James Robertson was looking for two things: an unusual ski holiday and a place where he could possibly make some good documentary photographs—something different from what he had been photographing for his job at an auction house in Edinburgh, Scotland. And once he discovered it was possible to go on a guided ski tour in the mountains around Bamyan, Afghanistan, he decided he couldn’t not go.

The skiing in these mountains about 111 miles west of Kabul is bare bones—no lifts, no groomed slopes, just the high-altitude mountains of the Koh-e Baba Range. The climb up is about an hour on foot.

On the second to last day of his ten-day tour in 2012, Robertson was heading down the mountain when he