Alexander Tarasov reports: “This incident happened in my youth, in 1983. I then worked in a geological prospecting party in the Southern Tien Shan. The party carried out a general search in the spurs of the eastern part of the Gissar ridge in the area of the five-thousand-meter mountains, the sharp peaks of which were covered with eternal snow.
One of my routes ran in the upper reaches of the say (ravine) Ak-bey-beyob, the narrow and steep trench of which was still covered with a "snow bridge", in local terms - tarma. On that day, along this tarma, my Pamir worker named Murod and I barely climbed to the upper Sai, overcoming at least a kilometer. There we seemed to find ourselves in another world: below there were alpine meadows and merrily seething streams.
Here, at an altitude of three and a half thousand meters, only rocks covered with snow and ice towered around. The cold wind blew under our windbreakers, and the sun's rays reflected from the snow and ice surfaces were so blinding that we had to wear special glasses.
And now, when half of the route was already behind us, the weather, as often happens in the mountains, suddenly turned bad. Dark low clouds covered the mountain peaks, the wind intensified, sleet began to fall, which soon turned into a dry prickly blizzard. The snow, under the pressure of the gusty wind, literally pierced our faces and hands.
Sharply colder, visibility due to the ever increasing snowfall dropped to several tens of meters.
I decided to wait out the bad weather. Murod and I sat down under a large stone overhanging from the leeward side in order to somehow hide from the piercing wind and thorny snow. And on time. A real blizzard broke out before our eyes: a strong wind carried snow almost horizontally, a whirlwind of snow covered everything around.
Wherever you look, a white shroud. Frankly, I felt uneasy. I glanced at the worker. The same one, hunched over in three deaths, tightly pressed against the cold stone and covering his face from the icy wind with a windbreaker hood, chewed a biscuit as if nothing had happened.
Suddenly I felt something, something made me turn my head to the left. From what I saw, a chill ran down my spine and the hair on my head and arms began to move. A white human figure was slowly moving in the blizzard. The chilling stories of older friends-geologists that the “white climber” appeared to people in the mountains instantly surfaced in my memory. So they called a ghost, the restless soul of a climber who died while climbing.
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Since then, she has been wandering the mountains and looking for her boyfriend, also a climber. Moreover, most often it was seen high in the mountains on the snow-covered slopes of those mountain climbers who had to endure cold nights without tents and sleeping bags or fall into terrible snowstorms on the peaks when they were on the verge of death. It was also said that the “white climber” called people to follow her. Those who agreed to follow her never came back. In general, horror!
In that short moment that I saw this ghostly woman, I had time to consider her. She was wearing wide white harem pants and the same white loose windbreaker belted with a rope - the usual outfit of climbers of the 1950s and 1960s. A large windbreaker hood was draped over his head, almost completely hiding his face.
And thank God! I'm afraid to even imagine what would have happened if this climber had noticed me!
I glanced at the worker: does he see the "white climber"? But he continued to look at his feet, munching another biscuit. I looked to the left again - the climber had disappeared, as if she had never been. No matter how much I peered into the snowy milk of the blizzard, I never saw anyone else.
For some time after that I was not let go of a chilling fear. It all seemed that the ghost of the climber was about to reappear right in front of us and drag us into the snowy abyss. But since nothing of the kind happened, I gradually came to my senses.
Surprisingly, the whirlwind of snow subsided shortly after the disappearance of the ghost, and as quickly as it began. Murod and I climbed out of our hiding place, flexing our numb legs. Snow covered everything around so that there was no point in continuing the geological route.
Then we headed down the sai: quickly, in leaps, we ran along the tarma and after some twenty minutes we again found ourselves in an alpine meadow, abundantly watered with rain. The sky was clear, the sun was shining, and everything that happened there, above, was already recalled as some kind of unreal dream. But that white figure, slowly wandering in the veil of a blizzard, I will remember for the rest of my life."