About AWExpeditions

How it started

In the austral summer of 2014, Sunny Stroeer climbed Aconcagua’s Normal Route solo and unsupported. She was a management consultant and weekend climber at the time, fairly new to high altitude and very motivated. She picked Aconcagua because the Normal Route is busy and not technical, a reasonable place to test herself on her own. Plenty of people climb it solo every season.

The reaction on the mountain surprised her. “Where is your guide? Or are you here with your husband? Wait, you’re all by yourself?” A solo ascent that wouldn’t have been worth mentioning became a big deal, for no other reason than that a woman did it.

Sunny came home with two things: a love of high-altitude climbing, and a clear view of how many people still assume the mountains belong to men. She had worked on gender bias in graduate school and through her corporate career. This time she decided to do something about it in the mountains, and AWE grew out of that. NBC News wrote about it in A Woman on a Mission to Integrate the Boys’ Club of Action Sports. She later went back to Aconcagua and set a speed record on the full 360 Route, which National Geographic covered.

Today AWE runs trips in Argentina, Peru, Mexico, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal and the western United States. Shea McCrary, who first came to AWE as a client on a Paria Canyon trip, runs the business day to day. You can read about both of them on our team page.

What we care about

We want the summit as much as anyone. On an AWE trip, nobody has to prove she belongs there.

We work as a team. People help each other, show up for each other when it gets hard, and keep their tempers when plans change, which they do. The mountain sets the pace. We expect people to be prepared, flexible, honest with each other and responsible for themselves, and to treat teammates, guides, staff and local partners with respect and curiosity. Teams are made up of women from very different backgrounds.

In practice we hold ourselves to this:

• Safety first, on every decision.
• Fair and ethical treatment of guides, porters and staff.
• Decent treatment of working animals, like the mules on Aconcagua.
• Care for the places we travel through.
• Following local rules, permits and regulations.

How a trip runs

Most AWE trips have two people in charge, doing different jobs.

The expedition leader is an AWE woman and your main contact from the time you sign up until you get home. She’s an experienced mountaineer, or an experienced backpacker on our canyon trips, and either knows the local terrain well or has done a lot of similar terrain elsewhere. She’s a certified Wilderness First Responder and trained in AWE’s emergency procedures. She answers your logistics and gear questions, runs the day-to-day flow of the trip, and hosts the welcome dinner and the final team dinner. She’s also the one who looks after how the team is doing, and who steps in when the old assumptions about women in the mountains turn up.

The lead guide comes from a local guide company we’ve vetted carefully. She’s permitted and certified for that area, knows the route and how it changes through the season, and runs the technical instruction and skills sessions. Her work is on the trail and on the mountain, so you may not see much of her on the town days.

We prefer women lead guides and choose partners with that in mind. Some places, Peru and Kyrgyzstan among them, still have very few fully certified women guides, so there the lead guide may be a man working with your AWE expedition leader. Where staff schedules, certifications and permits allow, one person sometimes does both jobs. You can read more about the outfitters we work with on our partners page.

What that looks like on the ground

We plan trips around learning skills and making sound decisions as a team.

Teams are small. The trips we run cap at eight or nine participants, and several run with as few as three. Itineraries leave time to acclimatize and practice skills where the route needs them, rather than covering as much ground as possible. Before the trip you get a detailed gear list, training recommendations and a full description of the logistics and itinerary.

We don’t meet you at the gear check and then just walk you up the hill. We put a lot of thought into who’s on each team. Most trips start and end with a dinner in town, so the team meets before the hard days and has time together after them.

If you’re wondering where to start, How we climb lays out our four levels, from a first backpacking trip to 7,000-meter (23,000-foot) peaks.