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Trailblazer
Heather Paul treks through miles of deep snow, dodges avalanches and climbs up
steep mountain faces in order to ski down some of the world’s most remote
peaks.
Telemark
ski champion Heather Paul arrived in the Chinese Altai, which borders
Kazakhstan
,
Russia
and
Mongolia
, in early spring of 2003. No westerner had been permitted to travel there
before. A marmot-sponsored athlete, Paul, now 34, and her team of five wore
the latest in brightly colored Gore-Tex outerwear, used the newest
K2
skis . . . which was a far cry from anything the locals had ever seen or even
used.
“It
was the hardest expedition I’d ever been on,” says Paul. “We traveled by
horseback, skis, foot and horse-drawn sleigh. Imagine trekking through an
unknown land with nothing but an outdated Russian map. We had no idea what we
would find or what we were up against.” Like Lewis and Clark, the group
entered an unknown frontier with little to no information on the area.
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