Our partners

Every AWE trip depends on people who live and work where we climb. They know the routes, how the weather turns in a given month, how the permits work and who to call when something goes wrong. We choose them carefully, and we look for outfitters who hire women.

Who we work with

INKA Expediciones, Argentina. Our partner on Aconcagua, for both the 360 Route and the Normal Route. INKA’s Argentine guides climb alongside our expedition leader.

Asia Outdoors, Kyrgyzstan. Our partner on Lenin Peak, the 7,134-meter (23,406-foot) peak on the Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan border.

McGill’s Mountains, Nepal. Dr. Jeannette McGill leads our Nepal Passes and Peaks trek with a Nepali sirdar and local team. She summited Everest in 2025 and was the first South African woman to summit Manaslu.

Dreamland Safari Tours, Kanab, Utah. Guides and ground transport for the Grand Canyon Rim-to-Rim backpack. Their guides on our trips are women who know the canyon well.

WHOA Travel. A women-run company that leads all-women trips on Kilimanjaro and the Salkantay trek to Machu Picchu. We don’t run those trips ourselves. We send climbers to WHOA and you book with them directly.

In Peru and Mexico we climb with local mountain guides, and on Mount Baker our own women guides run the courses.

Women guides

All-women teams create demand for women guides, and our partners have noticed. Over the years we’ve watched them put more weight on hiring women guides and staff. More women working as guides makes big mountains feel less like someone else’s territory for the next woman who shows up.

Some places still have very few certified women guides. In Peru, for example, the local lead guide is usually a man, working alongside an AWE woman expedition leader. We hire women wherever we can.

Why not book direct?

You can, and if you only want the trip itself, booking with a local outfitter can be a good choice. We’ll tell you that ourselves.

What AWE adds is everything around the climb. We put the team together and stay with it from the first call to the last dinner. An AWE expedition leader is on the trip to look after the group, help with gear and logistics, and deal with the gender bias that still turns up in the mountains. That’s a big part of why climbers come back.

The Summit Scholarship

In 2019 AWE’s founder, Sunny Stroeer, offered a single $5,000 scholarship for one woman to climb a high peak she couldn’t otherwise afford. Hundreds of women applied. That became the Summit Scholarship, which now runs independently as part of the GEA Alliance.

We still work with it. Scholarship recipients climb with AWE and with other operators around the world, and Rope Team Rising, our Mount Baker course for girls and young women, was created with the Summit Scholarship and Lucy Westlake.