Amirsoy, Uzbekistan, Feb. 26-27, 2025

[Tony Crocker]

All week it was predicted to rain late yesterday, then snow all day today, the last scheduled ski day of the Adventure Project tour. With that prediction we took yesterday off and arranged to ski Thursday before driving back to Tashkent.

Storm day skiing is normally done below tree line at Chimgan, but coverage is so marginal that both Ilya and I were skeptical of skiing there after what we saw Tuesday before our beacon practice.

But we finally caught a break with the weather. The storm sped up and snowed heavily overnight with afternoon clearing predicted, so we took our chances with Amirsoy. Ilya grew up as a snowboarder, has been skiing for 4 years but still prefers his board on fresh powder days. FYI Ilya said it has been over a month since Amirsoy had as much as a foot of snow in a storm and this was only the second 6-incher since then.

The morning was mostly high overcast, but with scattered trees inbounds we only had one run with bad light. The pics aren’t great but at least you can see we got a nice powder day.

We followed Ilya and most runs had diagonal fall lines near the upper gondola. 7 of the 9 runs were to mid-station, which is 1,470 vertical by my watch. I took most pics on early runs, these 4 from the first run.

The second run started directly under the gondola.

Ilya crossed a gully and traversed up to a nice wall but got bogged down on his board. He instructed us to hit it as there was another group approaching. So I got in there first, my track at right while Matt next skied to the left.

Liz followed.

We got two more runs in to mid-station before venturing out upper Charlie. The fog rolled in and made the open bowl more challenging. I used Ilya’s track for reference but still missed a roller and fell near the bottom of the bowl. Matt went skier’s right for better reference points but more variable snow.

We then had an exit gully and traverse that ended about halfway down Charlie.

Liz took a break to clean her foggy goggles. Ilya, Matt and I took 3 more mid-station runs with Ilya doing a nice job of finding the least tracked lines. For my last run I wanted to check out the ridge between the gondola and Charlie. Here I’m looking down it with the only track in front of me being Ilya’s.

There were a few other tracks in there. Looking back up from the middle of the ridge:

Ilya surveying the lower part where trees get denser:

Once we got a few fresh tracks but had to cut back through a tight spot to stay on the ridge. I could step up but Ilya had to take off his board and posthole about 15 steps. At the bottom it was probably best that we were not first so we could follow the cleanest route out, ending not far from the bottom of Charlie.

Meanwhile Matt ventured slightly into the east sidecountry where it is likely we will go tomorrow.

I finished with 15,300 vertical and about 10K of powder.

 

[jamesdeluxe]

I finished with 15,300 vertical and about 10K of powder.

Great that you finally caught a break.

 

[Tony Crocker]

The final Uzbekistan day on the Adventure Project trip is usually an early drive back to Tashkent and cultural day there. Since we spent Feb. 18 in Tashkent on the tour we did separately, we arranged to ski until 3PM Thursday and swapped our guide Ilya’s day for the poor weather down day Tuesday.

Ilya and Matt’s mindset was to begin ski touring immediately. I persuaded them that a rerun of the pitch Ilya and I skied between the top of Bravo and Papa was worthwhile since that was close to untracked at 2PM Wednesday. This morning it is cut up some but still room for powder turns.

I next wanted to do the run Matt had done the day before, view down that here:

Ilya was concerned that it was too short and flat and that too much time might be consumed by another gondola lap. He turned out to be right about the latter point.

So here we are with Ilya setting the skin track to top of Maygashkan.

With appropriate use of risers and the “AVA” kick turns Matt advised, I was not so tired at the top but it still took me an hour and 10 minutes.

There was a fast group from the Czech Republic that caught up with us at the top, so no pictures up there this time. Ilya told them we were skiing the east face, would have been sun affected at the start of our trip but now had fresh snow.

Matt went first, near the ridge separating the north and east faces. His track here, when I paused ¾ of the way down to make sure I didn’t ski too far.

Liz followed me.

Finally Ilya came down between my track and Matt’s.

The Czechs skied the north face. They have collected just right of and below center here.

We had time and just enough energy in my case to skin partway back up to the area of our second run on the first day. This took me 35 minutes but we also had a great view of our handiwork on the east face of Maygashkan.

This was a nice finale in the fresh snow, where Liz put down a track next to mine.

Ilya had to break trail for the long traverse back to inbounds.

So this took a little longer than on the first two days.

I took one last ride up the gondola from mid-station, where I had good views of ours and many other tracks from Wednesday.

Final view from the base from the Amirsoy gondola (red) to Maygashkan (purple):

Unlike most ski writers I try to make the effort to figure out what’s normal for snow conditions. The closest meaningful body of water to the west is the Caspian Sea, 900 miles away, about the same as Colorado from the Pacific. A generic Colorado area gets about 250 inches snowfall and I’d consider that somewhat of an upper bound here.

Another clue came from Ilya who commented that visitors should always come in February. When I skied about January he said you can’t count on there being enough snow yet. I rag on how places like Loveland and A-Basin are lagging getting terrain open through January many years, but overall I’d say it’s more the exception than the rule for most Colorado areas not to be in decent shape a week or two into January. So I’m sticking with that 250 upper bound and it wouldn’t surprise me if the real number at Amirsoy was more like 200.

One useful way to reveal snow reliability is to compare close-by areas in the same season or better yet on the same trip. The glaring exhibit A here is Park City/Deer Valley vs. the Cottonwoods. Believe what your eyes and skis are telling you rather than what you read in the brochure or the snow report.

It turns out Matt ran a new trip this year to Kyrgyzstan. The lift served ski area Karasol had abundant snow as did the cat skiing operation near Jyrgalan when he was there Feb. 7-17. Both of these places top out at 10,000 feet and sit east (downwind) of Lake Issyk-Kul, which is 111 miles long, up to 37 miles wide and more importantly does not freeze during the cold Central Asian winters because it is saline and up to 2,192 feet deep. That has to be some meaningful lake effect.

Matt says the Kyrgyz ski areas are 500 miles away from the Uzbek ski areas. That’s true but that also happens to be the same distance between Lake Tahoe and the Utah Wasatch, and in exactly the same direction, just north of due east. And guess what? Utah and Sierra snowfalls are 80% correlated. Sure, the Sierra is more volatile with its extremes. But both had record winters in 2022-23 and 4 consecutive under 80% seasons from 2011-12 through 2014-15. Only 6 times in the last 50 years have the Sierra and Utah not been either both above average or both below average.

So I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to hypothesize that Karakol gets a lot more snow than Amirsoy. I also note that Amirsoy’s top elevation of 2,300 meters is the same as Karakol’s base elevation. Another oddity is that Amirsoy has stunted trees up to about 7,000 feet while Karakol has larger trees up to 10,000.

If January coverage at Amirsoy is not reliable there’s not much room to withstand a below average season. I congratulate Matt on his good fortune in 2022 and 2023. There were other factors where this year was more challenging than those prior years. The other years Matt had literally zero completion in the sidecountry from other ski tourers. This time there were a few other groups like those Czechs on our last day. In the other years the Beldersay ski area was operating. This zoom view shows a T-Bar line to the top of the ridge above the new gondola station, which replaced an antique chair that was removed.

Unfortunately Ilya had no clue when Beldersay might reopen. And similarly he had no idea when heliskiing might resume. There seems to be a “U Factor” in Uzbekistan similar to the “A Factor” in Argentina.

Terrain wise I believe Karakol is a lot less interesting than Amirsoy. But Matt’s Kyrgyzstan trip includes 6 days of cat skiing and a total trip cost only 10% higher than the Uzbekistan trip. Considering what cat skiing costs in most places, that’s a great value IMHO. This was not an option for us because the Kyrgyzstan trip started Feb. 7 and we were in India until Feb. 12. The Uzbek trip dates were a perfect fit for us so we couldn’t resist. I’ll also add that the cultural attractions in Uzbekistan are worth your time if you’re traveling this far, and I’d tack that on to a Kyrgyzstan ski trip even though it would involve an extra flight between the two capitals Bishkek and Tashkent.

In obscure locations like Uzbekistan there is much value in having a guide with the right local contacts. After skiing Thursday I changed clothes in the boot/ski storage room and left my ski pants there, discovering the oversight in Tashkent 6:30PM. Liz then realized she left some items in our Achazor hotel room drawer. Matt called up the Achazor hotel manager, who arranged for a driver to bring the items down to our Tashkent hotel by 10PM, critical since we were leaving at 1:40AM. I had called the Achazor 3x before requesting Matt’s assistance, getting Russian voicemail every time and even had I reached a live person, most of the employees there spoke little English.