Altitude Junkies

Ted Callahan

Ted Callahan is a mountain guide, writer, photographer, and social anthropologist. He has worked throughout the world, first as a river guide in Nepal, New Zealand, and Uganda and more recently as a mountain guide in North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. For the past several years, Ted has been exploring the remote parts of the Pamir and Tian Shan ranges, in China, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan. He is currently finishing his PhD in anthropology and his dissertation research has focused on Kyrgyz nomads in remote NE Afghanistan, a country Ted has visited six times for a total of about 24 months. Ted speaks Kyrgyz, Dari (Afghan Persian), Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and Nepali, as well as a smattering of Russian, Tajiki, and Pashto. Ted’s great passion is expeditionary climbing and trekking and this is reflected in his steady, confident leadership. He has spent years amassing the skills of the expedition leader: logistics planning, medical training (the Afghan government put Ted in charge of health care for a community of 1,000), language skills, a wicked sense of humor, and familiarity with the high peaks on almost every continent. Ted currently resides in Vermont, where he at work on a book about his two years in Afghanistan.