Garth Willis: Bringing AMC to Asia

AMC Outdoors, November 2004

Most people can identify Kyrgyzstan as a former Soviet republic. But how many know it’s filled with snowy, 20,000-foot peaks? That it offers a program called the Alpine Fund that takes at-risk urban youth to those mountains? And that the program is run by American Garth Willis, who got his start working with AMC?

It all began 15 years ago, when Willis undertook a bicycle ride from his home state of Minnesota to Nova Scotia. When his bike broke in Pinkham Notch, he ducked into AMC’s visitor center for a cup of coffee. That led to a week volunteering in the kitchen, which led to a job. Willis never made it to Nova Scotia—but he got to know the mountain environment that’s since defined his life.

Sure, it’s a long way from the Whites to central Asia. But Willis, 40, credits the time he spent with AMC—including stints in its storehouse and as a winter caretaker at Carter Notch Hut and Tuckerman Ravine—with developing his love of high peaks. And when he came up with the idea for the Alpine Fund in the late 1990s—after traveling to Kyrgyzstan to climb, staying to work, then returning to the U.S. for a master’s—where did he turn for advice? AMC’s Youth Opportunities Program. Through both programs, he says, “The mountains give kids independence and confidence.”

In the last four years, the Alpine Fund has worked with about a thousand youth. Some come for the climbs or for language classes, while others train to be porters or work in its office. With an annual budget of about $20,000, the fund relies on volunteers from around the world. Willis, who just expanded the fund to a cabin and small plot of land outside the city of Bishkek, is considering creating a similar program in Tajikistan, where he now lives. He’s motivated by the same urge that led him to start the fund: “I wanted to do something that was useful, and that I could truly believe in.”

To learn more, visit www.alpinefund.org.

—Katharine Wroth is co-editor of AMC Outdoors.