at , situated in a former loading dock. 鈥擬.M.

11. French Broad River, North Carolina

The beauty of traveling by canoe is that you can carry a lot of beer. There鈥檚 probably no better place in the country to test out this theory than the mild 45-mile stretch of the French Broad that flows past the Southern outposts of three of America鈥檚 most cherished craft breweries. Put in at , hit midway through the trip, and take out at on the edge of downtown Asheville. Three days, three killer breweries, and island camping, thanks to the , a newly established series of campgrounds along the way. 鈥擥.A.

12. Smith Island, Maryland

Some of the most determined watermen in the world live on Smith Island, 12 miles off Maryland鈥檚 coast. Shaped by Chesapeake Bay tides, this small patch of dry ground set in salt marsh offers access to a natural maze of kayak trails that cut through the sea grass. Undaunted by rising sea levels, the 300 or so remaining islanders stay true to age-old traditions, fishing for oysters and crabs while speaking the 400-year-old dialect of their Welsh and English ancestors. Catch the on the mainland at Crisfield ($26 round-trip), then check out the island鈥檚 cultural center, where you can rent bikes and kayaks. Stay the night at the (from $125), and don鈥檛 skip a slice of ten-layer Smith Island cake, Maryland鈥檚 official dessert. 鈥�Andrew Evans

13. Nevada

It鈥檚 fair to say that Nevada鈥檚 mountain-biking scene is exploding鈥攆rom the 539-mile Trans-Nevada Trail, which starts at Lake Tahoe and spans the entire width of the state, to miles of new trails being constructed in the state鈥檚 48 million acres of Bureau of Land Management wilds. Start your tour of the best stuff 36 miles south of Las Vegas and ride 35 miles of smooth, flowy intermediate singletrack at the Bootleg Canyon bike park, which has received the Epic distinction from the International Mountain Bicycling Association. Then get farther afield in tiny Caliente, 150 miles northeast of Vegas, where IMBA plans to create 42 miles of trails this year. The group鈥檚 ultimate goal is to build a 150-mile system. Until then, the gravel riding in the area鈥檚 surrounding four million acres of BLM land is spectacular, and the 15 new campsites at just south of town are quiet and tucked away at the base of a 700-foot canyon ($17). 鈥擲.P.

14. San Lorenzo Mountain Lodge, Dolomites, Italy

Giorgia and Stefano Barbini, two Italian fashion-industry veterans, reimagined a into the type of place their friends would visit, preserving its Alpine charm while updating it with creature comforts like heated floors and, naturally, a heli-pad to access distant peaks for -hiking and skiing. Back at the lodge, Giorgia prepares dinner in the wood-fired stove while Stefano selects the evening鈥檚 pairings from the stable turned 1,500-bottle wine cellar. From $2,300 for up to ten people. 鈥擩.M.

15. Wrangell鈥揝t. Elias National Park, Alaska

On 鈥� new pack-raft traverse across Alaska鈥檚 Wrangell鈥揝t. Elias National Park, the action starts the moment the bush plane drops you at Nizina Lake, where you鈥檒l blow up your pack raft and paddle across the water, dodging icebergs fallen from the Nizina Glacier. Then you鈥檒l backpack for the next several days, until you reach the braided White River. From there it鈥檚 all downhill: a four-day, 60-mile Class II trip that ends with a pickup in Canada鈥檚 Yukon. From $4,000. 鈥�Chris Solomon

16. Scotland

If John Muir and James Bond got together and dreamed up an adventure, it would look a lot like 国产吃瓜黑料 GO鈥檚 across Scotland. You鈥檒l experience the spectacular Highlands and then unwind in 007-worthy castles, complete with roaring fireplaces and aged Scotch (which Ian Fleming aficionados know is Bond鈥檚 true drink of choice). You鈥檒l arrive in Edinburgh and shake off jet lag with a hike to the top of Arthur鈥檚 Seat, a dormant volcano that affords Instagram-perfect views of the capital. The next day, you鈥檒l head to the Highlands, taking a boat ride to the Strait of Corryvreckan for a spin in one of the world鈥檚 largest natural whirlpools, off the coast of Islay. The village of Glencoe will be your base for mountain-biking singletrack and scrambling up rugged peaks. And you鈥檒l want to burn as many calories as possible, since dinners at Glencoe Country House have a reputation for decadence鈥攖hink roast rump of lamb and sticky toffee pudding. In the morning, you鈥檒l kayak past otters and eagles en route to a secluded beach where camp tents and a roaring fire await. After a night in the wild, check in at Fonab Castle, then fish for salmon on the River Tay and take in views of Loch Faskally. From $5,450 for ten days. 鈥擩.M.

17. Nepal

Go now. Much of the country was unaffected by the 2015 earthquake, and just 15 percent of the trekking routes were damaged. With tourism down by almost 40 percent, there鈥檚 actually elbow room on the ($3,799 with REI 国产吃瓜黑料s). Visitors to Kathmandu can watch the painstaking restoration of historic monuments while staying at , a monument unto itself (from $220). The quake hasn鈥檛 stopped exciting new developments, either. (from $250), a sustainable resort less than five miles from Pokhara, sits in a lush valley on a working organic farm and will eventually donate up to 70 percent of its profits to charity. From there you can hike Himalayan foothills or set out on a dawn birdwatching tour. Mountain bikers with big lungs: consider 鈥� 12-day tour up trails between 5,000 and 13,000 feet in the Annapurna and Lower Mustang regions (from $3,350). 鈥擲.P.

18. Northshore, Louisiana

For Bayou charm, skip bland, boozy Bourbon Street and the voodoo tourist traps of New Orleans and head across the causeway to the other side of Lake Pontchartrain. The Northshore region was rocked by Hurricane Katrina but has undergone a serious rebirth in the past couple of years. In Covington, rent a set of wheels from and hop on the Tammany Trace, a 27-mile rail trail that weaves through the wetlands. Pull off in Abita Springs, where is brewed with the namesake springwater. If it鈥檚 a Saturday night, stick around for a bluegrass show at the . If not, head back to Covington to fill up on salumi and mussels at , then sip a Sazerac at the Cypress Bar in the century-old . 鈥�Cheney Gardner

19. Antarctica

One can only imagine what Ernest Shackleton would think of the continent鈥檚 transformation into an adventure travel hub. Now skiers can carve empty slopes with ski mountaineers Andrew McLean and Chris Davenport on a with Ice Axe Expeditions (from $8,995, plus a $1,000 backcountry-skiing fee). Shackleton buffs can join all-star explorers Conrad Anker and Tim Jarvis on a that sails to Elephant Island, where his expedition took refuge after their ship sank (from $14,995). The seriously hardy can fat-bike to the South Pole on TDA Global Cycling鈥檚 18-day, 69-mile . The $70,000 price tag is staggering but includes a Specialized fat bike to take home. Or opt for 国产吃瓜黑料 GO鈥檚 on a 68-passenger icebreaker. You鈥檒l sea-kayak to remote inlets, hike to rugged peaks, and, if you dare, cannonball into the frigid ocean (from $11,595). 鈥擲.P.

20. Colombia

The country鈥檚 passion for cycling is superheated at the moment, thanks to Nairo Quintana鈥檚 second-place finish at the 2015 Tour de France. And adventure companies like are offering new routes into forgotten corners of the Andes and across the coastal plains. Tackle the Alto de Letras鈥擟olombia鈥檚 signature ride and what鈥檚 said to be the longest paved climb in the world at 51 miles. Or opt for something mellower: pedal a chunk of Colombia鈥檚 coffee region, riding narrow, low-traffic streets past colonial villages, plantations, and high-elevation jungles. Make sure to fuel your ride with an agua-panela, hot sugarcane water mixed with melted cheese, known to locals as Colombian Gatorade. 鈥擥.A.

21. Santa Barbara, California

Santa Barbara usually brings to mind retirees on picture-perfect beaches. But the town of 90,000 is becoming younger, more active, and more interesting. , off downtown鈥檚 State Street, was started by two former pro cyclists and is the de facto meeting spot for the new breed of Santa Barbaran鈥攖he type that鈥檚 fueling up for a trail run in the Los Padres National Forest or a ride into the Santa Ynez Mountains. At night you鈥檒l find the same crowd at downtown bistro , which opened two years ago under the leadership of a twenty-something manager and wunderkind head chef. The team mixes can鈥檛-miss dishes with a sense of humor: the Egg McMuffin is an ode to the sandwich invented in 1971 at a McDonald鈥檚 just down the road. 鈥�J. Wesley Judd

22. Australia

Trekkers often overlook Australia because they鈥檙e dazzled by the descriptions of the routes in New Zealand (plus that whole Lord of the Rings thing). But Oz offers some of the best hiking routes on the planet. A particular stunner is Victoria鈥檚 four-day guided , a moderately difficult trail that covers 34 beautiful and remote miles hugging mainland Australia鈥檚 southernmost coastline along the Bass Strait. Guests stay at an eco-lodge designed for trekkers, with a foot spa and an impressive collection of wines. From $1,432. 鈥擲.P.

23. Hokkaido, Japan

The far northern island of Hokkaido is known for hot springs, temples, serious powder in the winter, and alpine hiking in the summer. Getting there used to require a ferry or pricey flight. The new , scheduled to begin service in March, will take you from Tokyo to Hokkaido in just over four hours, reaching speeds of nearly 200 miles per hour and traveling through the longest undersea train tunnel in the world. 鈥擥.G.

24. South Africa

Because the country offers incredible wildlife and wine鈥攂ut also because it hosts world-class races. On March 6, ride along-side 35,000 others in the 67-mile . Surfers, SUPers, and longboarders can sign up for the second annual August 19 to 21, at Muizenberg Corner, 16 miles south of Cape Town. Worth noting: last year鈥檚 inaugural event was cut short due to a great white shark sighting. The hottest new stage race is the three-day, 99-mile . You鈥檒l skirt the local high point鈥�8,209-foot Compassberg鈥攁nd pass through a game reserve filled with wildebeests, springbok, gemsbok, and zebras. 鈥擲.P.

25. 贵盲惫颈办别苍, J盲rpen, Sweden

Remote and well regarded鈥攊t鈥檚 number 25 on the San Pellegrino list of the 50 best restaurants in the world鈥� is set in an 18th-century barn on a 24,000-acre hunting estate 374 miles north of Stockholm. It鈥檚 worth the journey. The 30-course meal, orchestrated by head chef Magnus Nilsson, is farmed, foraged, and hunted on or near the estate. From drippingly fresh scallops cooked over juniper branches and birch coal to pine-bark-syrup ice cream, every bite is original. The best strategy to get one of its coveted 16 seats? Call on April 1 for a reservation for May through December, and spend the night in one of the restaurant鈥檚 five rustic bedrooms. Dinner, $258; accommodations, $292. 鈥擲.P.

26. Mealy Mountains National Park, Canada

Canada鈥檚 western half has long dominated the dreams of adventure travelers, but this year all eyes are on Newfoundland and Labrador with the opening of 4,130-square-mile Mealy Mountains National Park. Officially titled the Akami鈥搖apishku-KakKasuak鈥揗ealy Mountains National Park Reserve, it will be the largest in eastern Canada and comanaged by Parks Canada and the Innu people, who will develop aboriginal cultural experiences for visitors. The terrain ranges from rivers full of wild Atlantic salmon, rugged mountains capped with snow, sub-arctic tundra, boreal forest, and sandy ocean beaches that marauding Vikings called the Wonderstrands when they sailed past 1,000 years ago. Wildlife highlights: caribou, wolves, black bears, and martens, just to name a few. Base at the Innu-owned (from $2,190 for three days) or land a salmon at the fly-in fishing camp ($6,465 for three days). 鈥擥.G.

27. The Hotel 颅Habana Riviera Bar, Havana, Cuba

Havana is a city of ghosts, of absent gods and buried criminals. Take a seat in the 鈥檚 lobby bar鈥攁 tiny black curve with just four or five stools鈥攁nd listen for the sounds of the past: the roulette wheel, the clacking of poker chips, the murmuring crowds and celebrity high rollers. The principal owner at the time, Meyer Lansky, was the American Mafia鈥檚 main man in Cuba. His aerospace pleasure palace opened with a performance by Ginger Rogers in December 1957. Barely a year later, Fidel Castro took power, the casino tables were tipped over, and the hotel nationalized, the brief moment of corrupt glory over. But you can still have the memories. The hotel鈥檚 interior is stuffed with rich marble, golden latticework, and Enzo Gallo sculptures. The bar is now a quiet space, backstopped by an epic picture window full of ocean. There鈥檚 usually baseball on, and the Daiquiri Natural is good, year on year. 鈥�Patrick Symmes

28. WeeCasa, 颅Lyons, Colorado

Test-drive living small at this . There are 12 rentals on-hand, clustered along the banks of the North St. Vrain River in Lyons, 30 minutes from Rocky Mountain National Park and a quick bike ride from the Oskar Blues brewery. From $189. 鈥擥.A.

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It’s evening at the caravansery. Businessmen gather in the garden, summoning skewers of meat, each larger than the last, to their tables. Some head indoors to the chaikhana in one of the building’s converted stables, although at this hour they seek听shisha (flavored tobacco), not tea. The waiters鈥�garcons, they call themselves here鈥攑our more wine, racing from booth to booth with desperate deference as the orders pile up.

Baku: Guesthouses are rare in Baku. With the exception of the (very basic) Caspian Hostel (15 manat for a dormitory bed), the only budget accommodation in the old town can be found at the than to modern-day transporters of spice.听

Azerbaijan is increasingly looking to its cosmopolitan past to define its identity as a tourist destination. This summer, Azerbaijan鈥攁long with three other Turkic states鈥攍aunched an initiative to develop a Silk Road tourism route across Central Asia.

Sheki holds fast to its Silk Road legacy. The city鈥攍ike Azerbaijan as a whole鈥攖akes pains to emphasize its history as a onetime gateway to the East. On the winding streets of Sheki’s old town, hundreds of stalls called duqans sell silk scarves and handicrafts鈥攑atterned silver dishes and intricately whittled wood. Halvesi鈥攕weet shops鈥攁re almost as numerous, ,听along with candied hazelnuts and the brightly dyed pink and yellow sugar cubes that are so ubiquitous here.

Then there’s the , located high on a sweeping green hill overlooking the old town. Built in the late 18th century鈥攚ithout a single nail or drop of glue, according to legend鈥攖his summer residence of Sheki’s onetime rulers is a wild cacophony of colors and cultures designed to showcase the Khan’s power. The main visiting hall features delicately painted murals of weaponry and military banners, hunting parties and dragons鈥攖he latter a motif heavily influenced by Azerbaijan’s trade with China. Ottoman fireplaces cast shadows on stained-glass windows. Once, this hall was designed to intimidate visitors, to make them fully aware of the Sheki Khan’s wealth and strength. Even today, it demands reverence.

国产吃瓜黑料, an old man keeps a taxidermied wolf hidden underneath a carpet; only its muzzle pokes out from beneath the tassels. He stretches out his hand and waits for a tourist to trickle in coins before yanking back the covering to reveal the full animal, its eyes beady, its mouth lolling open.

At New Bazaar, a labyrinth of corrugated tin at the very edge of town, Sheki’s mercantile past feels even more present. Less picturesque than the elegant shopping stalls of the old town, Sheki’s bazaar is a riot of colors and smells. Heads of sheep and cows, freshly severed, share table space with ladles full of sumac and coriander. Sticky halva sells for four manat (about $6) a pound. Shopkeepers, their hands glistening with honey, force free samples into my palms. It takes several napkins to get the last of the sugar off my fingertips.

I stop by one more prosaic stall to pick up a miniature screwdriver to open my cellphone. I ask the price in halting Russian; the seller grins and shrugs. It’s a present, he says.

If the winding streets of Sheki embody Azerbaijan’s Silk Road past, Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital on the Caspian, exemplifies the city’s future. Silk and spice first gave way to oil at the turn of the 19th century, Baku’s initial oil boom. In 2005, with the inauguration of an Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey pipeline, 听while the upper echelons of its wealth鈥攎ost of whom belong to the ruling Aliyev family鈥攕ought to remold the city as a 鈥淧aris of the East.鈥�

Such frenetic remodeling is evidenced throughout Baku’s historic center. At the 15th-century palace of the Shirvanshahs, once Baku’s rulers, a high-tech video display is projected onto the faded domes, offering visitors examples of how the ceilings might once have been painted. With the aid of technology, wall miniatures move and the throne room is restored. At the nearby Maiden’s Tower, one of Baku’s most famous landmarks, a holographic flame allows tourists to pose for fiery photographs. In the distance stands Baku’s most iconic new building: three flame-shaped towers鈥攁 nod to Azerbaijan’s Zoroastrian legacy鈥攃omprising offices, hotels, and apartments for the city’s oil-rich elite.

At night, more holographs display neon fire as well as the Azeri flag. Along the Beaux-Arts waterfront of Neftchiler (Oilworkers) Avenue, the usual suspects proffer international luxury鈥擠ior, Tiffany, Dolce & Gabbana鈥攁dapted to the local audience. Advertisements feature three generations of a smiling, prosperous Azeri family in a traditional-looking house. Their toddler sons wear exquisitely tailored suits. A sign for Pastis,听either a franchise or knockoff of the New York restaurant, promises more decadence next door. Coffee here goes for five manat ($8) a cup.

Everything is the kind of beautiful that costs millions to construct and millions more to render subtle. The smell of oil is thick in the air.

Tonight, the听caravanseries听of the old town are empty. Black-suited men have cleared them out. They talk in hurried tones onto walkie-talkies. Security staff crowd the narrow alleyways.

“It’s normal,” says my friend Adnur, “whenever important people come into this part of town, they close it off.” Tonight, it’s the visiting French president; last week it was someone else. Yesterday, Adnur tells me, it was the birthday of current president Ibrahim Aliyev’s late father, Heydar Aliyev, effective ruler of Azerbaijan for nearly all of its recent history, whose face still appears on billboards in every town. “You couldn’t get close to the waterfront, there were so many people celebrating.”

It’s too expensive to get tea here, he sighs. He takes me 10 minutes outside the city center, where the shining facades and historic reproductions give way to ivy, crumbling concrete, and tea brewed in rusty samovars. “People听live听here,” he says.

But others are more excited about Baku’s frenetic development. When I visit the Carpet Museum, located in a faded neoclassical building on the waterfront Bulvar, my guide, Ramaz, excitedly shows me the plans for a new museum, which he tells me will be finished in a month or two. Fashioned of chrome and glass, the new museum resembles a rolled-up carpet. He points out another new carpet: a larger-than-life photorealistic image of Heydar Aliyev. “Every thread by hand,” he tells me.

Ramaz shows me the other carpets and explains how each fits into Azerbaijan’s legacy of trade and cultural expansion. The cross, symbolizing the four elements, is imported from Persia and Zoroastrian religious traditions. The dragon, stylized by Sunni Muslim tradition (which prohibits lifelike depiction) into an unrecognizable “S” shape, is taken from China, Azerbaijan’s frequent trading partner in the Silk Road days. Every strand tells a story and is an “exchange of spiritual values,” the plaque says.

国产吃瓜黑料, the boulevard whirs with the sound of cars and the smell of oil seeps out to sea.

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THE VILLAGE OF AHMED AWA鈥攁 single street of ramshackle shops and restaurants鈥攕its inside a mountain gorge just above the fertile plains of Iraqi Kurdi颅stan, about ten miles west of the Iranian border. Beyond the village, a dirt parking lot marks the start of the trail to the Ahmed Awa waterfall, one of Iraq’s most popular nature spots. The morning that I visited, in January, was clear and warm, but it was still unmistakably winter. The wild pomegranate, walnut, and fig trees that cover the slopes along the river leading to the cataract were bare, and I could see the torrent rushing by through a skein of skeletal branches. A cold rain had fallen during the night, and as I set off on my hike, joined by a Kurdish interpreter and the driver of our taxi, I had to keep to the edge of the trail, close to the drop-off, to avoid sinking into pools of mud.

The Iran-Iraq border

The Iran-Iraq border

Shane Bauer

Shane Bauer

Sarah Shourd

Sarah Shourd

Josh Fattal

Josh Fattal

Shon Meckfessel

Shon Meckfessel

As we hiked into the Zagros Mountains, which rise to nearly 12,000 feet along the border between Iraq and Iran, the driver grew nervous. “We’re going to have lunch in Tehran,” he said with a tense laugh. He had reason for his gallows humor: Six months earlier, three Americans鈥擲hane Bauer, 27; his girlfriend, Sarah Shourd, 31; and Josh Fattal, 27, Bauer’s former housemate from the University of California at Berkeley鈥攈ad walked along this same trail, with disastrous results. The hikers had鈥攁ccidentally, it seems鈥攕trayed across the unmarked border into Iran, been seized by border guards, accused of being U.S. spies, and transported to the notorious Evin Prison, in Tehran, where they remained as this story went to press, in March. Bauer, Shourd, and Fattal are experienced globetrotters who’ve traveled to such hot spots as Yemen, Kosovo, and Lebanon; two of the three speak Arabic. Yet somehow鈥攖hrough lack of preparation, cultural misunderstanding, ignorance, or a combination of all three鈥攖hese sophisticated nomads had wandered into one of the worst places on earth to be an American. Now I was retracing their footsteps, trying to understand how they’d made such a catastrophic error.

The path was deserted; when the American hikers were here, at the height of summer, it would have been crowded with families of Iraqi Kurds. The trees along the river would have been leafy and bountiful with fruit, and wildflowers would have speckled the now monochromatic pale green slopes. Ahead of us, a sign in Kurdish script identified the settlement of Zorm, a cluster of stone-and-mud huts perched on an outcropping. We slid down a muddy slope to talk to a farmer drying pomegranate rinds on the roof of his house. He remembered seeing the Americans when they stopped for tea before continuing to the waterfall. Two mornings later, he said, police and intelligence officers swarmed the village, informing locals that “the Americans have been arrested in Iran.” The farmer suspected that their transgression had been deliberate, though there are no signs to announce the border. “Nobody has ever made that mistake before,” he said. “Who knows? Maybe it was their secret task to go.”

The trail became steeper, and the gorge narrowed. The sun was shining in a cloudless sky, burning off the mist that had shrouded the jagged, snow-dappled peaks ahead of us, in Iran. Fifteen minutes later, we reached a thundering 60-foot cascade that turned the turbines in an adjacent hydroelectric power station. There we met another local, a former peshmerga鈥攁 Kurdish freedom fighter鈥攚ho’d battled the Iraqi army in these mountains in the eighties and now owned walnut orchards here. Over the water’s roar, he told us that the border was a two-hour walk east into the mountains. Almost all hikers come to look at the waterfall and then turn back, he said. But somehow the Americans had kept walking. From what he’d learned, they’d slept outside and crossed the border in the early morning, when the trail was empty.

“Nobody could warn them,” he said.

THE THREE HIKERS could hardly have picked a worse time to fall into Iranian hands. Hostility between the United States and the Islamist regime has reached a level not seen since the 1979 hostage crisis, when a gang of students and militants seized 66 Americans at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held the majority of them for 444 days. Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denials and anti-Israel diatribes, the surging power of Iran’s anti-Western Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the regime’s suppression of the country’s pro-democracy movement have driven rhetoric to new heights of acrimony.

Several U.S. citizens have been seized or allegedly seized by Iran’s government in the past three years. These include Roxana Saberi, a former Miss North Dakota and Iranian-American journalist for National Public Radio, who was jailed for four months in 2009 on spying charges; Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent and private detective who disappeared in March 2007 while apparently investigating a cigarette-smuggling case for an unnamed client in the Persian Gulf; and Ali Shakeri, an Iranian-born mortgage banker and peace activist from California, who spent 140 days in Evin after he was arrested in 2007 while visiting his ailing mother in Tehran. According to Alireza Nader, an Iran specialist for the RAND Corporation, a California-based think tank, these arrests have become standard procedure, a situation that’s not likely to change. “It has been [the government’s] modus operandi since the 1979 revolution,” Nader says.

When a civilian is jailed in Iran, the U.S. government is dealt a hopeless hand. The State Department has had no diplomatic relations with Iran since 1979 and must rely on the Swiss Embassy’s Foreign Interests Section to help negotiate any release. In typical fashion, State’s diplomats have been extremely cautious about what they will say regarding the three jailed hikers. Philip Frayne, the U.S. Embassy spokesman in Baghdad, will only confirm that they have been reaching out to regional allies like Syria and Turkey. “We’ve asked everyone who has relations with the Iranians to put in a request with the Iranian government to release the three,” he says. One top official in the Kurdish regional government, former freedom fighter Sadi Ahmed Pire, maintains that Iraqi president Jalal Talabani, whose warm relations with Iran date back to the eighties, has appealed personally to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to free the Americans on humanitarian grounds. “The president [is making the case] that it’s a matter of fairness to make their stay in prison very short,” he says.

That’s certainly what their families hope. The hikers’ parents鈥擲hane’s mother, Cindy Hickey, and her husband, Jim, in Pine City, Minnesota; Shane’s dad, Al Bauer, two hours south in Prior Lake; Nora Shourd, in Los Angeles; and Laura and Jacob Fattal, in Cheltenham, Pennsylvania鈥攈ave reached out to the regime, sending letters to Ahmadinejad and appealing via video to Ayatollah Kha颅menei. They’ve also called on public figures in the U.S. and abroad to lend their voices to the free-the-hikers campaign.

The silence was finally broken on March 9, when Iranian authorities permitted each of the hikers to call home. Reliable reports had indicated that Bauer, Shourd, and Fattal had been treated with particular severity inside Evin: locked in solitary confinement, subjected to frequent interrogations, and, with the exception of a few letters from home and two visits from Swiss diplomats, denied contact with the outside world. But in the short phone calls鈥攚hich lasted only several minutes each and were likely monitored by Iranian guards鈥攖he Americans said their treatment had been humane. Bauer and Fattal share a cell, they told their parents, and Shourd is permitted daily one-hour visits with her friends. The three said they were getting exercise, eating reasonably well, and even being permitted glances at state-run Iranian TV. But they were still in prison.

For all the hikers have endured, the stateside response has been muted compared with the attention lavished last year on Roxana Saberi, or on Current TV journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee鈥攚ho strayed across North Korea’s border from China in March 2009 and were sentenced to 12 years’ hard labor before being granted amnesty two months later. Few people buy the Iranians’ claim that the hikers were working for the CIA. But they lack powerful media sponsors, and they suffer from a widespread perception that their predicament is their own fault.

“‘Hiking’ between two countries which are in the news every day, and then calling it ‘outrageous’ when they are arrested is…completely ridiculous,” commented one reader on the Web site of the progressive magazine Mother Jones, to which Bauer has contributed occasional freelance stories. “These morons…deserved to be detained.” Many people I talked to about the case expressed bewilderment, even a hint of scorn, at how they could have been so clueless.

For the hikers’ families, the calls seemed a hopeful sign that their children might be released within weeks. But, whenever their ordeal ends, it serves as a frightening reminder of the political fault lines that often run along the world’s geographical boundaries. The trio’s imprisonment has drawn new attention to the dangers of adventure travel in an era when conflict zones can turn overnight into trendy destinations, guidebook writers can’t keep up with expanding appetites for edge-of-the-world experiences, and gung-ho vagabonds venture into places where having a U.S. passport can put you at risk.

As I discovered in my own travels through the region, Bauer, Shourd, and Fattal are indeed partly to blame; they went into Kurdi颅stan with a shocking lack of preparation. Even so, they were not well served by those they turned to for advice, and they fell victim to a sequence of small mistakes and misunderstandings that snowballed into a catastrophe鈥攁nd turned them from innocent backpackers into pawns in a high-stakes face-off between implacable enemies.

MOST OF WHAT the country has heard about the Americans’ capture has come from the so-called fourth hiker, Shon Meckfessel. A 37-year-old writer, musician, and student of Serbo-Croatian and Arabic now getting his Ph.D. in language theory at the University of Washington, Meckfessel traveled with Bauer, Shourd, and Fattal as far as the regional hub of Sulaymaniyah, a bustling town about 30 miles west of the Zagros Mountains. The night before their camping trip, he came down with a fever and stayed back at the hotel. He last saw his friends on Thursday evening, July 30, as they piled into a taxi for the 90-minute drive up to Ahmed Awa.

Meckfessel and his friends represent an idealistic breed of young American: cosmopolitan, curious, and engaged with the world. Each is the kind of expat鈥攋ournalist, teacher, activist鈥攚ho is devoted to bridging the gap between the U.S. and less developed countries, even in unstable areas where anti-American feeling may be rife. These travelers are in many ways the opposite of the ugly American鈥攍earning the local language, engaging with people, and debating their country’s policies in the bistros of Eastern Europe or the refugee camps of the Middle East. As Meckfessel says, “I’m interested in cultures that people in the U.S. misunderstand.”

The four converged in the Middle East through activist circles in the San Francisco Bay Area. Bauer, who grew up north of Minneapolis, and Fattal, who’s from the Philadelphia suburbs, met at Berkeley. After graduation, in 2004, Fattal became a staffer at Aprovecho, a nonprofit outside Eugene, Oregon, that designs low-impact stoves for the developing world. Bauer stayed in the Bay Area, trying to get a career as a journalist off the ground. He traveled in the Balkans and the Middle East and protested against the Iraq war.

Around 2005, Bauer met Sarah Shourd, a Berkeley grad from Los Angeles who was teaching English to newly arrived immigrants. The couple soon began living together in Oakland. They also found they had a mutual friend: Shon Meckfessel, another Bay Area resident whom Shourd had met on a relief trip to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and who knew Bauer from local music clubs and the activist scene.

In August 2008, the couple moved to Damascus, Syria, for a year. The capital of a Baathist police state, Damascus is none颅theless a seductive city with a secular atmosphere. Shourd studied Arabic and taught English at a language academy and to Iraqi refugees. Bauer freelanced for Mother Jones and The Nation. They fell easily into the thriving expat scene that revolves around the bars and caf茅s of the Old City.

Overall, they struck other Damascus expats as friendly and well-intentioned: Bauer is slight and energetic, while Shourd exudes a sweet, homey vibe that can belie her countercultural ideas. “They were very idealistic鈥攁 nice couple of kids,” says British freelance correspondent Kate Clark. “They wanted to make the world a better place.”

Last summer, Fattal and Meckfessel caught up with Bauer and Shourd. Fattal had just finished a semester as a teaching fellow at the International Honors Program, traveling around the world with 33 undergraduates. Meckfessel was spending the summer in Damascus after studying Arabic throughout the region. The four began planning a ten-day trip to coincide with Shourd’s summer break. They’d already seen Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan and were looking for a new adventure; after talking to a number of other expatriates, they settled on Iraqi Kurdistan.

“Friends told us they’d been to Sulaymaniyah, to the mountains,” Meckfessel says. “One said it was the most beautiful nature he’d ever seen in his life.” Known by travel-savvy Westerners as the “safe Iraq,” Kurdistan has been pro-American since George H. W. Bush sided with the Kurds in their uprising against Saddam Hussein after the Gulf war of 1991. There hasn’t been a significant terrorist attack there since 2004.

But getting precise travel information proved difficult. The Americans had loaned their Middle East Lonely Planet guide to a friend and resorted to a poorly detailed map printed from the Web. “We didn’t feel we had to do real in-depth preparation,” Meckfessel admits.

FOR DECADES, the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan was one of the most violent corners of the Middle East. The center of an ethnic Kurdish belt that extends from eastern Turkey to western Iran, it was targeted in the eighties by Saddam Hussein, who鈥攊n an effort to stamp out a series of rebellions鈥攔azed 4,000 Kurdish villages, slaughtering at least 50,000 civilians. In April 1991, Saddam’s forces drove hundreds of thousands of Kurds across the mountains into Turkey. The first President Bush demanded the withdrawal of Iraq’s troops, which helped the Kurds run an autonomous government. After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the Kurds began to develop their economy and open up to foreign tourists.

Many of these are European, but over the past two years a steady trickle of Americans鈥攍ow-budget travelers who work in the region and retirees on package tours鈥攈ave made their way here, drawn by the snowy mountains and green valleys, the culture, or simply the thrill of visiting Iraq. The standard route is overland across the Turkish border, or by Atlasjet flights from Istanbul to the Kurdish capital of Erbil. Still, Rebwar Daoud, who runs Babel Tours, in Erbil, told me that drumming up business isn’t easy. “We are trying to create a good image of Kurdistan,” he said, “but many people of Europe and America think, ‘You are going to Iraq? Oh, no, you are crazy.’ “

To get a sense of the hikers’ overland journey, I flew to Diyarbakir, in the Kurdish region of Turkey. I spent a night in a 16th-century converted caravansary, then hired a taxi to take me 175 miles east to the border at Silopi, where the four had crossed into Iraq. Darkness fell and, as the lights of the Iraqi border town of Zakho shone on the horizon, we rumbled across a suspension bridge over the Khabur River. At the border post鈥攆lying only a Kurdish flag, not an Iraqi one鈥攁 smiling official served me tea and stamped my U.S. passport after a cursory scan. There, I met my translator鈥攁n Iranian Kurd named Jamshid鈥攁nd hired a driver before heading on in the morning to Sulaymaniyah, six hours southeast.

The road twisted and turned through treeless mountains and fertile plains, past villages rebuilt after being bulldozed by Saddam. We reached Sulaymaniyah around nightfall and retraced the hikers’ path to the Miwan Hotel, a second-floor hole-in-the-wall a few doors down from a pirated-DVD shop.

“They were polite, no trouble; they didn’t even ask to take a shower,” said Muzafad Mohammed Zeli, the proprietor, a mustachioed 55-year-old wearing traditional baggy cotton pants. On the wall of the reception area, I noticed three photos of the Ahmed Awa waterfall. These pictures, Meckfessel recalls, were part of what had piqued the hikers’ interest in the first place. “All of us asked the owner where we should go to see the mountains,” he says, “and he pointed at the photos.”

Zeli, Meckfessel says, was one of ten people in Kurdistan who recommended they visit Ahmed Awa, but none of them mentioned that it was anywhere near the border. Zeli, however, insisted that he’d never discussed Ahmed Awa with the four. “If I had known,” he told me, “I would have warned them not to go.”

Ahmed Awa wasn’t on the Americans’ map, but they decided that it must lie in a mountain range near Dukhan, north of Sulaymaniyah and about 30 miles west of the border. They imagined following a hiking circuit through the mountains, camping under the stars. “For the Kurds, Ahmed Awa is a two-hour trip,” Meckfessel says. “We were thinking in terms of Yosemite鈥攕everal days.”

The friends settled into a brightly painted room with four beds, for which they paid 40,000 Iraqi dinars (about $35). The next day they toured the city, stocked up on provisions for their trip, and e-mailed home. “Hey sweetness,” Shourd wrote her mother. “So, we’re traveling. Actually, we’re in N. Iraq! It’s totally safe. The Kurds in this area have been pro-American since 1991. …So, don’t worry. Tonight we’re going camping. I love you.”

On the walk back to the hotel, Meckfessel began to feel feverish. He stayed behind as the other three set off in a taxi for the mountains at about 6:30 P.M. The plan was to meet on the trail the next day. Early in the morning, Friday, July 31, he got a cell-phone call from Bauer, who urged him to hurry and join them. “You totally could have slept here,” Bauer told him. “The weather was warm all night. It was really comfortable.” The hikers had camped under blankets in a clearing beyond the waterfall, Bauer said, then gotten up at 4 A.M. and started hiking again in the dawn light.

Astonishingly, Bauer and the others still didn’t realize they were anywhere near Iran; armed only with their Web map, they continued east, oblivious to their true location. Later, local newspapers would report that the three Americans were indeed warned鈥攂y a soldier at the last checkpoint before Ahmed Awa. “Be careful,” he allegedly told them. “There are no signs about the Iranian border.” If he did tell them, the message didn’t sink in. But six months later, when I passed through the same checkpoint, two guards inspected my passport carefully and demanded that Jamshid, my interpreter, leave his own identification card behind.

“If you are arrested in Iran,” one of them affably explained, “we can find the clues more easily.”

Even if the hikers had known the border was nearby, they still could have missed it. According to retired U.S. colonel Harry Schute, who runs tourism and security businesses in Erbil, “you would think that it would be a readily identifiable feature like the top of hill or a river, but it’s just the middle of a slope, with some blocks on the ground. And if you don’t know what that rock means, you can cross without realizing it.” There’s a huge smuggling industry on the border, Schute says, and the hikers鈥攚ho speak no Farsi or Kurdish鈥攃ould’ve been reassured by the movement back and forth. “There’s a lot of traffic. Watching these folks, you might think you’re OK, and next thing you know…”

Shortly after noon that Friday, Meckfessel sent Bauer two text messages saying he was on his way. Both went unanswered. “Then, at 1:13 P.M., I saw Shane was calling,” Meckfessel recalls. “I said, ‘How are you doing?’ and he said, ‘We’re in trouble.’ He was really serious. Worried, but not panicked.”

Bauer was inside a vehicle. “We were hiking and suddenly we had Iranian guards around us,” Meckfessel remembers him saying. “We had hiked up to the border and we didn’t realize it. We’ve been taken into custody, and they’re taking us somewhere.”

“When he said ‘Iran,’ ” Meckfessel tells me, “it was like saying he’d just landed in Vanuatu. It was the most shocking thing I’d ever heard.”

CINDY HICKEY was working at her Pine City, Minnesota, animal-training-and-nutrition business on a sweltering July morning when she received an overseas call. Through a crackling connection, a consular officer from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad informed her that her son, Shane, had apparently been arrested by “authorities” inside Iran. At that point, the embassy’s only information came from Meckfessel, who, after reaching a duty officer at the embassy by cell phone from Sulaymaniyah, had been flown to Baghdad and debriefed. Twenty minutes later, Hickey got a second call from the State Department, joined by the FBI. “They had no more details,” she says. “They said, ‘As soon as we find out anything, we’ll call you.’ “

Several days passed before both Iran and the U.S. confirmed the hikers were in custody. For their families, this set off an all-consuming campaign of vigils, letters to Ahmadinejad and other Iranians, and meetings with U.S. public officials, including senators Al Franken and Arlen Specter and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

At first daily, and now “regularly,” Hickey says, the families check in with a State Department contact who keeps them apprised鈥攗p to a point鈥攁bout the government’s efforts. “I feel like they are doing the best job they can, considering the relations between the U.S. and Iran,” she told me in early February. “There are a lot of things they can’t tell us.”

Through the State Department, they received sketchy accounts of visits made by two Swiss diplomats to Evin Prison on September 29 and October 29. Each hiker, Hickey says, “passed a private message to the Swiss, four or five sentences. Shane said, ‘I love you, I miss you,’ he talked about his sisters, and said he was able to get some of our letters. He said, ‘I’m physically OK, I’m strong, but lonely.’ “

In addition to the State meetings, the families began conferring on their own. “We brainstorm, we put things on the table, we weigh and balance things,” Hickey says. In the early days, they wrestled with the question of how they should handle the media鈥攚hether to keep a low profile and let State work its back channels or to make as much noise as possible. Hickey initially contacted 国产吃瓜黑料 about her son’s plight. But last December, when I reached out to the families, she responded with a brief e-mail thanking me for my interest but letting me know that they weren’t granting any interviews. Weeks later, they changed their minds and have since made themselves available to the press.

They’ve also worked to keep their children from being forgotten: Laura and Jacob Fattal have organized vigils in their Cheltenham, Pennsylvania, hometown, as well as a public appeal on the families’ Web site, . In December, Nora Shourd donned a chador, the floor-length garment worn by women in Iran, and released a video addressed to Ayatollah Khamenei. “Your Excellency,” she said. “They are good people. They did not mean to enter Iran. They meant no harm to the Islamic Republic…and have a deep respect for your ancient and noble civilization. If they entered Iran, it was an innocent mistake.”

For a long time, their appeals were met with silence. Iran refused the Swiss Embassy’s requests for further prison visits, and information dried up. Iranian lawyer Masoud Shafie鈥攚hom the family hired last fall, anticipating espionage charges鈥攈as continued to demand that the judiciary allow him to meet his clients. Reached by phone in Tehran in January, the attorney told me he’d gotten nowhere. “They don’t allow me to see them, and it is not according to the rule,” he said. “I told the judge that they must charge them after four months. Already six months have passed. They say, ‘Wait, wait, wait.’ “

In February, the door cracked: Iran’s top human-rights official, Mohammad Javad Larijani, told journalists in Geneva that he’d recommended to Iran’s judiciary and security forces that the mothers be allowed to visit their children. They immediately sent a letter to Ahmadinejad urging him to grant them visas. And then came the day in March.

“We got no warning, and neither did they,” Nora Shourd says. That morning, she noticed an unknown caller ID on her cell phone and let the call go to voice mail. When she played back the message, she was astonished to hear her daughter’s voice: “Hi, Mom,” Sarah said, “it’s me. They’re giving me the chance to call from prison. I’m ok and I’m coping.” Shourd was overwhelmed with emotion鈥攁nd regret that she’d missed the call. But Sarah phoned back 20 minutes later, and the mother and daughter spoke for three rushed minutes. Sarah quickly sketched in prison life鈥攕he was reading the GRE preparation guide Nora had sent (before her capture, she’d planned to return to the States to study women’s issues) and was able to see Bauer and Fattal. “The big fear,” Nora says, “was whether or not they were OK, and that big fear was lifted. It feels like things are moving a little. It could be that they just threw us a crumb, but the kids are hopeful.”

According to Alireza Nader of the RAND Corporation, the calls are indeed a positive sign, but they don’t necessarily presage the hikers’ release. The regime, he says, “ramps up repression when it feels threatened, but it’s been feeling less threatened lately, so they could be more relaxed.” Despite this goodwill gesture, Nader says, a real breakthrough may still require backroom negotiations.

“These innocent people have become bargaining chips,” agrees Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford University, who spent a month in solitary confinement at Evin during the reign of the last shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Iran wants the U.S. to ease pressure for reform and to lift economic sanctions, Milani believes; more specifically, it is seeking the release of 11 Iranian nationals, reportedly including intelligence officers and Revolutionary Guards, held by the U.S. military in Baghdad jails.

There may be a precedent for such a swap. Two months after Roxana Saberi’s release in May 2009, the U.S. military freed five Iranian prisoners in Baghdad. Embassy spokesman Philip Frayne insists that “there was no deal on Saberi, despite how it may look.” Regardless, in early February, Ahmadinejad publicly raised the possibility of a prisoner exchange in an interview with Iranian state television. Secretary of State Clinton immediately rejected the idea and again called for Iran to release the three “on humanitarian grounds.”

While some experts had cautioned that, given the depth of animosity between the U.S. and Iran, the Americans could be in for a longer stay, Milani can envision an eventual pardon by Ahmadinejad. Or the case might follow the Saberi model: She was sentenced to eight years for espionage, but an appeals court knocked the charge down to possession of classified information and gave her a two-year suspended sentence.

“I think Iran has realized there isn’t much wiggle room there,” he says, “and gradually they will step down. I would not be surprised if, a year from now, these young people are writing their memoirs at home.”

IT IS A ROUGH eight-hour drive east from the border near Ahmed Awa to Evin Prison, built at the foot of the Elburz Mountains in northern Tehran. A pale-blue metal gate in the dull-red brick facade leads to cell blocks, solitary-confinement and interrogation wards, a courtroom, and an execution yard鈥攚here 29 convicted murderers, rapists, armed robbers, and drug traffickers were hanged on a single day in July 2008. In recent years, the prison has also become the destination for opponents of the Islamist regime.

In March, the hikers described a tolerable existence inside Evin. But the calls were short, and Nora Shourd says that she could hear what sounded like an Iranian male voice speaking English in the background, indicating that they were being closely monitored.

From accounts of others who’ve spent time inside Evin, including Roxana Saberi, a picture has emerged of what the Americans may have gone through. Prison officials likely separated them upon arrival. The three would have received uniforms鈥攂eige synthetic sweats for all three, and, for Shourd, a chador. Then they would have been placed in single-person interrogation rooms, isolated from the other prisoners鈥攁bout 2,600 men and 400 women in 2006, the last time the international press had access.

Saberi, who spent 18 days in solitary last winter, says that, as high-value prisoners, the Americans were likely settled either in Ward 209鈥攔un by the Intelligence Ministry鈥攐r Ward 240, administered by the Revolutionary Guards. Each ward consists of several corridors painted antiseptic white, each lined with four or five cells, with a thin carpet and a tiny window covered by a wire-mesh screen that lets in a trickle of daylight. In the first weeks of their captivity, they may have been kept blindfolded and interrogated for hours a day, an experience that Saberi describes as disorienting and often terrifying.

“You don’t know how many people are in the room with you,” says Saberi, who chronicled her experiences in Between Two Worlds: My Life and Captivity in Iran, which was published in March. “They claim you are guilty [of spying], and you believe they believe it. They threaten you with a long time in prison unless you confess.”

Saberi’s quarters were a spare cell; she slept on the floor beneath a blanket, with a bare bulb kept on 24 hours a day and a small heater that never seemed to generate enough warmth. Her only contact came when the guards delivered meals: white bread and a cheese slice for breakfast, rice and stew for lunch, canned food for dinner. “Time passes so slowly, especially when you’re in solitary,” she says. “They are wondering every day, when will they get out of there?”

Halfway across the world, the hikers’ friends and families wait with them. In Washington State, Shon Meckfessel can’t keep his mind on his studies; he admits he’s dealing with a form of survivor’s guilt. “I’ve struggled,” he says. “I know my friends wouldn’t want my life to fall apart, and when they get out I don’t want them to see everything in shambles. Sometimes I think they’re going to get out soon, then I read something and I think they’ll be there forever. It’s horrible, unimaginable stress.”

Meanwhile, in Minnesota, Cindy Hickey was relieved to find out that her son was not languishing in solitary and clings to the belief that the Iranians’ attitudes are softening. “I know my son,” she says. “I know how responsible he is, and I can’t believe he’d put anyone in harm’s way. We are both hikers,” she says. “It’s beautiful, there’s a trail, and you want to know what’s around the next corner.”

The post A Mountain of Trouble appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

Skiing Iran

Farshad Kahlili and the author boot toward untracked snow at Shemshak

Skiing Iran

The powder patrol at the base of Dizin

Skiing Iran

Skiers at Shemshak

Skiing Iran

Idle gear at the resort's base

Skiing Iran

A memorial billboard on the road up

Skiing Iran

A sunny day at Dizin

VALI ASR AVENUE, IN CENTRAL TEHRAN, is a bustling hub of sports retail. There are soccer shops and bike shops, shops that sell wrestling apparel and those that offer only hats, including a few auto-racing caps with beer logos which is funny, because it’s been illegal to consume alcohol in Iran since 1979. You’ll also find shops full of skis and snowboards imported from Europe. Look closely and you’ll even spot some American gear.

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The ski equipment makes sense once you gaze north, straight uphill, as Vali Asr broadens and climbs 2,000 feet toward the base of a white-topped mountain that looms above Tehran’s deservedly notorious smog: 13,005-foot Mount Tochal.

If you squint at the lower regions of this steeply pitched peak, you’ll see a gondola stop, the start of a seven-station ferry that takes skiers to the top of one of the world’s highest ski areas located here, within the municipal boundary of the capital of the Islamic Republic of Iran, archnemesis of the United States, circa now.

Tochal is just one mountain in a towering, 560-mile-long range known as the Alborz, which divides northern Iran’s vast salt desert from the lush hillsides fronting the Caspian Sea. I’ve come during the wet spring of 2007 to snowboard several resorts in the range, starting at Tochal. Three days after arriving in Tehran, I make the trip up for the first time.

The gondola’s base sits amid a cluster of rickety amusement rides and tea shops. Few people are kicking around the dusty, snowless courtyard, but one young Iranian snowboarder spies my Burton board and waves. He’s wearing big sunglasses and has his helmet clipped to a pair of cargo pants. He would blend in seamlessly at Big Bear.

“Bur-ton,” he calls out, in heavily accented English. “Where you are from?”

“America.”

“A-mer-i-ca?!” he replies, his tone somewhere between a question and a shriek. “We are your enemy, no?”

I’m not sure how to answer that. Technically, yes our governments hate each other. Personally, no I’m here as a curious tourist in search of friendly faces.

He shares the news with a lift operator, whose eyes bulge. “NBA?” he says, doing a quick mental scan of his English dictionary. “Ma-gic John-son! Sha-keel Oh-neal!” There’s a pause. “Mi-kel Jor-dan!” He erupts in laughter.

I cram into a six-seat Poma cabin with my guide, Farshad Kahlili, having just passed under a sign that reads, in English, TRUST US AND ENJOY THE NATURE. It’s a peculiar message, but apt. At various times during the nearly 45-minute ascent to 12,073 feet, the 29-year-old cabin dangles 100 feet over boulders and craggy rocks. It looks like the upper regions of Squaw or Snowbird gnarly, steep, fun.

Unfortunately, Farshad informs me, most of these areas are off-limits for much of the winter because the snow is poor. What’s open is way up top, in a large, shallow bowl served by a pair of lifts.

When we disembark, snow is blowing sideways. All the inbounds terrain is intermediate and, this being Friday (the Muslim sabbath), the place is abuzz with affluent, stylishly attired Iranian teenagers who are, for the most part, very bad at skiing and snowboarding. Women in Iran aren’t supposed to show their hair in public, but they do up here. I see a few scarves, and at one point I think I see two women skiing in full chadors, but otherwise the women show little concern for containing their locks.

Later, on one of the chairs, I talk to a teenager named Ali, a 16-year-old from Tehran who says he’s been snowboarding “one year only.” I am “maybe the tenth” American he’s ever met, he adds, just as the lift sputters to a stop, a not uncommon occurrence. Unlike the boarder down below who, like nearly everyone I’ll meet in Iran, was both befuddled and thrilled by the sudden appearance of an American Ali seems unsurprised. He’s mostly interested in how high I can jump.

And then, as kids around the world are wont to do, Ali starts bouncing in the chair. Violently. Above and behind us, young people cheer and screech. Soon, chairs are moving like plastic bobbers on a stormy lake. One girl, her streaked hair completely uncovered, keeps blowing a whistle, as if a snowy rave is about to ensue. No one is fazed.

It doesn’t take long to exhaust the terrain. That afternoon, on my final descent of the day, I run into a woman I met earlier, Foutuhe Shahrad, a friend of Farshad’s who scoots around on pastel, eighties-era skis. She’s taking a breather by a lift tower.

“You like the skiing?” she asks sweetly.

Very much, I reply. “Maybe you will go back to America and tell everyone how nice it is in Iran,” she says. “Tell them please not to start a war with us.”

IT WAS A WEIRD TIME for a ski trip, to say the least.

By the start of 2007, tensions between the U.S. and Iran had reached levels not seen since the 1979 toppling of the shah and the subsequent hostage crisis. In December, the United States arrested several Iranian citizens under suspicion of aiding in attacks on Iraqi security forces. Then, not long before I left on my trip, U.S. officials presented evidence that Iran had been funneling arms to Shiite militants in Iraq. Iran, of course, was outraged, especially after Iraq’s president said they were in the country at his request.

Meanwhile, Iran continued to defy United Nations orders that it halt the enrichment of uranium, claiming that the country’s intentions at its nuclear facilities鈥攚hich the Bush administration might well destroy as a parting gift鈥攁re only to pursue the peaceful development of cheap power. Guided since June 2005 by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad鈥攁 rabble-rouser known for bon mots like “Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation’s fury”鈥擨ran has been especially aggressive since the U.S. took out the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, cementing the nation’s status as the region’s dominant Islamic power.

But I couldn’t resist visiting. For years, I’d heard whispers about Iran’s impressive mountains and abundant snow. What finally snagged me was the anomaly of it all鈥攖he idea that a U.S.-style snow-sports culture exists in a country that officially bans hand holding by unmarried couples. Was the skiing-and-boarding scene just a ghost of the shah’s Westward-leaning reign? Or was Iran’s massive young population testing new boundaries of liberalization?

I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near the place if not for Farshad, who secured my visa and made all the arrangements鈥攁 process that took months. He’s a cofounder of Iranian Mountain Guides, a startup that appears to be the country’s first backcountry-skiing-and-mountaineering outfit. He picked me up at the airport in his old, faded-blue Jeep Wagoneer.

“Let me tell you about some laws,” Farshad said as we drove away from Mehrabad Airport. “You must not talk to women or take photographs. You must not photograph soldiers. You must not speak politics on the street.” He paused. “I don’t like this way of things, but this is how it is.”

Farshad is a short, sinewy man of 43. He’s been skiing for seven years and climbing in the Alborz since he was a kid. One of his favorite places is Damavand, a dormant volcano that, at 18,605 feet, is the tallest peak in Iran. He’s climbed it some 60 times and skied it more than ten. If weather permits, he’ll take curious visitors just about anywhere in Iran’s vast and untouched backcountry, but I was more interested in seeing who was hanging around at the resorts.

The day after skiing Tochal, we head over to the Iran Ski Federation, a government-run sports body housed in a drab two-story building in northeast Tehran. The federation’s officials are clearly nervous about having an American journalist in their midst, and only after ferocious closed-door negotiating with Farshad do they agree to field my questions.

Farshad and I take our seats facing a pair of desks. At one sits Payan Nazar, the federation’s public relations manager. His uncle runs the ski school at Tochal. At the other is federation official Bahram Saveh Shemshaki, son of the organization’s president, Issa Saveh Shemshaki, a famous Iranian skier. Bahram’s cousin Alidad is currently the country’s top-ranked alpine specialist, which is not exactly like skiing for Austria. At the Turin Olympics, he finished 29 seconds back in the giant slalom.

Bahram is a stylish guy with wire-rim glasses and a black shirt open to his chest. He tells me that residents of the ski town of Shemshak, where he grew up鈥攈ence his last name鈥攈ave been skiing for 75 years. Some basic use of skis for transportation has been going on in the Alborz range for hundreds of years, but the downhill sport as we know it arrived around 1930, when German miners introduced the peculiar pastime to locals. Only a tiny percentage of Iranians ski鈥攎ostly people who live in mountain villages or the posh sections of Tehran鈥攁nd the presence of ski tourists from elsewhere is almost nil.

The federation, Bahram explains, exists to oversee Iran’s ski “zones” (resorts) and also to support national-team members in snowboard, alpine, cross-country, and grass skiing, a bizarre and dangerous summertime offshoot. This year, the federation added boardercross to the quiver and for the first time sent a halfpipe rider to an international competition鈥攖he Asian Games, in Changchun, China鈥攄espite the fact that there’s not a single terrain park, let alone a halfpipe, in all of Iran.

“Snowboarding is new,” Bahram says. “A lot of people like to test it. But I think it will go back to alpine.”

If that sounds familiar鈥攍ike the grumbling you’d hear from skiing purists at Taos or Mad River Glen鈥攜ou’re about right. For the older generation, Iranian snow sports froze stylistically in 1979, when the takeover by Islamic fundamentalists all but outlawed fun. What was left to hang on, barely, was a Euro-inspired skiing infrastructure put in place by the last shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, a passionate skier who encouraged development of the major resorts.

Little has been added since: Only one of the big resorts has built so much as a new lift in the intervening decades. It’s hard to say how close skiing came to going extinct, but government policy, then as now, was one of grumpy toleration for a frivolous Western activity. Popular rumor has it that ski resorts were shuttered after the rise of the mullahs, but that’s mostly myth. Tochal was shut down for 20 years, but the two biggest areas, Dizin and Shemshak, stayed open.

They did so only by a series of miracles, and thanks to the dedication and bravery of people who worked there. Veterans of that scene still tell wild stories about the period following the revolution, when religious zealots stormed the gates, shook the support towers, and literally stoned gondolas while a few bold (or crazy) skiers ascended.

ABOUT 45 MINUTES OUT OF TEHRAN, on a two-lane road that cuts into the mountains along a river of dishwater-colored rapids, big, wet flakes start to fall. Soon everything past the guardrails is whited out as we climb toward Kandovan Pass, which crosses the Alborz range from north to south, topping out at more than 8,000 feet.

Farshad is giddy; it rarely snows like this so late in the year. I ask if he prefers winter or summer, a fair question for a skiing mountaineer. “That is difficult,” he answers. “It’s like, Do you prefer your mother or your father?”

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We pass a turnoff for the Khor Ski Area, a tiny place with “only one small lifter,” Farshad says. Technically, there are more than a dozen ski zones in Iran, but all except five are like Khor: dinky. The ones that matter are, in descending order of size, Dizin, Shemshak, Darbandsar, Tochal, and Ab Ali. All of them lie in the Alborz, none more than a two-and-a-half-hour drive from the luxury apartment towers of north Tehran.

Though Shemshak, which opened in 1958, is very popular, Dizin became the heart of the country’s ski industry after it launched in 1969. It offers the most acreage, the biggest vertical drop (3,117 feet), and one of the longest seasons, opening in late November and sometimes closing as late as June 1.

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One reason for Dizin’s surge was that it captured the attention of important people. General Fatollah Minbashian, jefe of the shah’s ground forces, built a large home across the road from the lifts. The low-slung mansion is often mistakenly referred to as the shah’s “winter palace,” but belonged to Minbashian and served as the big man’s crash pad for ski trips. Minbashian took up skiing with great fervor. He forced his security detail to take lessons until they were good enough to ski in formation behind him. He even wrote a ski manual.

The clouds break. Massive peaks rise before us, slathered in white. I’m pretty sure I hear Farshad say “yum.”

“I think it is perfect for us!” he says.

Pulling into Rudbarak, the last village before Dizin, we stop beside a large sign depicting the grimacing face of the deceased father of Islamic Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. He’s at the head of a wedge of notable martyrs from the Iran-Iraq War, the 1980 1988 conflict that left an estimated one million Iranians and Iraqis killed. The air is still and clear, and here, for the first time, we hear the call to prayer, a mournful song echoing in the valley.

In the morning we hit the slopes. An old gondola car hangs from a decrepit stone arch, marking the entrance to Dizin, a massive three-sided bowl that, at 8:30 A.M., is nearly devoid of activity. The ski area is a vast panorama of white, rising dramatically and stretching so far from one end to the other that you could probably plop a couple of American resorts in the valley and still have room for expansion. We park near a car full of Iranian kids listening to Farsi hip-hop while chugging Red Bull and lacing up their snowboard boots.

After picking up my $9 lift ticket, I run into Farid Lotfi, a bearded 30-year-old with iron- cross earrings and the leathery skin of a resort regular. He pops out his iPod earbuds and informs me that he’s the freestyle and boardercross champion of Iran and that his sponsors include Rip Curl and Palmer. He considers his boast a moment, then qualifies it. “The village boys are strong,” he allows. “After them, I am the best.”

When he’s not training, Farid cobbles together cash by instructing. Today, he has two young students to deal with. He says we should give him a call later and perhaps “make a party.”

In the U.S., our vision of Iran is of a barren and intolerant desert populated by teetotaling zealots. In reality, the country has a diverse and well-educated population of 70 million and is in the midst of a Western-flavored youth boom. The open secret around these parts is that Iran’s more prosperous young people do not lack for entertainment. One day on the slopes, a young tech entrepreneur tells me that a black market services Tehran apartments, delivering beer, wine, and hard liquor as well as drugs like cocaine, ecstasy, and speed. These delivery services operate at a high level of risk the penalty for dealing drugs can include execution, sometimes by public hanging.

Twice during my trip, I smoke pot with locals, but never in front of Farshad, who wouldn’t allow it. The first time is in a Tehran apartment, where a friend of a friend grows his own. The second is on the lift at Dizin, with two Tehran businessmen in their thirties, enjoying a powder day on the mountain. If you have money here, they tell me, anything is possible.

THE APPROACH TO DIZIN’S gondola station is broken into three separate lines designated by Farsi signs. I assume these are for separating ski-patrollers from ticket holders, but the real purpose is to make sure men and women don’t share cars. When we head to the shortest line, we’re stopped by a surly lift op.

“This one is for ladies,” Farshad explains. Even so, there’s socializing the girls chatter away with the boys through metal bars that divide the lines, giggling and flipping their hair.

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The 20-minute wait for the creaky, ancient cable car is worth it once we’re atop the eastern ridge at Dizin. We clip in and drop over the lip of a wide groomer that draws all the traffic just a few feet off the trail, the powder is knee-deep and untracked. From one end of Dizin to the other there’s virgin snow. We stop at the midstation and hop a second Poma to the top, where Farshad leads us on a long traverse to the east around a bend in the mountain. You can drop off at any point and find your own powder field. The snow is as good as anything I’ve experienced in Utah or British Columbia soft and fluffy, none of it shallower than my boots. On a snowboard, it’s like heaven.

In a long and snaking gondola line, I meet yet another Ali, a teenager from Tehran who is also intrigued by my board. He’s dressed in head-to-toe Burton, with a Shaun White jacket that’s been available only since last winter. This indicates he’s traveled, which he has to Italy last year. He loved the discos.

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“American girls!” he says. “Nice!” We run out of words that we both understand and exchange an awkward high-five. “You call me in Tehran,” he says, scrawling a number in my notebook. “I will show you some parties! Maybe some beautiful girls!”

The sun is high in the sky, and it feels like Tahoe: Dudes recline on their snowboards, posturing for girls wearing enough makeup to go clubbing. (Though there are no legal clubs to go to.) Looking at the terrain, it’s hard not to believe that this place, in theory, has the potential to be world-class. In the pie-eyed days of the shah, there was talk of connecting Dizin and Tochal by gondola, and today nearly everyone seems to hold out hope for improvement. None of the skiers I meet is more passionate about this than Behrouz Kalhor, an international racer from the seventies who remains one of Iran’s most famous skiers.

Even at 47, Behrouz still skis every day of the season. He tells me that, in the early seventies, an official from the International Ski Federation, the sport’s governing body, came to Dizin and took it all in. “He said,” Behrouz recalls, “that this is one of the best pistes in the world.”

TO GET TO SHEMSHAK, you begin a slow, six-mile descent from Dizin’s upper parking lot on a road that hugs the side of the mountain, hundreds of feet above the valley floor. Close to the bottom, two lifts rise on the right each one arrow-straight and pointed uphill into a bowl. This is Darbandsar, Iran’s only privately owned ski resort, which explains why it has the highest ticket price around $12 and the only high-speed quad.

Further on is Shemshak, which is lower than Dizin and oriented east instead of north. The result is a warmer valley with a shorter season and wetter snow. People who prefer skiing here tend to talk about the steeper trails indeed, it is no place for beginners and the lower percentage of snowboarders.

That night we eat kebabs for the seventh straight day. My room at the Shemshak Complex Hotel is, alas, like something from a Krakow hostel. There are strange black hairs on my blanket, a shower that only trickles, and a drain that doesn’t. But that’s all right, because we wake up the next morning to more new snow.

“I can’t believe it,” Farshad says. “Your New Year’s gift!”

For all of its flaws, the dreary hotel couldn’t be better situated. If I were to leap out my window and time it perfectly, clearing the stairs and some scrubby trees, I could almost land on one of the lift chairs. We buy tickets from three guys at a table in a shack next to the lift. They’ve only just fired up the massive engine that runs the ancient two-seater.

It’s a chilly, bluebird day. I wouldn’t quite call the conditions dust-on-crust it’s deeper than dust but the skiing is tough and icy compared with the miracle we experienced at Dizin.

“This is difficult,” I say to Farshad.

“I think horrible,” he says. “It’s a good mountain, but I think not in spring.”

Even so, it’s amazing what a little hike past the out-of-bounds sign will do. We trudge through knee-deep snow up a knife-ridge. It’s hard work, but the reward is a deep, steep field of untouched snow, not powder or porridge but something soft and silky, like fine sand.

At lunch, an Iranian woman stops me to ask where I’m from, speaking perfect English. She is Laila Amin, a glamorous middle-aged mom in a fur hat who’s eating kebabs with her two young children. She went to Yale but now lives in Tehran. She’s been skiing at Shemshak for 35 years. Dizin has too many snowboarders for her tastes, and she also finds its lift lines unruly.

Real estate here is booming, Laila says slopeside chalets go for $250,000 and up but skiing is cheap. “In Utah you pay $80 for a ticket, and I know an instructor who charges $100 an hour,” she says. “Here, for $50, you can have an instructor all day.”

“You like this hotel?” she asks. “It’s OK, but if I took it over, I’d serve drinks to foreigners, like in Dubai. If they prioritize, this would be much nicer. But right now, it’s the government, and they have very little interest.”

THE VILLAGE OF SHEMSHAK, like most any Iranian town, has as its primary place of worship an impressive building of spindly spires and onion domes known as an imamzadeh. What most foreigners, myself included, assume to be a mosque is actually a Shiite shrine containing holy relics.

I asked Farshad to bring me here out of curiosity, but like nearly every experience we’ve had in the Alborz, we’ve ended up circling back to the snow. Inside, he spots a friend, telling me in a whisper, “He is very famous in this zone.”

The man is Mostafa Mirhashemi, 32, Iran’s foremost nordic skier. He represented Iran at the 2002 Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, rounding out the country’s team of two athletes. Mostafa missed last year’s Turin Games, but Iran had a capable backup: his older brother Mojtaba, who is 41.

Nordic skiing is the rarest snow sport of all here it exists almost exclusively for the smattering of men who compete in the national-team pool. Like all of the country’s top skiers, Mostafa and Mojtaba get little support from the government. For the most part, the brothers make do with club sponsorships and side jobs. They raise bees for honey, give lessons, and rent and sell ski equipment at a small shop in town. Mostafa takes great pride in these mountains and what they offer to Iranians.

“After the revolution, it was difficult for women to ski,” he says. “Now it’s much easier. This makes me happy to see.”

An older woman in a chador comes over and chatters in Farsi. It’s Mostafa’s mother, urging her son to invite us to their home to look at photographs.

We hop into Mostafa’s red van and head down the narrow valley road to their house. A cluster of shops hugs a bend in the road, and Mostafa pulls in, parks, and leads us down a lane. To one side is a steep hill covered in snow. “When I was two, I skied here,” he says. “I carried my skis to the top.”

We enter a small foyer, remove our shoes, and walk up some steps into a warm room empty of furnishings but full of children two boys and two girls, all of them small, giggle at our presence. Every one of them, Mostafa says, is a skier.

In the corner of the room, there’s evidence of a proud mother: The fireplace mantel is decorated with trophies, medals, and race credentials. We drink tea and look at pictures, and the experience is touching and telling. Here’s a man in his thirties, living with his parents and devoting himself to a sport that, in Iran, barely exists at all. The mountain villages are full of people like this. As the ski federation’s Bahram Shemshaki told me, “In Shemshak and Dizin, before they walk, they learn to ski.”

At the same time, you’ve got a large group of hipsters from Tehran using the ski resorts as a way to experiment with freedom, to intermingle and express themselves with thick mascara, pink cargos, and techno music delivered by iPod.

The groups intersect in ski shops and caf茅s, like the one down the hill from my Shemshak hotel. 国产吃瓜黑料, it’s drab. Inside, there’s the vibe of modern ski lodge, complete with Red Bull and a fridge full of a new mineral water called Aqua Viva that comes in a bottle shaped like aftershave. Its slogan? THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH.

The post Powder Keg appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

For the August 2007 feature story, “Powder Keg” we sent Josh Dean and Alex Tehrani to lay some tracks at the highest ski area聟in Iran. Here, flip through some of Tehrani’s outtakes from their epic, see more images from his previous assignment for 国产吃瓜黑料, and read an interview with the man himself.

skiing Iran

Gallery: Carving Iran

The heads of state over in Iran may have a few problems with U.S. foreign policy, but their people are just gaga over that most Western of pastimes, stalking powder. Alex Tehrani trains his lens on the locals, and the locales, and walks us through his photos in this exclusive online gallery.

Interview and Gallery: Up a Creek with Alex Tehrani


For the January, 2007 国产吃瓜黑料 feature story, “Paradise Pretty Soon,” we floated Alex Tehrani down Gabon’s Djidji river in search of the perfect photographs of the four-year-old Ivindo National Park. Little did we know he’d come back with just as many stories to tell as the article’s writer. He dishes on the assignment and shares some of his photo outtakes.

For more on Alex Tehrani and his work, head to .

The post Exclusive Online Gallery:<br/> Off-Piste Middle East? appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

CHAOS, GLOOM, CONFUSION聴what a great time to be a travel writer. Last year a crop of daring, even heedless authors returned from unflinching tours of the world’s sore spots, proving once again that no one gets a better grip on the planet than the long- suffering, far-wandering witness with a pen.

Mirrors of the Unseen

Mirrors of the Unseen: Journeys in Iran

For London-based Jason Elliot, the “whims and goals and prejudices” of travel are turned to unexpected shapes by the hard lathe of Iran. In Mirrors of the Unseen: Journeys in Iran (St. Martin’s, $27), he weaves three years of wandering聴through the ruins of Persepolis, the stony mountains of the Assassins聴into an embrace of Persian culture and grudging respect for the Iranian revolution that cuts past clich茅s of mad mullahs and rave parties. It’s a more pacific account than his superior 1999 debut, An Unexpected Light, a sumptuous tale of summer breaks in the eighties spent fighting with the Afghan resistance (or at least raiding orchards in mujahedeen costume). But in Iran the Farsi-fluent Elliot, 41, renders transparent a civilization that somehow endures earthquakes, wars, and political storms.

Revolution’s aftermath is the theme for Jeffrey Tayler, 45, whose River of No Reprieve: Descending Siberia’s Waterway of Exile, Death, and Destiny (Houghton Mifflin, $24) returns the Atlantic Monthly correspondent to his adopted home and first love, the “exacting taskmaster” of rural Russia. For no more reason than that “the Lena [River] came to mind,” Tayler travels to Siberia and, with an amply stocked raft and outboard motor, descends 2,400 miles down the isolated river, where a merciless forest swallows the abandoned gulags of empire. He fends off alcoholic villagers, fascist hooligans, and mosquitoes the size of golf balls without losing his eloquence. The only explosions are the nightly “tridents of lightning” breaking over a river where “panes of liquid silver are speckled with raindrops.”

But it was The Prince of the Marshes and Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq (Harcourt, $25), a clear-eyed marvel by Scotsman Rory Stewart, that kept me up all night. Eton boy turned officer of the Black Watch, speaker of half a dozen languages (but little Arabic), dashing, 33-year-old Stewart made book-club hearts throb in early 2006 with The Places In Between, about his stroll through Afghanistan, in winter, weeks after the Taliban’s fall. He was resting up from that trek in 2003 when the Coalition Provisional Authority called, offering him seemingly limitless funds (the money would later arrive shrink-wrapped in “million dollar bricks”), a bodyguard detail of six, and 12 months to pacify a province in southern Iraq. Prince is Stewart’s diary of rebuilding schools, clinics, and self-government amid the Machiavellian scheming and sniper attacks of competing sects, tribes, armies, and egos聴all of which he faces with black humor reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh. “Tell you what, though,” a rollerblading British general advises him at one point, “you’ve got the plum job. Most fun province in Iraq.” Stewart emerges a year later defeated but unmuddied, convinced that good manners and humility would have gone further than shock and awe. His province is today aflame, and Stewart recently moved to Kabul, for the quiet. His books, like those of Elliot and Tayler, prove that literate and urgent travel writing is alive and well.

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