Copyright © 2011 Pakistan Youth Outreach  All rights reserved.

Pakistan Youth Outreach

A Youth Mountaineering Education Program

Project Update - A Quest Beyond Limits - Part I

Pakistani girls dream higher: Samina Baig's first 6000er climb at 18

Karakoram spires are setting the scene for young guns to show their true colors. In this case, news is even better as it is a local female rising star which has bagged her first ascent. At only 18, Samina Baig summited the previously unclimbed Chashkin Sar (6,400m) in Shimshal, in the Hunza-Giligit region on 30 Aug 2010.

Promoting adventure for Pakistani girls 

Samina climbed along with her brother Mirza Ali (group leader), Romanian Stelian Pavalache (film maker and photographer), Tafat Shah, Yahya Baig, Salamat Khan, and Arshad Karim.  The peak has been renamed "Samina Peak", according to the team.  The expedition project was launched by Pakistan Youth Outreach, which is an educational program for youth mountaineering and awareness and promoting women adventurers. Mirza Ali is also the founder and president of Pakistan Youth Outreach. 

“The project’s main goal was to film a documentary promoting women adventurers in Pakistan,” Mirza told ExplorersWeb. “Thus PYO joined forces with Stelian Pavalache’s Satwa Guna Project--Illusion of Forms. This was for a film about a Pakistani girl climbing a Karakorum 6000er."

Pakistani women climbers: Everest as ultimate goal 

Stelian Pavalache's 2010 stage of the Satwa Guna Project was named “Shimshali People”. It comprises of two 90-minute video documentaries and a photographic series "which wants to reveal, but not to judge, aspects of the status of women in the Muslim culture, traditions and local customs, beliefs and forms of mystical practices in the Pakistan, Karakoram area in an attempt to perpetuate and to sustain the conservations of authentic values," the project website reads. 

"Times have changed, and today women in Pakistan are working in areas previously designated for men (such as an army or police officer)," Mirza states. "Despite the progress, climbing is still an exclusively male domain. Lack of information in society about mountain sports, the fact that it is an expensive sport, prejudices about women's inability to climb and the absence from home in a wilderness area are several reasons that explain the lack of women in the Pakistani alpine world." 

"This is part of a larger project that will culminate with a Pakistani woman climbing Everest, as Nepalese, Iranian and Indian women have done. No Pakistani woman has ever climbed an 8,000-meter peak--this is ironic if we think that Pakistan has five of the 14 peaks over 8,000 meters in the world." 

Chashkin Sar, 6,400 meters, is located in the Shimshal area, Upper Hunza, Pakistan. The peak rises at the Maidur Valley, easily accessible from Purian Sar. The dome-topped peak was climbed from the east ridge. 

Mirza Ali, 27, from Shimshal has worked for a number of climbing expeditions on Pakistan's 6000ers and 7000ers.