Skiing in Iraq is not as much as a misnomer as it may sound.
Since the reign of King Faisal II in the 1940s and 50s, local Kurds have been zig-zagging down wooden skis about 330 winding miles north of the capital of Baghdad. During the Iran/Iraq War, Saddam Hussein unwillingly helped the industry by constructing supply inroads into the mountains, which expedition leaders now use to get to higher trails. In the late 1990s, the Iraqi-helmed Darin Group, created the $95-million Korek Mountain Resort to the southwest of Choman, which now houses the country’s one and only chair lift, a number of villas and skiing on two runs, a 200-meter and a 300-meter, with minimal downhill angle.
To backcountry enthusiasts, however, the area around Choman offers seemingly unlimited runs. In 2012, Norwegian ski adventurer, Kit Monsen, brought his gear in an effort to become the first person to ski down Halgurd at 11,830 feet — the tallest mountain in Iraq. “All I heard was that there is snow at this time of year so I brought my gear and off we went,” he told a mountaineering magazine at the time. Rain and snow kept them from the top. Monsen settled for a smaller peak and wouldn’t complete his world record until five years later.
After Monsen made his run, not much was attempted during the height of ISIS fighting from 2012 to 2017. Still… “that gave me an idea,” says Omar Hussein, the owner of adventure outfitter, VI Kurdistan short for Visit Iraqi Kurdistan and co-founder of the Iraqi Ski Festival. “I bought these cheap skis from Iran, and we started skiing around. When the Europeans and Americans came to ski here, I bought their skis and soon enough we had enough for a small club. A few years later, the ski club put on a festival to invite everyone come ski.” In February 2018, however, mountaineer and former Iraqi War Veteran, Stacey Bare, in partnership with Dutch guide Jan Bakker, led the first complete ski ascent and descent of Halgurd. James Wilcox, the leader of Untamed Borders, an international adventure travel agency, followed with group of about 30 skiers for the first Untamed Borders trip, in which the clan strapped on skeins and toured around the Zagros for a week outside Choman. A local tourism agency, VIKurdistan, also held its first ski race in 2018, a human-powered up-and-downhill ski race of six miles, starting at an altitude of 2000 meters with roughly 2000 meters of elevation gain, ending with the fastest possible downhill race time at the finish line in town. An American-based woman, Ashley Hartz, attended that first trip and the next year started bringing bags full of K2 and Atomic demo skis and boots to help develop the Choman Ski Club and to outfit teenagers from the Darashakran Refugee Camp — sponsored by the Choman Ski Club — to come and ski for the first time.
In 2018, the Ski Festival — with the help of Hartz, Wilcox and Hussein — took off. and a new tradition was born. “My job, as I see it, is just to spread skiing — for people to go out to the mountain and just geek out on the natural beauty and the gear and have a good time,” Hartz has said. Since then, VI Kurdistan has put on the ski rally and Untamed Borders has run 10-day ski touring trips to the slopes of Northern Iraq every winter until February 2020 – after which they ground to a stop due to coronavirus. In February 2023, a group of three Americans, two Danes, an Englishman and several Iraqis brought their our skis back to the Zagros mountains — the first trip there since the coronavirus halted flights and winter sports.
