Between 1932 and 1933 the Soviets built a mountain observatory at 4200 masl, next to Fedchenko glacier (recently renamed to Vanj-Yakh by Tajik authorities), to study the Pamir climate and cryosphere. SPI PAMIR members, in collaboration with Tajik Hydromet, paid the station a visit in September 2025 in order to renovate one of the most valuable high-mountain weather stations on the Asian continent.
The site is extremely remote, leaving only two means to reach Gorbunov Research Station: by helicopter, or on foot. In recent years, the helicopter option is generally unavailable – few aircraft and even fewer Tajik pilots are authorized to fly at the required altitude or to land on glaciers. On foot, there are several ways to reach the site, but none of them are straightforward:
- From the Bartang valley in the Southeast of the mountain range, requiring a traverse of the Fedchenko system;
- From the Kygyz semi-exclave of Altynmazar, near the terminus of Fedchenko glacier, requiring a major river crossing and ascent of 30km of glacier;
- At least two routes from Poymazor in the Vanj valley, each requiring a river crossing, glacier ascent, and crossing of a pass.
We opted for the same route we took during PAMIR’s first visit to the site in July 2022, it is the quickest and most direct but also a demanding four-day alpine approach from Poymazor. The team for this trip included three researchers – Ines (a glaciologist and mountain guide), Faridun (a meteorologist from Tajik Hydromet) and myself (a glaciologist and hydrologist); Jason (an artist in love with Central Asia); Rahim (a professional Tajik mountain guide); Ubai, Sas and Khayom (our three porters).
The approach began with a ride on a GAZ-66 soviet military truck – a surprisingly capable vehicle that climbs over and through almost anything. This vehicle carried us 18km to the destroyed bridge over the angry Abdukagor River, which we crossed by way of a Tyrolean traverse using the bridge’s remaining steel cables. From there, the real work began – twelve annoying and seemingly endless kilometres up a barely walkable debris-covered glacier named after the Russian Geographical Society – RGO. We then climbed 1500m up a buttress framed by icefalls, with very steep scree slopes and more or less stable blocks requiring technical climbing. This latter part was the crux of the entire approach – and if Rahim and Ines hadn’t been leading this stretch, I would have preferred to turn around and go home.
Next came the crevasse-field navigation across the Kachal Ayak Pass. Apparently, the people of Vanj used to cross this pass to raid Kyrgyz settlements and vice-versa. This seems almost unbelievable given the wildness of this place. The Soviets – following the heroic colonialist narrative – claimed to be the first explorers of the uncharted Fedchenko glacier at the beginning of the 20th century. But of course, local people had been there long before! Three days and three camps later, all that separated us from the Gorbunov Station was half-a-day hike down one of Fedchenko’s 50 tributaries with a number of large crevasses to navigate – a different set of challenges compared to our first visit in July 2022, when a thick layer of snow gave the route a completely different character.
Everyone working in the field in Central Asia this season (summer 2025) came back with the same story: they had never before seen anything like this at their study sites. Be it in the Tien Shan, in the Fan mountains, in the Pamir, researchers found a similar picture: All snow and firn gone from the glaciers at elevations of 4500 m and higher, unprecedented ice melt rates and glacier-fed river discharges. Part of mass balance observations – accumulation measurements – became obsolete on many glaciers in Central Asia. Accumulation kits stayed at camp. Was it just an extreme year, or is this the new normal? If glaciers used to be healthier here than elsewhere in the world until recently (part of the Karakoram Anomaly), Central Asian glaciers are now catching up with the rest of the world.
Being at Fedchenko felt oddly comforting after my visits to smaller glaciers in the Tien Shan, the Pamir Alay and in the Pamir this summer – those glaciers seemed to liquefy right beneath our feet. It was comforting not because this glacier is healthier than the other glaciers in the region, but because of the sheer mass of ice that surrounded us the more we advanced into the valley. While snow had retreated to the highest elevations, huge serac falls and avalanches were still crashing down from all sides between 6000- and 7000-metre peaks.
This landscape is still glacial in its most intimidating and awe-inspiring way. A short refuge from numbers and figures, global datasets, from zooming through mountain ranges on Google Earth, from the collapse of scales that defines our information age. Being a tiny creature with an insignificant lifespan in a brutal and ancient landscape like this is indeed a humbling impression, during a time when our species has become destructive enough to reshape even the face of the highest mountains, compromising its own viability on Earth.
Finally descending from Kashal Ayak pass we spotted the main unit of Fedchenko. Its scale is disorienting: Three kilometres wide, almost eighty kilometres long. With a gentle slope, and its smooth medial moraines meandering their way down the valley, it adds something odd to the landscape, something you can stare at for half a day but still not get it – a huge, floating ribbon of ice.
The idea of building an Arctic-style, permanently manned research facility in such a remote and inaccessible site seems insane today, let alone in 1932. But whatever the Soviets had set their minds on was carried out against all odds and obstacles. One hundred tons of material were hauled to Osh for three months, then to Altyn Mazar, the settlement at the terminus of the glacier. Note that we are talking about a time when helicopters were still adventurous ideas on the drawing boards of a handful of engineers and roads simply didn’t exist. 180 camels and 60 horses were gathered to carry 30-40 kg parcels to the research station’s designated location. The way in: serious river crossings, loose rock slopes, 35km of glacier travel with large and complex crevasse fields, paths to be built for animal passage on-the-go. This undertaking makes our adventure look like a walk in the park.
It quickly turned out that the camels, who were great for crossing rivers, were useless on the rocky debris surfaces and the moraines made up of sharp and loose rocks. Horses carried the loads up most of the glacier. Even before the construction materials had fully arrived, meteorological observations at the site had already begun.
The construction of the Gorbunov Station was a bold undertaking, not least because of the harsh conditions at the site. A long-term Gorbunov staff member named Davlyatov wrote in a letter that the year consisted of “120 good days, and 245 days with precipitation, 10 days of spring in August, 10 days of summer and after that – autumn,…” and he was thinking about glacier-atmosphere interactions: “the glacier has its own microclimate, it makes its own weather”. These cold, down-valley winds we today call ‘katabatic winds’ indeed persisted around the clock during our stay and made working outside quite uncomfortable.
Construction started in late summer 1932 and carried on until winter forced the workers to retreat. In 1933, within just a few months, the station was completed. From that year onwards the station was staffed permanently: 2-3 researchers at a time, one cook, one radio operator. A few of them would stay for several years in a row, transitioning the know-how from one year to the next.
They had a daily routine of making observations around the station and on the glacier, during any kind of weather. They hardly ever missed an observation, even when the station was buried under 6 metres of snow, and the entrance to the main building was only accessible through the roof. They were connected to the ‘motherland’ via radio and were able to follow what happened in the Union day-to-day. Their letters radiated pride in their work and loyalty to the Soviet Union and its leaders. During the first full season spent at the station, the observers wrote in the diary that by taking measurements of meteorology, snow accumulation and glacier mass balance, their monitoring shall help to “unravel the climatic regime of the glaciated area, answer unresolved questions about glaciation,…” and “that this will allow them to provide forecasts of the water supply to the rivers that feed the Amu Darya,…” As I was reading their letters, I realized that their questions were not dissimilar to our current research questions! We have moved forward technologically, and today we are studying a system that is severely out of balance, but the motivations are the same. Did they imagine that their long-term monitoring would help to understand one of the greatest threats our civilization is facing today, a hundred years later?
Gorbunov looks as if time had frozen. The station is reminiscent of a scientific museum from the Soviet era, with multiple generations of historical instruments in place – ancient rain gauges, thermo- and hydrographs, sunshine collectors, theodolites, alongside huge radio-antennas, the ruin of a wind-power station, empty fuel barrels stashed in one corner of the buttress. And, what makes you realize that it is not a museum but an abandoned place: The absence of descriptions – you have to figure out for yourself what all these things used to be – and a lot of trash.
has been sitting here, neither maintained nor downloaded, nor transmitting data, just measuring, logging, charging its batteries from day in, day out. Will 10 years of untouched, extremely valuable data be our reward for coming up here? Short answer – no. In 2015, engineers configured the station in a way that it would log only for 15 days. Some variables would be measured every minute, filling up the storage within a few days. As for other stations they installed throughout the country, the engineers probably assumed that problems with the satellite-transmission could just be fixed by coming here within two weeks. Well, here we are – years later.
With Ines and Faredun, we were able to hot-swap all the sensors that were out of calibration or simply broken. At least there will be valuable data for the decades to come, we thought, just before the batteries of the laptop went dead. But without reconfiguring the logger, none of the new sensors would work and the station would keep logging for 15 days only.
And here the fun began. While Faredun and the porters custom-built some spare-parts for the pluviometer – from nothing – we spent the next day frantically searching through all the ancient electrical material in Gorbunov station, looking for anything useful to generate between 15,6 and 16,0 Volts for the laptop – no luck. We managed to cobble up an archaic charging plug for the laptop, while almost frying its motherboard. An ancient radio receiver that we used as a power converter to charge a satellite phone from in 2022 – useless for the laptop.
The next morning, we woke up in the snow and had given up on completing the station repairs. We were supposed to leave and descend that day, but bad visibility prevented us from setting off. At 9AM, the wind was tearing at the building, but the sun came through and hit the solar panel of the weather station. We decided to give it one last try: We wired the laptop directly to the 12V battery of the station, and the solar panel delivered JUST enough power to actually charge the laptop. By 12AM, we had abandoned the plan to descend that day, since Kachal Ayak pass was still in thick clouds, but the batteries had fully charged!! The station work could go ahead, the mission was saved, lessons were learned.
Stumbling down the endless, debris-covered portion of the RGO glacier on our way out from Fedchenko, rocks rolling, sliding away under my feet while traversing above steep ice cliff faces, climbing and descending one hummock after another, jumping across small supraglacial streams, I thought of the Tajik guys who were “forgotten” at Gorbunov while the civil war was raging in Tajikistan in 1994. I was told that they had to walk out more or less the same route after realizing that no helicopter would come to stock up their supplies, nor to evacuate them. Those helicopters were needed elsewhere.
The last staff members of Gorbunov were simply left on their own, on the little rock island surrounded by a sea of ice, which the station literally is. What was waiting for them coming down to the valley? While a warm and cozy bed, a shower at our homestay in Poimazor, and some of the best homemade food in the country awaited us, they probably knew little about what was going on in the country. Were they concerned about their families? Were they worried about their own lives, in case once down, they were forced to fight to protect their community? Many who had served here left their names together with the dates of their mission engraved in the rocks around the station. Some of those people are still alive, still working at Hydromet. The repercussions of that time are evident in many facets of the country today, often hidden behind the shiny new facades of Dushanbe. Many people of my age have experienced hunger and malnutrition, violence, damage and unbelievable atrocities during their childhood, and have been deprived of security and education. The very man who ended the war is still in power today, 28 years later. A large majority of Tajiks today prioritize stability.
The PAMIR project was funded because this region had hardly any cryospheric observations, and the most important locations are remote places deep in the Pamir mountains. There is a good reason why, for a long time, nobody could make sense of this mass balance anomaly, and we still don’t really know – for a lack of observations. Joint efforts by European and Central Asian institutes since the 2010s, – most notably the two ice-cores extracted in parallel to our mission some 100 km to the east and 1500 metres higher in altitude – will help us find out. How cool that Central Asian researchers welcome us to their mountains to make this happen!
