Like any mountain climb, the expedition will have its dangers, but the group is preparing to deal with any problem that might arise.

They will be climbing mountains with a maximum altitude of 18,000 feet, attempting to take the safest routes up these uncharted mountains. They will be able to summon a helicopter in the case of serious injury, but they will be 120 miles away from the nearest village and will have to get the injured climber off the mountain and back to their base camp first.

“The most challenging parts of this expedition will probably be the logistics and the planning—which will be very intensive, considering the extreme remoteness of the area we’re entering,” Cole says. “The technical difficulties of the climbs themselves shouldn’t be that hard.”

“We’re limited by available resources and the training of the team,” says David L. Krause, an EMT who will serve as the expedition’s medic. “Serious injuries will have to be evaluated carefully...Obviously, that’s a huge challenge in the middle of, say, a fifty-degree snow slope in a blizzard. So equally obviously, good judgment and careful decisions will have to be the order of the day, as preventive medicine.”

Krause has served as an EMT for eight years and a salaried wilderness medicine instructor for five. He has also served on a search-and-rescue team for over seven years.

“The team is getting some rescue training this weekend from an expert in Mt. Washington Valley,” Krause says.

The expedition will follow the Leave No Trace (LNT) philosophy, carrying out the waste they generate in order to preserve the area.

“Ideally, after a fresh snowfall, the only way anyone would know we had been there would be that they saw one of us give a slideshow,” Krause says.

Regarding safety concerns of the expedition, Holmes says, “We’ve been actively practicing emergency scenarios as a group. Several of us also have more than a decade of climbing experience and several expeditions under our belts, and that kind of experience can help keep one out of harm’s way.”

Another safety concern is the turbulent political situation in Kyrgyzstan. Laursen says that the club is keeping an eye on developments there after protests forced former Kyrgyzstan president Askar Akayev out of his office in the country’s capital, Bishek, last month.

Since the coup, the club has decided to use a more remote route through Kazakhstan, which borders Kyrgyzstan, which will allow them to avoid Bishek. American authorities in Kyrgyzstan will also be aware of the expedition’s presence.

“Basically, once we are in the field, we will be so removed from civilization that we probably wouldn’t notice anything that might happen in the capital city,” Holmes says, adding that “the consequences of both success and failure are meaningful.”

“We succeed by just getting ourselves into the area. We fail if someone gets seriously injured or worse,” he says.