Makes Big Strides
Alison Criscitiello has a big stride. It’s not that her legs are unusually long – rather, she stands just five-foot-one. But on touring skis or in mountaineering boots she effortlessly matches and even outpaces much taller companions. And with a sparkling smile and keen eyes signalling a sharp mind, much the way her compact size belies her physical power, her youthful face conceals her 34 years. Her impressive climbing resume includes leading a female only ascent of 6,930- metre Pinnacle Peak in the Indian Himalayas, and a six-week ski expedition in Central Asia’s Pamir Mountains. With plenty more planned, she’s headed to unclimbed Brahmasar II in India’s Garhwal Himalaya this fall.
Criscitiello’s introduction to adventure began with an outdoor skills program when she was 10 with her identical twin sister, Ra. Alison was instantly hooked. At 19 she scored a job as a climber ranger in Washington’s Olympic National Park. “It was three years of getting paid by the National Park Service to go mountaineering, climbing the most popular routes and writing trip reports,” she said with a grin. She racked up eight ascents of Mount Olympus; four of Rainier by three different routes; a traverse of Blue/Hoh/ Humes Glaciers; a one-day solo summit of Eldorado in the North Cascades, and lots more.
More than once though, her guests were sorry to underestimate their guide. “I’ve had all male clients on the biggest peaks, and when I go meet them at the airport, you can tell they’re thinking, ‘Are you kidding?’” she described with a laugh. “I’m 5- foot one. I can carry a 60- pound pack and pull a 100- pound sled. But I get judged right off the bat. Then I completely destroy it.”
Mountaineering, however, is only half the picture. Obsessed with glaciers since middle school, she earned her master’s in geophysics at Columbia University with a focus on polar science, then gained the first glaciology PhD ever conferred by mit. She’s drilled ice cores in Antarctica and on Ellesmere and Devon Islands in Canada’s Arctic, and worked as an emt and marine technician on an Icelandic icebreaker. In addition to guiding clients up Aconcagua and Denali, she’s taught whitewater canoeing and led a month-long ski expedition across Alaska’s Juneau Icefield – three times. Last year she was inducted as a fellow of the esteemed Explorers Club.
No ordinary adventure, her 2015 ski expedition along the border Tajikistan shares with Afghanistan, China and Kyrgyzstan was awarded the American Alpine Club’s Lara Kellogg and Scott Fischer Conservation grants to study the effects border fences have on the migration patterns of Marco Polo sheep and ibex. “I’m drawn to assignments that have some aspect of importance,” she said. “It’s a level of satisfaction that surpasses publishing a really great paper, or just climbing something for the sake of climbing it. It feels really cool.”
While objective hazards of wilderness travel offered spicy challenges, political obstacles really upped the ante. Skiing across the remote, largely unpopulated corner of Kyrgyzstan their maps showed to be 50 kilometres from the border, they encountered a barbed wire fence manned by Chinese guards.
“They were armed,” Criscitiello said. “We asked if we could follow the fence to the north, and they said no, we’ll follow you. We completely retreated, back into Kyrgyzstan. It was weird to see it. The Chinese just pick the next obvious geographical feature like a mountain or a river and they move the border to it. Where we were planning to ski, they had just usurped the land.” But that wasn’t