Mount Elbrus

• 1. Introduction

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  Mount Elbrus stands 5,642 metres above sea level, making it the highest point in both Russia and Europe. Yet for all its stature, it is not just a mountain. It is a dormant stratovolcano whose last eruption is dated to around AD 50. Beneath the snowfields that feed 22 main glaciers and 77 secondary ones, geologists can still detect fumaroles escaping from the eastern flank and hot springs bubbling up on the slopes. The first person known to reach either of its summits was a Circassian man named Khillar Khashirov, who climbed the lower eastern peak on the 10th of July 1829. What drew him up, what armies later fought over the mountain, and what continues to make it one of the most visited and most lethal high peaks in Russia are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Name Across Millennia

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  The Avestan phrase Harā Bərəzaitī, a legendary mountain from Iranian mythology, lies at the root of the name Elbrus. Harā carries the sense of "watch" or "guard", tracing back to the Indo-European root meaning "protect". Bərəzaitī comes from a Proto-Iranian word meaning "high", an ancestor shared by Modern Persian words for tall and elegant and by Modern Ossetian bærzond, meaning peak. That ancient compound was reshaped through Middle Persian into Harborz, then into Modern Persian as Alborz, the name still carried by a long mountain range in northern Iran. The Caucasian peoples who lived in the shadow of the volcano gave it names of their own that carried different weight. Circassians called it Uash-ha Makhua, meaning "the mountain of happiness". The Karachay and Balkar peoples used Mingi Taw, meaning "eternal mountain" in Turkic. Greek writers connected the peak to the myth of Prometheus. Writing in around 130, the author Arrian described a summit in the Caucasus called Strobilos, noting that local tradition held this to be the place where Prometheus was chained by Hephaistos on Zeus' order. The scholar Douglas Freshfield, writing in The Exploration of the Caucasus in 1896, later identified Arrian's Strobilos with Elbrus itself, noting that the ancient Greek word strobilos refers to twisting or rotating objects such as a spinning top or a pinecone. That layering of myth, language, and place has been accumulating around this mountain for more than two thousand years.

• 3. Two Summits, One Volcano

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  Elbrus is not a single peak but a pair of dormant volcanic domes separated by a saddle sitting at 5,416 metres. The western summit, at 5,642 metres, is the higher of the two by 21 metres. Both summits cap an almost symmetrical volcanic body whose snowfields cover 138 square kilometres. Those snowfields feed the glaciers that give rise to the Baksan, Kuban, and Malka rivers. The two largest glaciers are Bolshoi Azaou, covering 23 square kilometres with a length of 9.28 kilometres, and Irik, covering 10.2 square kilometres with a length of 9.31 kilometres. Some of these ice bodies reach 400 metres in thickness, yet all are receding, having lost between 80 and 500 metres in length. The volcano that built these summits began forming around 10 million years ago. Uranium-lead dating of rhyolite, rhyodacite, tuff, and ignimbrite fragments places the formation of the main caldera at around 700,000 years ago. The eastern summit still bears a crater 250 to 300 metres wide, gradually filled with snow and ice. The longer of the recent lava flows extends 24 kilometres down the northeast face, a trace left by a large eruption estimated at around AD 50 and still visible on the surface today.

• 4. First Ascents and Early Ambitions

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  Khillar Khashirov climbed the eastern summit on the 10th of July 1829 as a guide for an Imperial Russian army scientific expedition commanded by General Georgi Emmanuel. The harder western summit, standing about 40 metres higher, waited until 1874, when it was reached by a British expedition led by F. Crauford Grove. The team included Frederick Gardiner, Horace Walker, and a Swiss guide from the Valais canton named Ahiya Sottaiev. During the early Soviet period, mountaineering became a mass pursuit, and traffic on Elbrus grew sharply. On the 17th of March 1936, a group of 33 Komsomol members, largely inexperienced, attempted the peak. Four of them died after slipping on ice. That disaster pointed to a tension that would persist: Elbrus is physically demanding rather than technically extreme, which draws large numbers of climbers, some of whom are far too inexperienced for the altitude and the weather. The mountain's location 100 kilometres from the Black Sea and 370 kilometres from the Caspian places it in the path of powerful westerly air masses. Above 4,000 metres, blizzard conditions with near-zero visibility can develop even in summer. Winds exceeding 100 kilometres per hour are not unusual. In winter, summit temperatures can fall below minus 50 degrees.

• 5. War on the Summit

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  In August 1942, the Wehrmacht's 1st Mountain Division, its Gebirgsjäger alpine troops, occupied the area around Elbrus as part of the Battle of the Caucasus. General Hubert Lanz ordered a detachment to climb to the summit and plant the Nazi swastika flag. They succeeded on the 21st of August 1942. When word reached Adolf Hitler, he reportedly flew into a rage, dismissed the climb as a stunt, and threatened to court-martial Lanz. The flags were removed by Soviet army mountaineers on the 13th and the 17th of February 1943, when the German forces were pushed back. A story, possibly apocryphal, circulated about a Soviet pilot who was first decorated for bombing the main mountain hut, Priyut 11, while it was occupied by Germans, then nominated for another decoration after it emerged that he had missed the hut entirely and destroyed the German fuel supply instead, leaving the structure standing. Elbrus was briefly incorporated into the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic from 1944 to 1956 before returning to its previous administrative position. In 1956, the Soviet state organised a mass ascent of 400 mountaineers to mark the 400th anniversary of Kabardino-Balkaria's incorporation into Russia.

• 6. Huts, Cables, and the Burning Refuge

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  Eleven scientists erected the first hut on Elbrus in 1929, at 4,160 metres, naming it Priyut 11, meaning "Refuge of the 11". A larger version for 40 people followed at the same site in 1932. The Soviet travel agency Intourist added a larger aluminium-clad structure at 4,200 metres in 1939, intended to attract western tourists paying in foreign currency. That building was later converted to serve as military barracks during the wartime fighting. On the 16th of August 1998, the hut burned down after a cooking stove fell over. The Diesel Hut, named for the former diesel generator station on whose site it stands, was built in 2001 a few metres below the ruins. Between 1959 and 1976, a cable car system was constructed in stages, eventually carrying visitors to 3,800 metres. A gondola opened on the 27th of December 2015 to serve the uppermost section, becoming the second-highest gondola in Europe after Zermatt in Switzerland, which sits at 3,883 metres. The new gondola has a capacity of 750 people per hour. Painted red and white horizontal steel cylinders known as the barrels, or bochki in Russian, serve as acclimatisation shelters just above the cable car terminus. In September 2012, an emergency shelter was installed on the saddle between the two summits at the EG 5300 station, temporarily the highest mountain refuge in Europe. Winds destroyed it that December. A more modest replacement capable of holding four to six people was built by the Russian Mountaineering Federation in 2013.

• 7. Record Climbs and Unusual Summits

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  In 1997, a team led by Russian mountaineer Alexander Abramov drove a Land Rover Defender to the top of the eastern peak, earning a Guinness World Record. The project took 45 days. The vehicle was driven as far as the huts at the Barrels at 3,800 metres, then hauled higher by pulley. On the descent, a driver lost control and had to jump clear. The vehicle crashed and remains below the summit. In 2016, Artyom Kuimov and Sergey Baranov set a separate Guinness record by reaching the summit on ATVs. A different tradition involves horses. In August 1998, a group from the Karachai-Cherkess Republic became the first climbers known to take horses up the mountain. Three Karachai horses, Imbir, Daur, and Khurzuk, wore special horseshoes fitted with removable steel spikes. Six people reached the eastern summit: three Karachai horsemen named Dahir Kappushev, Mohammed Bidzhiev, and Murat Dzhatdoev, alongside three mountaineers, with two of the three horses. A fifth equestrian ascent took place on the 23rd of September 2020, when Karachai horseman Taulan Achabaev and his cousin Rustam Achabaev reached the western summit with the stallion Bahr. The Elbrus Race adds a competitive dimension. The first official race was held in 1990, won by Anatoli Boukreev, who climbed from Priyut 11 at 4,050 metres to the eastern summit in 1 hour and 47 minutes. On the 7th of May 2017, Swiss-Ecuadorian mountain guide Karl Egloff set the full race record of 4 hours, 20 minutes, and 45 seconds on the long route from the Azau Meadow, breaking the previous record by more than 18 minutes. Diana Zelenova holds the women's ascent record on the long route with a time of 4 hours, 30 minutes, and 12 seconds, set in 2017.

• 8. Danger and Access Today

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  The average annual death toll on Elbrus runs between 15 and 30 people. Mountaineering authorities cite the leading cause as unorganised and poorly equipped attempts. During summer months the normal southern route can see 100 climbers a day, many using the cable car system to bypass the lower slopes. The mountain received 424,000 visitors to the surrounding area in 2020, reflecting its growing role in domestic Russian tourism. Access has not always been straightforward. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and through the early 2010s, economic instability and armed conflict across the North Caucasus made travel to the region increasingly hazardous. As of 2019, the United States Department of State issued a travel advisory against climbing Elbrus, citing terrorism and political instability in the wider North Caucasian Federal District. In June 2022, those warnings were reinforced with additional cautions about kidnapping and civil unrest. Access permits are required south of the town of Baksan because of border controls near Georgia. For those who attempt the circumnavigation of the mountain rather than the summit, the easiest circuit takes between eight and ten days, crossing several glaciers and passes and passing the Sultan Falls, a waterfall of forty metres near the Malka river. The Terskol Observatory, carrying the International Astronomical Union code B18, sits 2.5 kilometres northwest of Terskol village at 3,090 metres, a reminder that the mountain's unusual altitude makes it useful not just to climbers but to scientists studying the sky.