Russian Alpinist and Award-Winning Photographer Gleb Sokolov Knew How to Have Fun in the Mountains

Every January, we share a tribute to members of our community who we lost last year. Some were legends, others were pillars of their community, all were climbers. Read the full tribute to Climbers We Lost in 2025 here.

Gleb Sokolov, 71, May 9

Gleb Sokolov, who hailed from the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, was among the leading Russian alpinists of the late to post-Soviet era.

Beginning with Lenin Peak/Ibn Sina (7,134m/23,406ft) in 1979, he racked up a gargantuan list of ascents during his nearly four decades in the mountains. In total, Sokolov made 57 ascents of peaks above 7,000 meters and nine ascents of peaks higher than 8,000 meters, but remarkably, some of his hardest climbing occurred in the 2000s, when he was already in his 50s.

Sokolov was particularly prolific on the five 7,000ers of the Soviet Union—known as the Snow Leopard peaks. In the Himalaya, along with the 8000ers K2, Everest, Cho Oyu, Makalu, and Manaslu, Sokolov was a member of the team that made the first ascent of Lhotse Middle (8,413m/27,601ft) in 2001, which was then the highest unclimbed summit in the world. To date, he remains the only person to have summited all three Lhotse peaks: Main, Middle, and Shar.

Notably, Sokolov was a key member of Russian teams that made the first ascent of K2’s West Face in 2007 and established a new line on Everest’s North Face in 2004, and was also a part of the first Russian climbing expedition to Antarctica, in 2003.

Along with Khan Tengri (7,010m/22,999ft), which he climbed at least 30 times, one of Sokolov’s classic proving grounds was Kyrgyzstan’s Pobeda Peak/Jengish Chokusu (7,439m/24,406ft). He set a 20-hour camp-to-camp speed record on the mountain in 1993, and in 2005 made an eight-day solo traverse of the massif, lugging a pack filled with fresh cucumbers, apples, fried drumsticks, sausage, smoked fish, jam, and candied pineapples. Interviewed for Mountain.ru, Sokolov reported battling high winds, Arctic temperatures, and heavy snow with healthy doses of cognac and beer, music and poetry.

Sokolov was also responsible for two new routes on Pobeda, including, in 2009, at the age of 55, a “desperate” direct route up the mountain’s sheer, nearly 8,000-foot north face with Vitaly Gorelik. It was Sokolov’s third attempt on the line, which was a finalist for the 2010 Piolet d’Or.

In a report on this route for the American Alpine Journal, Sokolov described almost comically heinous conditions: constant avalanches, subzero temperatures, “nearly impenetrable ice … as hard as steel plate,” and rock consisting of “rotten yellow stone,” that crumbled under their ice tools and crampons and defied any attempt at protection. The men topped out in a howling blizzard, their limbs moving “like robotic arms under the guidance of a half-dead processor.” Sokolov said he only saw the sun on two of their eight days on the mountain, and by the end of their ordeal he had lost 26 pounds.

Sokolov, an award-winning mountain photographer, continued climbing 7000-meter peaks into his 60s, and even an ultimately fatal cancer diagnosis couldn’t keep him out of the alpine. Last spring, barely a month after having a tumor-covered kidney removed, the then-70-year-old scaled Aktru Peak, a 13,000-foot mountain in his native Siberia, along with several other smaller summits, and even survived a 1000-foot slide. In his final Facebook post, dated September 21, Sokolov reported that more cancer had been found during an MRI of his brain, and his right arm was subsequently paralyzed. Still, he was undaunted. “We’re alive, brothers!” he wrote.

Gleb Sokolov died nearly eight months later, on May 9, aged 71.

Read the full tribute to Climbers We Lost in 2025 here.

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