George Cherrie went by freighter with the expedition's equipment, along with four cougar hounds, to Karachi. Theodore and Kermit Roosevelt with Suydam Cutting departed from New York City on 11 April 1925 aboard SS Leviathan. In England they secured, with the help of the Soviet envoy Rakovsky, permission to enter the Russian Pamirs. Stopping in Paris to buy presents for Asians they might encounter, the three Americans went by rail to Marseilles and then by ship to Bombay, arriving on May 11. On May 19 the expedition left Srinagar with a caravan of 60 ponies. Via the Zoji Pass they reached Leh about June 1 and then collected several specimens of the barhal and the Tibetan antelope. For more than 2 weeks, the expedition journeyed through the high Himalayas and lost 14 of their 60 ponies, before reaching Sanju Bazaar in eastern Turkestan on July 5. A few days later the party reached Yarkand, where they split up. Cutting went northwest to Kashgar; Cherrie collected birds, small mammals and reptiles in central Turkestan; the Roosevelts with the two Bandipur shikaris went to the Tian Shan Mountains for big game hunting.