Guardian · 14 hours ago

Some Question Why Young Women Should Climb Mountains but Hiking Gives Me Freedom | Mohsina Gufran | the Guardian

Before sunrise, three young women in Kargil lace up their ordinary shoes, pull their hijabs against the cold, and head into the mountains - not despite the voices that question why they should, but quietly beyond them. In a place where daily life for young women moves along a narrow track of study and household duty, the trails above the valley offer something harder to name: "The mountains also give us something else: freedom." What this 23-year-old writer describes is not rebellion but expansion - the slow, steady discovery that faith and ambition, tradition and independence, can be carried up a mountain together without contradiction. Her dream of becoming the first female mountain guide she has never seen is less a departure from where she comes from than a deeper arrival into who she is. She closes with a note to a daughter she has not yet had, and in that gesture something becomes clear: the mountains taught her to trust herself, and now she is learning to pass that trust forward.