A week after meeting at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ, second-year students Ben Chorba and Dennis Vink hopped in a car together and set off to the Adirondacks to hike the Trap Dike on Mount Colden.
Only a few years later, the duo was 6,000 miles from their school, summiting a peak in the developing, post-soviet nation, Kyrgyzstan.
Vink and Chorba shared their experiences of their month-long stay in Kyrgyzstan and how they got there in a presentation at the Rock and Snow Atrium on Nov. 16.
Prior to meeting, Vink and Chorba both had experience in the backcountry and followed each other on social media. When they ran into one another for the first time on campus, they immediately hatched an adventure to the Adirondacks and have not stopped pushing themselves to do more challenging outdoor adventures.
The duo has mountaineered through the northeast, hiked volcanoes in Ecuador and Washington and rock climbed through the Gunks. In Kyrgyzstan, the goal was to backpack through the country in a two-week long, 1,200-mile race, called the Silk Road Race, before summiting an unclimbed peak that they had picked out. However, once traveling to the country, the pair faced a lot of unexpected challenges. “A lot went wrong, a lot went right, a lot more went wrong though,” Vink said in the presentation.
Upon arriving in Kyrgyzstan and preparing for the race, the duo went to the local Papa John’s and got food poisoning immediately after. The race started the next morning, and the pair set out to bike despite being terribly ill. They didn’t make it more than a few days on the trail and had to abandon the race out of concerns for their safety. The pair used this extra time to explore the cities, culture and history of Kyrgyzstan, something Vink considers a highlight of the trip.
Once they recovered, they backpacked through the stunning, remote mountain landscapes of the Tian Shan range. ‘It is such an incredible feeling to be completely removed from society and placed into a wild environment,” Vink said. “It often makes things more serious and more dangerous but is incredibly worth the feeling of being small in this big world.”
Due to safety conditions, the pair never got to summit the unclimbed peak, but they don’t see that as having affected the trip at all. In fact, on their way back from their failed summit, the duo found three stranded Czech women who had become lost in the mountain range and who were stuck on an island in the middle of a glacial river. Using their mountaineering equipment, Vink and Chorba were able to pull the women across the river and bring them to safety.
A trip of this difficulty has a lot of challenges, and Vink says it was their interactions with others that brought them through the darker times. When the pair was suffering from food poisoning and making the long trek back to civilization a child on a donkey rode up to them. “He says, ‘Can I ride with you guys,’ so he rode with us for 10 miles on his donkey while we were on our mountain bikes. It was probably the best thing ever,” Vink said. “Experiences like that push us through. So many great people.”
Vink and Chorba encourage those who want to get out into nature to go for it. “Just get out there and push yourself,” Vink said. “You’ll never know where it can lead you.”