The Jeep Driver’s Son

A Peace Corps Volunteer’s son became the first Afghan to summit Everest and Denali—while helping build a ski culture in war-torn Afghanistan.

In 2003, Sam Sidiqi boarded a bus in Kabul in his best suit, heading back to the village on the outskirts of the city where his family had deep roots and where his uncle worked as a teacher. He was on summer break from business school in the U.S., and had just finished his first day of volunteering at Afghanistan’s central bank. Even though he’d left Afghanistan when he was 11 months old, the bus ride back home somehow felt familiar.

When a man on the bus looked at him and asked where he was going, Sidiqi told him he was heading back to his village. The man paused and said, “Your mother, she was the one who drove the jeep.”

Decades earlier, Sidiqi’s mother, Katherine, had served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Afghanistan, where she met and married his Afghan father, Nezamuddin Sidiqi, and then remained for six years after her service ended in 1975. His mother was the woman with the jeep, and someone on that bus still remembered her, more than two decades later. The encounter created a lasting impression on Sidiqi, as his mother’s presence had on the villagers. “It was a cool little passing,” he said. “The institutional memory of the village.”

That memory represents a thread running through Sidiqi’s life. As the son of an American Peace Corps Volunteer and an Afghan father, Sidiqi grew up between cultures. He was raised in the United States but was continually drawn back to Afghanistan through sports, mountaineering, and community building. In many ways, the blend of adventure and rootedness that shaped his parents’ lives would later shape his own.

Today, Sidiqi is the first Afghan national to summit both Mount Everest and Denali (also known as Mount McKinley), and is the founder of Afghan Peaks, a nonprofit that supports the Afghan Ski Challenge—a grassroots ski race and mountain-sports initiative hosted by the Bamyan Ski Club, based in central Afghanistan’s Bamyan province. The Bamyan ski community is a resilient network of Afghan skiers, guides, and young athletes who have spent years building a grassroots ski culture in the country’s central highlands despite decades of war and political instability.

The cover of Sidiqi’s children’s book, My Daddy is Climbing Denali, published in 2026. All proceeds from the book go to the nonprofit organization Afghan Peaks.

The club is the subject of 2024’s Champions of the Golden Valley, an Emmy-nominated documentary produced by RPCV Baktash Ahadi (Mozambique 2005–07). The film offers a rare and deeply personal portrait of Afghanistan, one that goes well beyond the vision of the country most outsiders are familiar with, with its links to war and political collapse.

Sidiqi is also an author and recently published the children’s picture book My Daddy is Climbing Denali, with all proceeds supporting Afghan Peaks.

Growing up, Sidiqi didn’t think of his mother’s Peace Corps work as service. “It was just her journey,” he said, likening it to The Hobbit, which he remembers reading at ten years old. That was the parallel that came to mind, he said: leaving the isolated tranquility of Tolkien’s Shire and setting off into something unknown. That framing stuck with him.

When Sidiqi sought to draw himself closer to the Afghanistan of his parents, he wasn’t looking to launch a sweeping intervention. He was looking to do something tangible that could quietly shape lives in ways no one could have predicted.

He found it in skiing. 

Sidiqi had skied as a child and later spent four years living in Switzerland in the mid-2000s, working for a logistics company. During that time, his hobby turned into a passion, and Sidiqi began to see skiing’s broader potential as both a tool for community building and a way to connect Afghanistan’s international reputation to something beyond conflict.

While studying business at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Sidiqi encountered the leadership philosophy of Stewart D. Friedman, which emphasizes “four-way wins”—a concept that postulates that meaningful work can fulfill multiple goals at once. For Sidiqi, skiing in Afghanistan did exactly that: It connected his personal passion, family life, and sense of service to a country that had always been part of his identity.

His approach was also influenced by the work of one of his college professors, economist Abhijit Banerjee, who argued that small-scale targeted action can often be more effective in improving people’s lives than broad development projects or major interventions. “There was so much corruption in Afghanistan, so many people doing so many bad things,” he said. “I thought, why don’t I just focus on this small thing that I can actually affect?”

Sidiqi at the summit of Denali, North America’s highest mountain peak, in 2021.

Sidiqi’s attitude toward mountaineering drew on a similar philosophy. “If I wasn’t going to be the first Afghan on Everest, I probably wouldn’t have climbed it,” he said plainly. “It was a really good way to help the nonprofit.” The summit was the point, but so was the flag. In a sense, he was carrying Afghanistan onto that mountain, into a space where the country had never been represented before.

The children’s book he later wrote grew out of conversations with his daughter during his preparation to climb Denali. Some of her questions were simple: How high is the mountain? Will there be animals? Other questions stopped him cold: What happens if you don’t come back?

That last question became the heart of the book. The main character, modeled on Sam, does not summit the peak—a deliberate decision meant to reinforce the book’s central message: that safety matters more than reaching the top.

This is just skiing. We’re not teaching people how to revolt.

“When you read a book to your kids, you’re setting an expectation,” he explained. “I wanted the expectation between the parent and the child to be ‘I’m going to be safe, and I’ll make the decision to come down if that’s the right decision.'” The book, he said, is for parents as much as their kids.

Operating Afghan Peaks under Taliban governance has required a different kind of caution. Women’s skiing, once a central part of the organization’s work, is no longer viable under Taliban jurisdiction. Sidiqi is methodical about framing what Afghan Peaks does, explaining that the nonprofit does not threaten local governance, does not operate as a political instrument, and actively works to build trust with authorities. “This is just skiing,” he said. “We’re not teaching people how to revolt.”

What he hopes people will take away from Ahadi’s documentary and from his own story is ultimately quite simple.

“Afghanistan is still there,” he said.

In some ways, Sam Sidiqi’s story began long before Everest, Denali, or the ski races of Bamyan. It began when his mother, a young Peace Corps Volunteer, stepped off a plane in Afghanistan decades earlier and then built a life rooted deeply enough in the place that villagers still remember her years later as “the one who drove the jeep.”