British adventurers Niall McCann and Finn McCann are on their way to climb Mount Asgard, the 2,015m twin-peaked granite tower in Auyuittuq National Park on Baffin Island. It's a family affair: They want to climb the peak that their grandfather, Patrick Douglas Baird, named but never summited.

The McCanns will arrive shortly in Pangnirtung, the gateway to that Canadian Arctic national park. Here, they will share 1953 photos with local residents to connect with those who may recall Patrick Douglas Baird. They will then haul 40kg loads to the base of the mountain and climb the tower over about three weeks.

In an Instagram post, Niall McCann recounted Patrick Douglas Baird’s 1953 expedition: “In the summer of 1953, my grandfather Pat Baird led a four-month expedition...for the Arctic Institute of North America. During this expedition, he first laid eyes on an extraordinary-looking mountain, which he named Asgard (subsequently changed to Mount Asgard), home of the gods.”

The jagged, fiord-indented east coast of Baffin Island features some of the highest cliffs in the world. The highest peak is Mount Odin (2,147m), followed by Mount Asgard (2,015m), Mount Qiajivik (1,963m), Angilaaq (1,951m), Kisimngiuqtuq (1,905m), Ukpik (1,809m), Bastille Peak (1,733m), Mount Thule (1,711m), Angna (1,710m), and Mount Thor (1,675m). There is also a whole other area further north with slightly lower but equally world-class cliffs in Sam Ford Fiord, where the walls rise directly from the ocean. In short, eastern Baffin offers amazing climbing.

The two towers

Mount Asgard lies inland on southeastern Baffin Island. Its granite north and south towers, separated by a saddle, soar 1,600m above the valley, making it a premier big-wall destination. Of the two towers, the north one is slightly taller than the south.

In 1934, Patrick Douglas Baird explored Greenland and northeastern Baffin Island. In 1938, he returned to Baffin, only to lose his companion when a storm blew him out to sea, to a watery grave.

Although he never summited the peak, Patrick Baird was an important figure in the climbing history of Asgard. It began in 1953 during the Arctic Institute expedition, which he led. Four Swiss scientists -- Jurg  Marmet, Hans Rothlisberger, Fritz Hans Schwarzenbach, and Hans Weber -- father of polar traveler Richard Weber -- made the first ascent. They reached the Asgard saddle from the east, then summited the north peak. Baird put up several first ascents during that four-month expedition, but he himself didn’t join the Asgard climb.

In 1963, Baird led another successful expedition to Mount Asgard. His 14-year-old daughter, Niall and Finn McCann’s mother, was a team member. Baird again did some notable first ascents in the area but did not climb Asgard.

A climbing party, led again by Baird, made the first ascent of the 2,000m South Tower in 1971. Doug Scott, Guy Lee, Rob Wood, and Phil Koch summited via the 1,000m south ridge. They then made an epic descent in a blizzard. In 1972, Scott returned to Baffin Island with Dennis Hennek, Paul Nunn, and Paul Braithwaite, this time without Baird, and established the Scott-Hennek Route on the East Pillar of Asgard.

More on Pat Baird

Patrick Douglas Baird was born in the UK in 1912 and became a key figure in latter-day Arctic exploration. He studied geography and geology at Cambridge University. Then in the 1930s, he joined the British Arctic Air Route Expedition to Greenland (1930–1931) and led the Cambridge East Greenland Expedition in 1934. He also directed a 1936–1937 expedition to Baffin Island, where he did mapping and studied glaciers.

During World War II, Baird served as an instructor at the Canadian Army’s winter warfare school, training soldiers for cold-weather combat. In 1947, he became Director of the Arctic Institute of North America, guiding research and serving on the institute’s Board of Governors.

Baird wrote many scholarly articles on Arctic geography and glaciology. He also authored The Polar World in 1964 and co-wrote Field Guide to Snow and Ice with W.H. Ward. Baird died in Ottawa in 1984, and his ashes were scattered on Baffin Island. You can read more about Pat Baird here.

The McCann brothers

Niall McCann, a biologist, National Geographic Explorer, and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, has extensive experience in big-wall climbing in the U.S. and Europe. He has also done ski-mountaineering in Greenland.

Finn McCann brings over 20 years of climbing experience across more than 30 overseas expeditions, including Himalayan ascents, technical Alpine mixed routes, and multi-day big walls. He also participated in the 2014 Greenland expedition with his brother.

High on the remote granite cliffs of Sam Ford Fiord, Baffin Island, climbers Erik Boomer and Ky Hart have completed a new big wall route in one of Canada’s most isolated regions. The 23-day ascent, which they named Sikunga Express (WI3 M7 5.10 A3+ Grade VII, 975m, 19 pitches), tested their mettle through cold temperatures, storms, and sustained technical difficulties.

Near the top of the climb, with only one usable rope remaining and over 500m of exposure beneath them, the pair were pinned to their portaledge as strong Arctic winds hammered the wall. It was one of the most exposed moments of a trip defined by commitment and the need for well-rounded climbing skills.

Boomer and Hart had traveled to the east coast of Baffin Island in search of unclimbed terrain. They found it on a sweeping face just north of Clyde River on the southwest-facing side of photogenic Sam Ford Fiord, considered the Yosemite Valley of the Canadian Arctic.

Full commitment

Their approach was exploratory from the outset.

“We kind of showed up there with a loose plan of climbing something new,” Hart said. “This cliff seemed to have the least amount of [water] runoff and was seemingly steep.”

Temperatures were cold during the early stages of the climb, with daily highs around -7˚C and averages around -15˚C.

“There was a good 60m ice pitch at the very beginning,” Hart recalled. “Those first couple of days, we had a high of seven degrees.”

From that initial ice pitch, the route climbed through increasingly complex terrain, demanding a combination of alpine, mixed, and aid skills. The pair encountered loose rock and challenging aid sections that pushed their skills and gear.

“Every style of aid [climbing], clean to nailing, to copperheads hooking,” said Boomer. The lower pitches were also prone to being loose. “Rampy ledges that would come off in the beginning and, you know, send down some rocks,” Hart added.

Pinned to the wall

After a mid-route snowstorm forced a temporary pause, Boomer and Hart pushed higher, only to be caught in severe wind while camped on one of their most exposed bivouacs right near the prow of the face.

“The wind started picking up,” Hart said. “It was funny at first until we got picked up on the ledge and put back down.”

"We were kind of hanging on for dear life in that ledge during that windstorm, just getting tossed around and just hanging onto the straps," Boomer added.

Unable to move safely, the two spent the day pinned to the wall, their portaledge buffeted by strong gusts. As the storm wore on, they took stock of their dwindling equipment.

“We had core shot three out of our four ropes,” said Hart. “The gear was getting thin.”

Despite the conditions, they continued upward and reached the summit just as the weather warmed dramatically.

“It was a huge swing,” Boomer said. “We were definitely dodging a lot of rockfall.”

20 nights

In total, Boomer and Hart spent 20 nights on the wall. Including the time spent route finding and establishing the lower pitches, the full expedition spanned 23 days from May 1 to May 23.

With a snowmobile and komatik (wooden sled), they had their own transportation in one of the most remote climbing areas in Canada.

“We were able to insert and extract ourselves,” Boomer explained. “Cruise around and choose our formation a little bit more relaxed.”

Their route adds a new line to the vast granite walls in this part of Baffin Island. Despite a reasonable amount of climbing activity in the region in recent decades, it suggests there is still much potential for exploratory climbing. The climb also marks a further step in Boomer's transition from elite whitewater kayaker to Arctic traveler and now big wall climber.

“Overall, it was a sweet trip,” Boomer said. “We wanted to do a new line and we did it.”

David Kocsis and Marton Nagy of Hungary have opened a new line on the South Wall of 5,203m Shkhara, Georgia's highest mountain. Due to the difficult terrain, bad weather, and lack of time, they didn't continue along the upper ridge to the summit. Still, their climb marks only the second complete winter ascent of that wall.

Kocsis and Nagy started on February 28. At 3,800m, they encountered harsh conditions with intense snowfall. The more difficult technical sections began at 3,900m, and the Hungarians had to overcome 100m of waist-deep snow up a 65˚ slope.

At 4,058m, they camped in a small space they hollowed out for their tent in the deep snow. The temperature dropped to -26˚C that night. In the morning, an avalanche buried their tent, but they managed to dig themselves out. They moved the tent closer to the rocks to avoid more avalanches.

Kocsis and Nagy considered that the safest place was on top of the wall, so they hurried to finish it, despite the weather. After a difficult section, they completed the new line, according to Mozgasvilag.

Seracs ready to fall

From there, the climbers saw that the glacier on the upper section was in bad condition, and they would have to climb just below falling seracs. Here, at around 4,600m, they turned around. After a difficult descent, they reached base camp.

Kocsis attempted Shkhara's South Face in the winter of 2024 as a member of the Hungarian National Climbing Team, which first attempted this face in 2020. In 2024, the late Archil Badriashvili advised the team about their planned line. Badriashvili and Georgi Tepnadze made the first ascent of the South Wall of Shkhara in February 2018. They also successfully summited the mountain.

Back in base camp, Badriashvili's friends arrived to celebrate the new line with them. It's a pity that Badriashvili could not be with them; he perished in a climbing accident in Georgia last year.

Below, the 2018 climb of Badriashvili and Tepnadze.

Taking advantage of a brief break in the heinous Patagonian weather, Matteo Della Bordella, Dario Eynard, and Mirco Grasso have completed the best climb of the 2025 season in South America. They did the entire Gringos Locos route on the northwest face of 2,719m Cerro Piergiorgio.

Thirty years ago, two other Italians, Maurizio Giordani and Luca Maspes, partly climbed this highly difficult line but never completed it.

Last month, the team made it halfway up the route during their first push after waiting nearly a month for a weather window. They then retreated to El Chalten, hoping for one more try before they had to return home.

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Last-minute chance

They had nearly lost hope when forecasts announced a mini-break in the weather last week. The three climbers ran back to the granite face and started where they had left off, opening new pitches until they connected with the last five pitches of Via dell' Hermano, a line opened by Herve Barmasse and Christian Brenna in 2008.

The team had to deal with strong winds and bitter cold as a new storm approached but reached the summit at 3 am on February 27. They quickly rappeled down just in time to escape the bad weather.

No obvious lines

The new combination route by Della Bordella, Grasso, and Eynard has 27 pitches graded as 7A and A2 (even moderate aid climbing is remarkable on such a smooth wall). As the climbers later told the Italian Alpine Club (CAI), it was the most difficult climb of their lives.

The expedition was part of the CAI Eagle Project, which puts together seasoned climbers like Della Bordella with promising younger ones like 25-year-old Dario Eynard from Bergamo.

As they told PlanetMountain, the team's only regret was not having had time to climb the entire route in one alpine-style push. They used ropes that they had left fixed from the first push. However, they did retrieve everything from the wall as they descended.

There is a good reason why the line remained unclimbed since 1995. At first sight, the 900m wall has no obvious lines. Della Bordella describes it as a smooth granite mirror. Legendary climber Michel Piola called the northwest face of Piergiorgio "the perfect wall." And Gringos Locos is the most direct line up the smoothest part of the face.

Matteo Della Bordella is in Patagonia to attempt an unfinished big-wall route from 1995 -- the northwest face of 2,719m Cerro Piergiorgio.

"It is impossible not to be amazed by this wall of rock that looks like a 900m-high natural dam, a smooth mirror, devoid of any logical line that clearly indicates a climb," said Della Bordella.

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Unfinished task for 30 years

Maurizio Giordani and Luca Maspes first attempted Gringos locos exactly 30 years ago, but didn't quite finish it. For 21 pitches, the Italians opened a beautiful line up the middle of the face. But in the end, they left a few rope lengths undone. Despite several subsequent tries, no other team has completed the route.

Luca Maspes recently described the route as an unfinished work of art and "a hymn to climbing imagination" on "an ocean of difficult but wonderful granite." He wished Della Bordella and his team all the best in their attempt.

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Experts and young stars

Della Bordella is the leader of the Eagle Team Project, a climbing program supported by the Italian Alpine Club (CAI). Its teams combine highly experienced climbers like Della Bordella with younger, promising stars like Dario Eynard.

Eynard and Mirco Grasso, 32, from Venice, have joined him on Piergiorgio. Grasso, an expert in exploratory climbing, happened to be in Patagonia and put aside his own projects to join the Piergiorgio team. Six years ago, Grasso himself had designs on the Italian route, but bad weather prevented him and his team from even setting foot on the face.

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Previously, Della Bordella and Grasso paired up with Alessandro Bau for a new route on Aguja Val Biois in the Fitz Roy massif.

Halfway so far

So far, the team has climbed half the face during a three-day weather window. They had to wait almost a month for even that brief patch of climbing weather.

"Given the limited time available and the difficult/slow climb, we decided to climb as high as possible and fix ropes to the highest point to have a good chance if another window comes," Grasso explained.

"We managed to reach a niche on the wall known as the 'Heart,' slightly above the halfway point," Dario Eynard wrote on social media. He describes the climb as hard and slow, alternating free and aid sections.

"Cerro Piergiorgio is frighteningly large and isolated, but I feel that there was harmony in the team, and we all rowed towards the same goal. I still have a lot to learn about logistics in contexts like these...[It is] completely different from the Alps," said the young climber.

The team has now returned to El Chalten to wait and hope for one more window before the season ends.

Every last drop

"Patagonia is giving us the classic roller-coaster of emotions between successes, retreats, rescues, injuries, dreams, and hopes," Della Bordella wrote yesterday on social media. "It is still early to say how high we will reach, but...we want to squeeze every last drop from this great experience."

Few climbs have captured our collective imagination quite like The Dawn Wall. This notoriously difficult route on El Capitan in Yosemite became a crucible for legendary climber Tommy Caldwell, who spent years developing it.

When Caldwell and partner Kevin Jorgeson finally ascended the entire route in 2015, their triumph became a seminal moment in the history of rock climbing. It has only been repeated by Czech phenom Adam Ondra (in 2016), and it is now widely considered the most difficult big wall climb in the world.

Almost a decade later, Belgian climber Sebastien Berthe has become the fourth person to score an ascent. Climbing mostly with France’s Soline Kentzel in a continuous 14-day push, the duo topped out on January 31.

The 31-year-old overcame a back injury, bad weather, and a bit of despair to etch his name into climbing history. But he still sounded stoked about the accomplishment during a recent interview. Berthe had first attempted The Dawn Wall in 2022, but the 5.14d traverses (the crux of the route) proved as difficult for him as for Jorgeson, whose famous night climb of the traverse became the stuff of legend.

We caught up with Berthe about how he pulled off one of rock climbing’s greatest challenges.

Sebastien Berthe on climbing the Dawn Wall

Why were you inspired to climb The Dawn Wall? 

Berthe: It’s hard to say when I first thought about it. In 2019, I climbed the Nose in eight days. And that was probably my best achievement so far. I had a good feeling about climbing this route. Somehow, I got confident that I was quite good in the Yosemite style and also that I really liked it a lot.

So, after this trip, I was hoping to get back to Yosemite and try a really big goal. I wanted something hard, even if it was too ambitious. I was there in the Valley when Adam climbed it in 2016. It was a dream I had, even though I didn’t know if I could even try it. After the Nose, I knew I had at least a chance.

When did you first learn about The Dawn Wall? 

Berthe: I remembered when Tom and Kevin topped out. I was following their push at the time when I was in Belgium. I remember I was watching when they topped out, and the media circus around it was incredible. It was the first time I had seen that in climbing.

Freeing El Cap

Next year, I came to Yosemite, where Adam was working on it. Seeing him struggling, then doing it, was a big inspiration. At the time, it wasn’t a proper goal or a dream. I hadn’t considered it. I spent too long in the Valley that year. The first month was just going up Astroman and other classics there, and it felt so hard. After my first month, I got somehow used to the climbing and could climb some 5.12s. After two months, I could free El Cap on some routes.

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How would you compare climbing The Dawn Wall to the rest of the Valley? 

Berthe: It’s really a big labor. The big difference is just about the amount of work you have to do just to go climbing.

The first time I tried it two years ago, we spent two weeks just trying to get to the pitches. It was hard to free-climb most of it. We were mostly pulling on cams. It took a lot of time and energy. Even when the lines are fixed, you have to jug up 400 or 500 meters just to practice a 5.14d pitch.

You jug for an hour and a half, usually while hauling gear, sometimes in the full sun. Other times it’s very cold. It’s a lot of work just to get to the climbing. It’s worth doing all that work. But I totally get people who don’t want to get into that.

What Tommy did with this first ascent is even harder. What he did is really crazy.

One boulder after another

How do you think about this route now that you’ve sent it? 

Berthe: It’s really crazy that you can find such a sustained route from the very first all the way to the end. Every pitch is great. There is no one pitch you would take away. What is crazy about it is that it’s just one boulder after another for 600m. And that’s something quite unique.

Are you more attracted to big walls now? Or do you need a break? 

Berthe: It’s hard to say what’s going to be the next thing for me. I really like being up there. I feel like it’s where I’m the most focused, compared to sport climbing or bouldering. But I also know I can’t do it all year. I need some breaks. I’d like to open a big wall one day or free something. That’s been a dream of mine for quite a few years now. There are many other lines on El Cap, but you just need to trust it.

What was the hardest moment for you?

Berthe: The most difficult moment of the first half was Pitch 14. And I had this back problem. I knew I could do it, but I kept falling, and I couldn’t understand why. To change that was kind of hard. I think I could have stopped there. If I had failed on the second day, I’m not sure I would have kept going. That was a big turning point for me.

Pitches 14 and 15

Mentally, the hardest moment was when I sent Pitches 14 and 15 and saw the weather was turning bad in two days, and I had to get out of there. That was a big challenge. I hadn’t practiced the rest of the pitches as much because I didn’t take the time. The weather forced me to start the push a little earlier than I wanted.

At some point, I realized I might not be able to finish it, and that would have been hard for me. If I would have failed after Pitch 14, I don’t think I would have recovered mentally for an attempt later in the season.

You need to climb The Dawn Wall when it’s really cold. Which means between November and March. But that means storms coming in every two weeks. And you need at least a few weeks to climb the route. So I think that’s how you need to climb it: rushing between the storms. There are so many factors that make it difficult. You also need to have some partners to help you.

Do you have any methods to help you retain focus? 

Berthe: This year, I’ve been working with a climbing coach who helped me to deal with an intense moment, either failure or send. We were working on the momentum, like trying to stay in the positive momentum, even when I was failing…We were working on how to fight better, how to breathe better…That was something that probably made the difference this year than when I tried two years ago.

Shoes the key

What would you say to another climber who’s considering an attempt on The Dawn Wall? 

Berthe: I would say very practical things, like the shoes, are really key. I don’t like to say that, but you need to bring quite a lot of pairs of shoes. Some shoes are really not working, and some do. Some pitches require more smearing. Other times, you need a really stiff edging shoe. I personally found the Mystic from Scarpa worked best for me.

I was sandpapering my shoes between every try on most pitches, and especially on 14 and 15. I had to be really focused on how I treat the shoe. I would sandpaper each shoe for 3 minutes each until the edge was smooth again. Every time, you’d break a bit of the shoe’s rubber, so you want to equalize.

The skin game

Also, consider your skin and figure out how to build really strong skin. The Dawn Wall has taught me some interesting ways to deal with my skin. Finally, take time to rest because all the work is intense and hard. Don’t rush it too much.

What’s special about The Dawn Wall? 

Berthe: I don’t know. Maybe it’s not so special. The idea of going all free in such a steep and big smooth face is quite amazing. It’s quite a lucky and amazing thing. It’s just a bit harder than other routes. But it’s still only just a climbing route. The uniqueness is about what you bring to it.

I think Tommy’s story makes it special. I was talking a bit with Tommy after the ascent and I felt really thankful for him creating this route. It was more than just the climbing. It was a big part of my life, and I lived some really intense moments up there with the people who supported me, and I think that’s what makes it special.

Do you have plans to climb something even cooler than The Dawn Wall?

Berthe: When you tackle a goal like The Dawn Wall, you feel like it’s a feeling you can have only once. Once I finally climbed my first 9a, I felt like I was just starting. I don’t think I can find something cooler than The Dawn Wall. At least not without spending the next 10 years in the Valley — and I don’t have the time for that! Or the visa.

This article first appeared on GearJunkie.

Tasio Martin and Ibon Mendia of Spain have made the most of Patagonia's stingy weather windows. After a new line on Torres del Paine, they nailed another new route on Aguja Mermoz in the Fitz Roy massif last week.

A one-day break in the otherwise stormy weather was all the two Basques needed to send a 500m line on the east face of Aguja Mermoz.

"It was a single, 18-hour push up and down a line we had been planning for days," Martin wrote.

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The climbers called the new route Dardara and graded it up to 7b+.

"The route goes to the left of Pilar Rojo [the Red Pillar]," Ibon Mendia wrote. "In the first three to four pitches, we found some material from a previous attempt. Otherwise, we first-climbed the rest of the route."

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Not long ago, the Basques opened the 420m, 7a Erresistentziara kondenatuak (Basque for "Doomed to Resistance") on the North Peak of Torres del Paine during the last days of 2024.

Matteo Della Bordella, Mirco Grasso, and Alessandro Bau of Italy overcame the rough Patagonia weather to open a new 7a, A1 route on the east face of Aguja Val Biois in the Fitz Roy massif.

The team pitched their tent on the glacier, found a suitable line, and went straight for it during a short weather window between storms. The route proved difficult from the first pitches, and the climbers endured bitter cold for the entire climb. Some demanding cracks and passages required aid climbing (A1).

After climbing the planned line, the team reached the ridge to discover that a stormy front was approaching fast. New route completed, they decided to retreat without summiting the Aguja Val Biois.

"The route is beautiful, but I don't know how many repetitions it will have," Della Bordella told his home team. Hence, they called the route "Quien va?" colloquial Spanish for "Who's next?"

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Patagonia climbing peaks in January, but locals and some regular visitors have already notched some noteworthy early-season climbs.

At a first glance, conditions this year are quite snowy, which increases the difficulty of some classic routes, with more mixed sections and bigger snow mushrooms. On the other hand, approaches are easier and safer.

"The snowpack on the glaciers is thicker than this date last year, which was already better than the previous years," Colin Haley reported this week. "Yay for more snow and less horrendous talus!"

The American has been in Patagonia for three weeks with Thomas Bukowski and Anthony Walsh. So far, he had enough good weather to attempt Aguja Poincenot and to climb Aguja Guillaumet by the Amy route.

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New route on the White Throne

Local climbers live close enough to the peaks to seize the smallest weather window. Seva Pelleti and Hernando Salas had just a single afternoon of calm weather between storms and put up a new 700m route on the south face of the White Throne (Trono Blanco) in the so-called French Valley of Torres del Paine.

The climbers called the route Ultima Ronda and graded it AI3 M4. The window was so small that the strong wind picked up again while they were on the summit. They quickly rappelled down.

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More ascents

The Odel brothers, Pedro and Tomas, also made the best of the late Patagonian spring with Anda pa alla, the difficult route opened last year by Sean Villanueva O'Driscoll, Leo Gheza, and Matteo della Bordella on Aguja Guillaumet.  Then, the brothers went for the impressive Los Tiempos Perdidos on Cerro Torre, with Guillermo Navarros.

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Pataclimb, the website about Patagonian climbing edited by Rolando Garibotti, also reported two recent ascents on Aguja Standhardt's Exocet by Tom Seccombe and Etienne Potof, and by Dane Steadman and Allie Oaks.

The site also highlighted:

• a repetition of Via dei Ragni on Cerro Torre by Ethan Berkeland, Ballin Miller, and Chris Labosky
• an ascent of the Supercanaleta on Cerro Chalten by Saul Marcos and Jorge Larraz of Spain

There has also been interesting action in the Torres del Paine group. More on this later.

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This past summer, Matteo Della Bordella, Symon Welfringer, Silvan Schupbach, and Alex Gammeter made the first ascent of a remote 1,980m wall in East Greenland. But their climb of the northwest face of Droneren was only part of the adventure.

They spent 33 days in the Arctic, kayaked 450km, then climbed 35 pitches on a wall with difficulties up to 7b in pure trad style. They had four encounters with polar bears. Finally, they put together a film that is now screening at mountain film festivals. (Next viewing is at Courmayeur on December 13.) A busy month.

We spoke to Matteo Della Bordella about his thoughts on the expedition. He also shared a report that partner Silvan Schupbach wrote in English.

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Raising the bar

Della Bordella has kayaked and climbed in Greenland before, but always within a fiord. This involved the open sea and was his biggest challenge yet.

"It raised the bar in many ways," he said. "Most of all, because the place was so remote and so far. For the first time, I really felt in the middle of nowhere."

The face was challenging in part because of rock conditions and the time pressure. They had limited supplies, so every day they spent kayaking or climbing meant one day less food to get back.

Half climbing, half kayaking

The team arrived at Tasiilaq in East Greenland in mid-July, but thick pack ice delayed their start. This was a rough ice year on the east coast of Greenland. When a piteraq, a katabatic wind blowing down from the Ice Sheet, momentarily cleared the way, the foursome paddled 300km south in 10 days to Skjoldungen Fiord. (They had received a partial lift via boat to a hunter's hut 150km from Tasiilaq.)

"We took everything with us: food and gas for the entire expedition, [plus] the climbing and camping gear," Della Bordella told ExplorersWeb. "[This] increased the uncertainty of success."

To do otherwise, they felt, would have been easier but less adventurous.

In fact, the climbing took only 15 out of the 33 days, not counting the boat transfers. They spent eight days kayaking to the wall and another four kayaking back to their pickup. They waited out storms for the other six days.

Kayaking amid the ice floes

According to Schupbach, they faced obstacles every day at sea. "Once, we got stuck in the ice and narrowly escaped. Another time, we were almost crushed by ice floes as the tide changed."

Then a storm forced them to stay in their fragile tent for 60 hours as the violent wind sent rocks flying through the air.

"I especially recall the amount of ice at the beginning," Della Bordella said. "There were moments when we had to paddle among so many icebergs and chunks of moving ice...it was like trying to cross a highway with heavy traffic."

He also recalls some scary moments with swells up to three meters high.

Skjoldungen Fiord

The team set up base camp in Skjoldungen Fiord and went for the northwest face of Droneren, a spire that American adventurer Mike Libecki first spotted and attempted some years ago. No other teams had been there since Libecki.

"The approach through the flat valley floor had a special charm, struggling naked through rivers and swamps, stung by thousands of sand flies," Schupbach recalled. "Further up, we climbed over moraines and firn fields to the glacier below the wall. Shortly after our arrival, as if to welcome us, a huge boulder fell out of the left part of the wall and crashed spectacularly...After this, we quickly agreed to stick to the central pillar in the middle of the wall when climbing."

The climb

They climbed capsule style, working on the lower sections of the wall during the short, drier weather in between the otherwise relentless rains. The weather thwarted three summit pushes. In the end, they had to sacrifice style on their return and shorten the kayaking in order to gain more time for the climb. It paid off.

It was on our fourth attempt, at the last minute so to speak, that we finally reached the end of the fixed ropes again. Symon and Matteo climbed quickly into the new terrain. Alex and I carried all the gear. It was great to finally be on the wall and give it our best shot! Late in the evening, we reached a good bivouac spot high up on the wall.

 

The mood was finally good, and motivation was high. The next day, Alex and I climbed ahead. It was cold, and the higher we got, the more snow there was on the wall. Alex climbed some combined pitches, without crampons and ice axe. After the magnificent last pitch, we left the rocks below us and stood in front of the impressive summit ice cap. A hundred meters later, we finally reached the summit.

They free-climbed the entire route, says Della Bordella, without bolts.

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Not over yet

Back down, the team had more adventure than expected. There was no boat immediately available to bring them back to town, so they again loaded the kayaks and started paddling. They had just four days of food and assumed they would have to kayak at least half the way back.

Just as we were getting into the kayaks, a polar bear appeared right behind us. It was very curious, and we were alarmed. I took out my rifle and fired a warning shot. The bear continued to come toward us. I fired a second time. Finally, the polar bear retreated, and we hurried to get into the kayaks and say goodbye to base camp.

 

The following days at sea, we had mostly good weather, but decided to keep night watch because the polar bear [might] follow us. After four days and 150km we set up our last camp...The next morning at dawn, a polar bear tried to open my kayak. Luckily it was shy and ran away when I screamed. In the afternoon, a boat finally arrived and the tension of 33 days in the wilderness vanished.

We had been warned there were a lot of polar bears on the way to the face because that area is very remote and there are no human settlements nearby," Della Bordella said. "Perhaps we were the first humans these bears saw...Three of the bears that came close to us ran as we shouted at them, but the fourth one was not scared at all. We had quite a frightening moment because it came 10 meters from us. It only retreated after the third warning shot."

After the trip, Silvan Schüpbach says he felt like Ulysses after his Odyssey. In the end, they called the new route Oddisea Borealis (Northern Odyssey).

He is one of the most iconic characters in the big wall scene in general and Patagonia in particular. Sean Villanueva O'Driscoll is a multi-awarded climber, artist, reflective observer, and polyglot who feels at home anywhere there are walls to climb. Somehow, the climber has managed to make that combination of personality traits fit in harmony with the savage atmosphere of the Patagonian spires.

O'Driscoll made time before hitting some early-season ice around Banff for a chat with ExplorersWeb. He had come to the Canadian Rockies for the Banff Mountain Film Festival, where he and his partners told in words (and song) about their first free ascent of Riders on the Storm on Torres del Paine.

Born in flat Belgium 43 years ago, O'Driscoll unsurprisingly began his career in a climbing gym and then sports climbing on natural rock: bouldering, crags, then multi-pitch. He moved to western Europe, from Spain to the Alps, then progressed to big walls around the world, from Yosemite to the Himalaya. Yet he is most often associated with Patagonia.

Dragged to Patagonia

"It's just a powerful place, the weather, the rough scenery...There, you feel so small and insignificant...It just dragged me, and I can't stop coming back there."

O'Driscoll cited an old Patagonian legend: "If you eat Calafate berries [Berberis microphylla, a symbol of Patagonia and, according to recent studies, a superfood], even just one, you'll have to return to Patagonia for the rest of your life, and I did have some!"

O'Driscoll visited Patagonia for the first time in 2006 on his first alpine big wall expedition. On that occasion, he did the first repetition of Riders on the Storm on the central tower on Torres del Paine with regular climbing partner Nico Favresse, as well as Mike Lecomte and Favresse’s brother, Olivier.

The mythical route, opened by Kurt Albert, Bernd Arnold, Norbert Baetz, Peter Dittrich, and Wolfgang Guellich in 1991, left its mark on O'Driscoll. He wanted to return to attempt the first free climb of its 38 pitches. To its overall grade of VI 5.12d (European 7c) A3, you need to add a notable exposure to rockfall.

Siebe Vanhee had unsuccessfully tried to free-climb it the previous year, but it was when the Belgian trio of Vanhee, O'Driscoll, and Nico Favresse joined forces in 2024 -- with photographer Drew Smith as a fourth -- that they finally succeeded after 18 days on that wild Patagonian wall.

Enjoying the storm

How do you ride out the famously heinous Patagonian weather? It's not about fun or the challenge of bagging a first. It's something personal. In addition to skills and endurance, such a climb is about attitude.

"Out of the 18 days we spent on the wall, we could only climb six," O'Driscoll explained. "The rest of the time was spent sitting in the portaledges, hit by snow and wind. You have to be comfortable in that situation, and if you don't manage to enjoy yourself, you will not be able to continue."

Conditions were also extremely hard during the climbing days.

"The wind is blowing, it is snowing, there's ice on the holds, your fingers and feet hurt or get completely numb, so if you're just there for the performance, to achieve the first free climb, you're not going to do it. You have to be patient and enjoy the process.

A privilege

"In the end," he added, "it is a choice: you have to choose to enjoy, understand that it is also a huge opportunity, a privilege just to be there on the portaledge, in that incredible place. Sure, it's scary sometimes, but it is also incredible to be out there."

He believes that the key is accepting the weather and the conditions is simply making the best of it.

To help time pass, the climbers read, chatted, and played music. Luckily, they are very familiar with each other, and O'Driscoll said they never quarrel on a climb. Photographer Drew Smith pointed out after the expedition, "The summit was reached far before we stood on top because of the positive energy of the team."

Yet winds over 100kph eat up a lot of that positive energy.

"There was one night when the wind was so, so high, and the portaledge was shaking and banging all night long that it was impossible to sleep," O'Driscoll recalled. "It was like heavy turbulence. On that occasion, in addition to securing the portaledge on top, we also had to tie the floor to the wall. Otherwise, it would just fly away in the wind like a flying carpet."

Music

On a route named after a song by The Doors, the sound of music resonated while O'Driscoll and Favresse were there.

"It's a very special place to play music, and our instruments have become part of our climbing gear," O'Driscoll said. "Music is a great resource to lift up the spirits. When you are playing music, you are there expressing yourself, learning, practicing, and communicating with the others. You are not just waiting."

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Asked if music would be less important if Patagonia had better weather and they weren't tentbound as often, O'Driscoll reflected: "I [still] think it would help with the uncertainty and the difficulties ahead. Yet, playing music is not something we planned as mental training or anything, it's just something we started doing to pass the time, and turned out to be amazing."

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A lucky weather window

After Riders on the Storm, O'Driscoll went to El Chalten to rest and visit friends. "After such an exhausting expedition, I feel like a wreck and need time to recover," he said. "I don't think I could do several major climbs back to back."

However, on this occasion, a rare good spell of Patagonian weather was too tempting. "I recovered at El Chalten, and then I saw this weather window and said, wow...You know, in Patagonia, you don't get many weather windows like this one, so when one happens, you get ready quickly," he said.

On February 22-25, he soloed the Skyline traverse of the four towers of Torres del Paine, following the jagged outline's double-M shape.

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Before the climb, O'Driscoll had modest expectations. "I thought ok, worst-case scenario, I'll just go for a walk and turn around if conditions are not right," he said. "But I got to the base, and it looked good, so I thought I could climb one pitch and see how it went, so I did one pitch, and then two, and then three pitches, and then I ended up doing the whole traverse."

Filming while climbing

Despite the hardships of Riders on the Storm, Drew Smith managed to get enough material to put together a documentary of the climb. It will be released soon.

The rigors of filming somehow didn't get in the way of the team's connection to the mountain.

"There is something amazing in the way a good film can let us climbers share our story, the experience, and the places," O'Driscoll said. "In addition, Drew never interfered with the climb or with what we did. In fact, he filmed but he was also part of the team, climbing and dealing with the gear like the rest of us."

O'Driscoll recalled a veteran climber commenting during an event how "if you don't write books, you are a nobody." That was the case for his generation. "So perhaps now, it's the same with movies," laughed O'Driscoll. "If you don't do films, you're a nobody. But well, that's fine with me, I'm a climber."

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A 'lifer'

Two days before the interview, O'Driscoll had listened to a Banff event featuring Jim Donini. At 81 and with an impressive climbing career behind him, Donini was still doing first ascents in an obscure part of Patagonia. Not as technical as he used to do, but that didn't matter to him. Donini described himself as "a lifer."

O'Driscoll says he feels the same. "I love what I do, and I feel privileged. As long as I can do it and keep loving it, I have no desire to do anything else...As time goes by, I know I will take pleasure in doing 5.9 or just scrambling or hiking...I don't have to be a world-class climber, but just enjoy what I can do."

Tommy Caldwell has free-climbed The Heart, one of the mythical routes on Yosemite's El Capitan, together with young gun Connor Herson.

Caldwell attempted the feat with Alex Honnold last year, but he was still recovering from a torn ACL and admitted he didn't send the route's 31 pitches (Honnold did). Since then, Caldwell has felt that he had "some unfinished business" with that line.

For the task, the 46-year-old Caldwell paired up with 21-year-old Herson, "hoping to absorb some of that youthful energy," as he said. They completed the 31 pitches of the 5.13b (8a) route in three days.

Herson had not tried the route before, so he set off without knowing what he would find. "Turns out to be a wild route, with some of the steepest climbing I’ve done on El Cap: a very thin slab, and even a 10’ down dyno," he said.

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The California-based Herson has already gained a reputation in the U.S. climbing community, including from elite veterans like Caldwell.

"I’ve never seen someone look so solid on El Cap. Keep an eye," Caldwell wrote about his young partner. "I can’t wait to see where he takes Yosemite climbing in the years to come."

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Oldest, youngest to free El Cap

Caldwell is -- he believes -- the oldest climber to free-climb a route on El Capitan. Connor is the youngest, as he free-climbed the Nose at only 15. In doing so, he snatched the age record from Caldwell himself, who was 23 when he free-climbed El Cap's West Buttress.

"It’s crazy to think that one piece of granite can stretch my imagination for 26 years —and I don’t plan on that ending any time soon," Caldwell said.

Caldwell recently brought his son Fitz for a night on El Cap's wall, and the kid seemed to enjoy it. Check Caldwell's IG post.

While not a first, free climbing the 5.13b-V10 (8a) route is still a major challenge wrapped in the aura of the legendary valley. Caldwell is clearly still in top shape at 46 and not yet done with Yosemite.

The Heart was opened by  Chuck Kroger and  Scott Davis in 1970, as Yosemite became a worldwide mecca for big wall climbing. It took 45 years for Mason Earle and Brad Gobright to first free-climb the entire route in 2015. It includes some spectacular moves, such as the V10 (7c+) dyno mentioned above. (A dyno is an explosive, dynamic move needed to grab a distant hold.)

Honnold's 2023 free-ascent with Caldwell was just the third free-climb of the route.

For decades, rock climbers in Yosemite National Park have set new standards by asking themselves a simple question: How much can you accomplish in 24 hours?

This “game,” as some climbers call it, is what inspired legendary crushers like Dean Potter and Alex Honnold to climb the park’s three biggest walls, known as the Yosemite Triple Crown, as fast as possible.

Now, two relatively unknown climbers — Tanner Wanish, 34, and Michael Vaill, 32 — have taken the bar set by their predecessors and pushed it a little higher. Earlier this month, they shaved a half hour off the Yosemite Triple Crown record, practically swimming up El Capitan, Mount Watkins, and Half Dome in just under 18 hours.

That would be impressive enough. But the duo were still chasing elite climbing feats in Yosemite Valley.

This week, they announced themselves the “Valley Quadfathers” for pulling off four big walls in a single day. Wanish and Vaill added a 366m Yosemite face called the Washington Column to the Triple Crown and still managed to summit all four walls in 21 hours and 50 minutes.

Put the four walls together, and that’s 2,500m of vertical climbing.

The right partner

Many climbers would consider ascending just one of Yosemite National Park’s big walls a lifetime achievement. It requires mastery of many different technical skills, incredible endurance, and meticulous planning.

So, it’s no small thing that Wanish and Vaill met just three years ago during their first attempt to climb El Capitan. They met through climbing wiki Mountain Project and quickly established a bond that would take them higher than ever before. In a tribute to their partnership posted on Instagram last week, Wanish noted that “climbing is inherently a team sport” that often requires the right partner for the biggest objectives.

“With the right partner, it’s really incredible what you can try to get done,” he wrote.

“We were both used to being the one always down for one more pitch in partnerships, so without a voice of reason to say no, we quickly started to rack up some big days in the following seasons,” he wrote. “Since then, almost every one of my proudest days on rock has been with Mike and it’s been incredible to grow both individually as climbers and as a team together toward something bigger.”

The Yosemite Triple Crown became one of rock climbing’s most respected records back in 2001, when Dean Potter and Timmy O’Neill first managed to scale all three mountains in less than 24 hours. Only eight other parties have managed the feat since then.

Triple Crown records

Of those, only Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell have free-climbed the Triple Crown (meaning they only used gear for protection, not for upward movement). Jim Reynolds and the late Brad Gobright set the previous speed record for the Triple Crown in 2018.

As for Wanish and Vaill’s four-wall accolade, only time will tell if other climbers decide that climbing four walls in a day is better than three. But even if someone comes along and climbs the mountain fasters, Wanish and Vaill will always be the originators of the Yosemite Quadruple Crown.

This story first appeared on GearJunkie.

Beyond its highest peaks, Pakistan has hundreds of technical rock spires, many of them unclimbed. Matteo De Zaiacomo and Chiara Gusmeroli of Italy went to the Namgma Valley to make the first ascent of one of these: an obvious and hard-looking granite tower called Sckem Braq (5,300m).

They could see the pillar from the day they left Kande village.

"Sckem Braq means 'dry mountain,' but its original name is Look Mon, which means 'no exit'," De Zaiacomo explained on social media. "Perhaps because it looks like a wall at the end of green pastures, and beyond it, there is nothing but bare, useless rock.

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It took them two tries to complete the route.

"We spent a total of seven days on the face over two attempts," said De Zaiacomo. "The final, vertical headwall offers a single, uninterrupted crack that took most of our skills, free-climbing and aid-climbing where the crack was just a few millimeters deep."

A close call

From the foot of the face, the climbers used the first day to tote their gear to a middle ledge.

"We climbed six steep and difficult pitches on the second day," they told the Ragni di Lecco, the famous mountain club they belong to. "While we were at it, we saw a huge landslide below us that hit the pitches we had climbed the day before."

Summit day featured another scary moment, as De Zaiacomo highlighted in his report:

After resting in the tent [ for one day] during bad weather, we climbed and solved the steepest and most technically difficult part. [It] included a single pitch that took us more than three hours. In the evening, we bivouacked on a 'comfortable' ledge of 80x50cm. We woke up in a snowstorm but set off anyway toward the summit.

The day turned out to be splendid. After summiting, we descended to find the tent destroyed by a landslide. (It gives you the shivers to think that we slept there for three nights.) At the base of the wall, all the remaining material was reduced to crumbs by the other landslide on the second day.

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Extreme Risk

During the expedition, Chiara read The Shining Mountain by Pete Boardman and Azzardo Estremo ("Extreme Risk," the Italian title for Joe Tasker's Savage Arena).

"[The books] accompanied me, motivated me, and kicked my ass when the days were gray and this corner of the world seemed as beautiful as it was impossible and inaccessible for just four legs and four arms," he recalls.

As a tribute to Tasker, the climbers called their new route Azzardo Estremo. "We felt a bit like Tasker and Boardman on Changabang during our emergency bivouac," De Zaiacomo wrote. "It's been three wonderful weeks. Climbing Sckem Braq is an absolute privilege that is only possible in remote places like this."

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It's possibly the most recognizable view in the northern Italian Dolomites. Elite rock climbers have opened dozens of difficult routes on its faces. But this past July, Micha Rinn and Chistian Bickel completed the Skyline Traverse of all the summits in what the climbers believe is a world's first.

The Cime di Lavaredo have been traversed several times both from east to west, across Cima Piccolissima, Punta Frida and Cima Piccola. The west to east route has been done too, starting with the Cima Ovest, and then Cima Grande, Cima Piccola, Punta Frida, and Cima Piccolissima.

However, the Skyline Traverse climbs the complete skyline of Tre Cime from the western Forcella Col di Mezzo over all nine peaks to the eastern Forcella Lavaredo, Micha Rinn explained.

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The pair prepared part of the route with some rappel anchors and a new rappel line down Torre Comici. They then climbed the route on July 23-24 in a 23-hour push that featured a bivouac in heavy rain in a cave after Cima Ovest.

In the end, they successfully completed the 2,030 vertical meters and the following list of summits:

Starting point: Forcella Col di Mezzo, 2,315m
1. Torre Lavaredo foresummit, 2,500m
2. Torre Lavaredo, 2,536m
3. Sasso di Landro, 2,763m
4. Torre Comici, 2,780m
5. Cima Ovest, 2,973m
6. Cima Grande, 2,999m
7. Cima Piccola, 2,857m
8. Punta di Frieda, 2,792m
9. Cima Piccolissima, 2,700m
Finish: Forcella Lavaredo, 2,454m

"Even a broken rope from rockfall in the rappel gorge after the fourth summit on Torre Comici couldn't stop us," Rinn noted.

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"We didn't want to set a new speed record on Tre Cime, nor climb the highest difficulties, but rather climb one of the most obvious lines, the Tre Cime skyline from pass to pass," Rinn told PlanetMountain.

Dodging the polar bears that have been abundant in Greenland this summer, Matteo Della Bordella and his team have opened a new big wall route on the isolated east coast.

In a short text, the Italian climber said they were safely down from the wall (see feature images) and that their new route was 1,200m, 35 pitches, with difficulties up to 7b. The team included Silvan Schupbach and Alex Gammeter of Switzerland, and Symon Welfringer of France.

The team had had to retreat from a previous attempt last week because of 100kph winds. This week was their last chance, as they were running out of food and time. They still have at least two weeks of kayaking to make it back to civilization, and they want to keep the expedition self-sufficient by avoiding motorboat support.

Polar bears around

Their kayak route may not be straightforward, as polar bears remain abundant in southern Greenland. One bear even visited their camp a few days ago. "It ran away as soon as it saw us," Della Bordella wrote.

Most readers will not be familiar with the Ashat Wall in the Gissaro-Alai, and that's not surprising. It's in a remote part of Kyrgyzstan that is rarely visited by climbers. But Olga Lukashenko, Anastasia Kozlova, and Darya Serupova of Russia have just spent three weeks on its sheer granite faces.

The all-female team was alone on the wall, climbing onsight and in harsh conditions, with only one person waiting for them in base camp. Only elite male alpinists had attempted it before, said Olga Lukashenko.

An added thrill

Lukashenko had long been captivated by 5,282m Sabakh Peak, the highest summit on the Ashat Wall. When she discovered that only elite male alpinists had ventured here before, it further stoked her interest.

"Frankly, I don't really care about the difference between male and female climbers," she explained. "I’m just highlighting that this climbing area is genuinely serious and challenging. This discovery [that no women had previously attempted it] only added to the thrill of tackling such an uncharted and demanding climb."

You can find out more about a 2013 expedition to the region led by Piolet d'Or winner Yuri Koshelenko here.

Lukashenko won the Steel Angel prize last year (the Russian version of the Piolet d'Or for women), and Kozlova and Serupova were finalists. For the 2024 expedition, the team received a Grit & Rock Expedition grant, promoting women climbers attempting new routes and exploratory expeditions.

"When applying for this grant, you need to have a preliminary route lined up, so yeah, our goal of climbing Argo, one of the points of the Ashat Wall, was pretty clear-cut," Lukashenko said.

Getting there

But before climbing Argo Peak, you have to get there.

"The logistics were an adventure," Lukashenko admitted. The trip involved flying to Osh - "a vibrant city teeming with people and cows, with a bustling marketplace that never stops," then a long day's driving to Ozgurush village, the start of their trek. Here, they loaded 200kg of gear and supplies onto the backs of donkeys and horses.

"We set up our base camp about two or three hours from the Ashat Wall, conveniently close to a good water source," she said. "For our ABC, we found a spot just 40 minutes away...the perfect staging ground for climbing Argo."

Their main goal was the north face of Argo Peak (4,750m). They acclimatized by climbing Western Parus Peak (4,850m) via a new route on the Southwest Face (ED-, 28 pitches, 1,460m long, 1,150m elevation gain, 6c, M3, A2).

"We completed this route, primarily through free climbing, by following a massive corner system in the center of the face over 2.5 days," Lukashenko said. "We bivouacked once midway up the wall and once near the summit. The slabs in the first part of the climb mainly involved friction climbing. The main difficulty was definitely the very strong wind and wet cracks."

Then they climbed Argo by a hard new route, notching the first all-female ascent of the mountain.

Route details

The team graded the new route on Argo as ED, 29 pitches, 1,250m long, 950m elevation gain, 7b, M5, А3. Lukashenko described the climb as follows:

The first 500m mainly consists of mixed climbing. We started the route along an ice gully, which had completely melted by the fifth day when we were rappelling down. The ice conditions were questionable due to the warm temperatures, so we opted for mixed climbing, placing protection points in the rock and avoiding ice wherever possible. The second half of the wall is significantly steeper. The climbing was engaging, with difficulties up to 7b, though the frequently wet cracks added extra challenges.

 

The main difficulties included the wet, ice-filled cracks, loose rock, rockfall hazards, and unpredictable weather — regular thunderstorms, hail, and snow. Additionally, there were a few sections of demanding aid climbing at A3+, involving vertical, disconnected large blocks. Pulling out a protection point in these sections could potentially cause multiple points to fail and damage the rope.

As Mark Twain once said, "It doesn’t have to be fun to be fun." This certainly holds true.

Lukashenko says that the three women made all their decisions collectively.

"We did have some lively disagreements, like whether to rappel down on the first day or ambitiously aim for the summit first, but otherwise, all was agreed without any violence or bloodshed," she said.

The team had a rough division of roles: Lukashenko tackled the mixed climbing, Darya Serupova handled the rock climbing, and Anastasia Kozlova focused on the aid climbing.

"But it wasn't set in stone—things changed and got shuffled around as we went along," Lukashenko said.

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"[The Sabakh area and the Ashat Wall] are fantastic places with immense potential for new routes," the women concluded.

While Pakistan's 8,000'ers are now deserted, August is a good month for rock climbing teams to attempt new routes on big walls.

Matteo de Zaiacomo and Chiara Gusmeroli are heading to the rock spires of Pakistan's Nangma Valley. Rising "only" 4,000m and 6,000m, the peaks are not as tall as popular spots in the Karakoram, such as the Trango Towers, but they offer highly technical new routes. Some refer to the place as the Yosemite of the Karakoram.

Big walls

Although Zaiacomo is only 31 and Gusmeroli 27, the climbers have had the project in mind for a decade. They have set their goals on 5,850m Amin Brakk and 5,980m Shingu Charpa.

"They are among the most beautiful granite spires we've ever seen, yet only in photographs," they told the Italian Alpine Club (CAI). "[We] can't wait to see them up close."

The pair flew to Pakistan yesterday and intend to spend 25 days in the mountains.

Amin Brakk was first climbed by Spaniards Silvia Vidal, Pep Masip, and Miguel Puigdomenech in 1999. They spent over 30 days on the wall, climbing a 1,650m line up the center of the west face that they called Sol Solet.

On Shingu Charpa, the pair will aim for the unclimbed, 1,600-vertical-meter north ridge, which they describe as one of the most ambitious mountaineering projects in the valley.

"It is one of the most aesthetic climbs imaginable," they said.

Flexible plan

The climbers also have other potential goals, such as 6,447m Drifika. Their overall plan is flexible. They hope to climb at least one of the three objectives, as well as some shorter routes on the valley walls during brief weather windows.

"The valley offers the advantage of being able to change the project depending on the conditions," they explained to the CAI. If it's too dry for mixed climbing, the possibilities for rock climbing are almost unlimited, and vice versa in case of heavy snow."

Zaiacomo represents the new generation of top big-wall climbers from Italy. In 2022, he opened a new route on the East face of Cerro Torre with Matteo della Bordella and David Bacci. During the upper sections of the climb, they collaborated with Corrado Pesce and Tomas Aguilo, but the joint success turned into tragedy when Aguio and Pesce died on the descent.

As a pair, Zaiacomo and Gusmeroli repeated the impressive Afanasieff route on Fitz Roy. They advocate for clean climbing, without drilling or leaving ropes on their routes.

A brief story in Japan's YBS News today reported the death of a young man at the 8th station of the Yoshida route on the Yamanashi side of Mt. Fuji. While sad, it would not be news except for the fact that the deceased is world-class rock climber Keita Kurakami. He was just 38 years old.

Kurakami had a serious heart condition, and he knew it. But he had refused the prescribed treatment, which would have meant the end of his career.

Kurakami was born in Gunma prefecture in 1985 and started climbing in high school. He was first attracted to bouldering. After about a decade, he re-focused on trad, multi-pitch, and big wall climbing outside Japan. He had a particular passion for opening new routes.

In 2015, he and partner Yusuke Sato opened what was considered the hardest multi-pitch route in Japan -- Senjitsu no Ruri, “A thousand days of lapis lazuli” -- up the Moai Face of Mt. Mizugaki.

Kurakami wrote a long report about the climb, the mountain, and his own perceptions of climbing for Alpinist magazine. Read it here. Two years later, he made the fifth ascent of Walk of Life, a famous E9 6c slab route in the UK.

In 2018, Kurakami completed the first free climb rope solo of Yosemite's El Capitan. (He climbed alone but self-belayed with a gri-gri and rope system.)

"Kurakami had redpointed every individual pitch on the Nose the previous year but decided that he wasn’t satisfied with his style because he didn’t free the route from the ground in a single push," Alpinist wrote about him. Kurakami had promised to return to El Cap and "climb it in a better style."

He also held a degree in physics and shared a transcendental view of climbing "as a continuum of contact points and discovery where nature, people, the past, and the future intersect," as he put it. "I aspire to free climbing as an expression of physical art and philosophy."

Cardiac condition

Kurakami's cardiac condition showed up in 2021 after a hard training session. He was taking an active rest day, cycling with friends, when he collapsed at a street light, and his heart stopped. Paramedics managed to revive him on their third attempt.

Doctors diagnosed a ventricular arrhythmia caused by "exercise-induced coronary spasm angina." Kurakami was told to quit climbing or risk sudden death. They also suggested that he get an implantable cardioverter defibrillator, a kind of pacemaker that can also deliver an electric shock. After reflecting on it for the three days he spent in the Intensive Care Unit, he refused.

"I thought that giving up climbing would be a choice I would regret later on," he told a Japanese magazine in 2022. "Even if I lived to be 70 or 80 without climbing, would that really be a happy life for me?"

He decided that an implanted defibrillator could also malfunction and chose not to take that risk.

Kurakami read all he could about cardiac disease. He returned to exercising, following training methods from Kilian Jornet and Steve House. A year after he collapsed, Kurakami had returned to bouldering, running, and climbing for 18 hours non-stop. He felt 90% recovered. He progressively returned to climbing but always carried an AED with him.

"I chose a life with climbing over the risk to my own life," Kurakami said. "But if the time came when I had to choose between climbing or my wife and family, I would not hesitate to give up climbing."

Climb till the end

It is not clear if Kurakami changed his routines or treatment since then. According to his Instagram, he climbed till the last moment. Last week, he posted photos of himself rope-soloing Freedom, a 5.13 route.

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Today, he set off on his last hike up sacred Mt. Fuji. Although the mountain is officially closed until July 1, some climbers venture up its slopes off-season. A friend who joined him called the emergency services when Kurakami lost consciousness some five hours into the hike. Kurakami was taken to the hospital, but this time, doctors could only confirm his death.

American climber and photographer Drew Smith was kind enough to share some photographs for this story. Smith met Kurakami when he rope-soloed El Cap.

"He was a very kind and joyful guy to be around," Smith recalls. "The climbing he liked was very challenging and intense, but he had a calm presence and great energy."

There’s a tradition of improvisation on Mount Dickey in Alaska’s Ruth Gorge. Season after season, the mountain’s mile-high granite faces draw the planet’s best climbers. And season after season, these visitors watch their main objectives evaporate as Mother Nature forces them to obey.

That doesn’t mean they fail.

Tom Livingstone and Gaspar Pintar are the latest pilgrims in the Mt. Dickey saga. The Great Wall (ungraded as of this writing) slices across lower slabs and up a tenuous couloir to the 2,909m summit. It's an unconventional line on the mountain's often-overlooked south face.

 

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Its features attracted Livingstone and Pinter as soon as they arrived in the Gorge, but amounted to Plan B. Originally, they had set their sights on the classic east face route Blood From the Stone — but it didn’t give passage.

“When we swung our axes into what we hoped was ice, we found mostly unprotected sugar snow,” Livingstone wrote on Instagram. He noted other routes stopped them with similar obstacles.

Bad rock, few routes

Pivoting, he and Pintar refocused on the south face. It’s famous for bad rock and generally bereft of routes. But the climbers noticed an opportunity.

“Crazy slabs” protected the couloir and summit access, Livingstone wrote. But the climbers made a bid anyway.

“Many pitches looked improbable, always tricky. The weather was fickle, but we got lucky,” Livingstone reported. “A subtle traversing line up steep rock led us to the middle of the face, pumpy ice, and a cave bivy. Then we zigzagged higher as snow fell (or rather, rose in the updraft).”

Another marginal bivy on a “snow arete” led to pitches of overhanging neve to the top. In their weeks-long stay, this would be the only summit the two touched.

“Conditions seem ‘bad’ this year but we’re happy to have made the most of it,” Livingstone commented — a takeaway that falls directly in line with the recent history of Ruth Gorge climbing.

Failure or opportunity?

For an adroit alpine climber, Blood From the Stone (1,524m, A1 M7+ WI6+X) is a juicy prize. That’s part of the reason Sean Easton spent multiple seasons establishing it with the likes of Ueli Steck. Deterred over and over by ephemeral ice, Easton finally broke through in 2002 with Steck.

The threshold was thin, even though both climbers were at the height of their fitness. (Steck was fresh off his groundbreaking Eiger solo.) Each man took lead falls that would unnerve the masses, and Easton published a breathy report in the American Alpine Journal.

“With moments of doubt, we had ventured forth without certainty…and the path had unwound before us,” he said.

Thin ice and outright difficulty combined to prevent a repeat for over two decades. Livingstone and Pintar are not the first Blood hopefuls to abandon the route and create their own. Alan Rousseau and Jackson Marvell followed the same blueprint to stamp out Ruth Gorge Grinder (1,524m, AI6+ M7 A1) in 2019.

 

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“A pitch and a half up [Blood From the Stone], it became obvious to me there was not enough ice on the route to safely continue,” Rousseau wrote. “If we didn’t feel defeated enough already in that moment, as we rappelled back to the bivy, we saw two ravens fervently tearing through Jackson’s bag of stashed food.”

Defeat, shmefeat. Marvell and Rousseau returned to the Ruth with Matt Cornell in 2023. Another new east face line, Aim For the Bushes (1,600m, AI6 M6X) resulted.

 

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In the Ruth Gorge, one thing’s clear: Just because a rope team backs off doesn’t mean they’re out of the fight.

“In total, we tried six routes,” Livingstone said of his and Pintar’s trip, “staying busy and psyched! Hats off to folk who’ve climbed routes here.”

Marcin Tomaszewski and Pawel Haldas of Poland have safely returned from The Moose's Tooth after opening a new winter route on the legendary Alaskan peak.

The pair flew into the mountains 12 days ago and started immediately. They spent 10 days battling winter weather on the south face of one of the granite "teeth" of the massif. As Tomaszewsi notes in a post on social media, their route might also be the first opened on that wall in particular.

The result is 'Cold Wars,' a 19-pitch, 980m route on rock, ice, and mixed terrain. The line comprises 730m of A3, M5, and 250m on snow/firn up to 60-70˚.

"It was colder and harder than Greenland," wrote Tomaszewski, referring to the new route that the pair opened in February 2023 on Greenland's west coast. We highlighted that climb as one of the top expeditions of 2023.

Tomaszewski described the wall on the Moose's Tooth as "beautiful...Difficult terrain, technically demanding and time-consuming."

The Polish climbers told ExplorersWeb that they'll write up a detailed report in the next few days.

"We haven't dried the equipment yet," they said, as they recovered from their effort over beer and pizza in Talkeetna.

Maciej Kimel and Michal Krol of Poland expected extreme conditions climbing the British route on Trango Tower in winter, but their attempt ended even before touching the wall, Kimel told ExplorersWeb in an exclusive interview. The problem: After a windstorm, they say their outfitter left them alone in a destroyed Base Camp.

This was Kimel and Krol's second attempt at a first winter ascent of the Karakoram's Trango Tower. In 2022, they went with Janusz Golab, but bad weather and avalanches pushed them back after eight days on the face. This year, they went for the same route but opted for a lighter, faster approach.

A promising start

"We went in a small team and kept things to a minimum," Kimel, speaking on behalf of the pair, told ExplorersWeb. "Instead of a large portaledge, we took a small, two-person one, assuming that we would move the bivouac higher each day."

Everything started well, with a short three-day trek to Base Camp in good weather.

"On our first outing, we carried all our stuff up the wall to an altitude of 5,200m," Kimel said. "We also managed to fix rope up the last 300m before the route, because there was a high risk of avalanches."

The team climbed a little further, to 5,300m, and deposited some gear just below the start of the British route. "We saw the first pitches but did not climb a single meter."

A gale strikes Base Camp

"In the [first] three days, we went up and down three times, carrying 70kg to the base of the wall," said Kimel. "On the fourth day, gale-force winds swept Base Camp. It most affected the mess tent, which was not prepared for winter conditions."

The Base Camp staff had no ropes or any way to secure the tent, nor were they properly equipped.

"It was extremely cold and yet they wore ordinary [sneakers]," Kimel said. "The situation soon got dire, so Michal and I decided to retreat lower down. We descended 400m to 3,800m, and so did the BC crew. We waited there for two days, with no food." See a video of the storm here: IMG_8904

When conditions improved, they returned to Base Camp to find it completely destroyed.

"Before we retreated two days before, I asked the cook to secure the kitchen and pack everything in the barrels, but he didn't. When we returned, everything lay scattered around Base Camp."

"We had no more mess tent, and all the food the agency had provided was ruined and scattered around, picked at by the crows."

Left for days

"When our cooks saw the scene, they said they had nothing to do there and departed down the valley, leaving us without food, electricity, and heat for four days, at temperatures down to -30ºC. To this day, I don't understand why they left us there."

Kimel and Krol say they contacted their outfitter daily and that they were promised replacement staff, supplies, and equipment "the following day." Nothing came.

"Finally, after six days -- two at 3,800m and four more in the flattened Base Camp -- two porters came in the evening with a moldy tent and some vegetables. We still had no heat and no generator. We no longer had the strength to wait for more promises."

While alone in Base Camp, they survived by using the food and fuel they had stocked for the climb.

"If it wasn't for the problems with Base Camp, we would have tried climbing," they said. "The wall looked in very good condition, mostly dry, with only a little snow in the dihedral."

No beginners

The climbers said they had hired that particular outfitter in the past. "In 2022, we also had some problems with the generator and a mess tent, but it looked better than the one we were provided this year."

Maciej Kimel is not new to the Karakoram: in addition to the 2022 winter attempt, Kimel did some first ascents on Shimshal's 6,000'ers on an expedition that also included Adam Bielecki, Janusz Golab, Michal Czech, and Wadim Jablonski. Kimel and Jablonski also opened a new route on Chobutse in Nepal last fall.

As for the expedition outfitter -- read the report by Polski Himalaism Sportowi for further details -- it is one of the biggest in Pakistan, but this was not its first controversy. This same outfitter also sent high-altitude porter Muhammad Hassan to K2's upper sections without proper gear or experience. Hassad died at the Bottleneck while dozens of climbers passed over him on their way to the summit. Local authorities later banned the agency from the 8,000'ers for two years.

ExplorersWeb has contacted the agency's owner for comments, but we have not yet received a reply.

One year after opening a remarkable winter route in Greenland, Marcin Tomaszewski and Pawel Haldas of Poland are back for a new cold-season adventure, this time in Alaska.

"Not much has changed since our last trip together to Greenland," Tomaszewski wrote yesterday from Talkeetna. "We are still looking for the peaks of cold, preferably far from home."

The plan was to fly by small bush plane to the base of Moose's Tooth (3,135m), one of Alaska's most iconic peaks, in Denali National Park.

"We will be scratching its walls," Tomaczewski said vaguely, without revealing any details.

It is not clear if they have a line in mind, although its mouth-watering 1,000m walls lie on the north and especially east sides.

One certainty: They will be on their own. "During calendar winter, climbers don't visit this area often," Tomazcewski noted. "It will be just us and the bears."

Even that is highly unlikely since Alaska's brown bears are hibernating at this time of year. And in summer, they roam the lower areas, where they can find something more reliable to eat than Polish climbers.

Brutally cold

It will be extremely cold, especially for climbing, which requires lighter equipment than, for instance, polar treks. The late David Lama, who climbed Bird of Prey on the east side of Moose's Tooth in April 2013 with Dani Arnold, noted in the American Alpine Journal that even when the sun hit the face, it was brutally cold.

However, the Polish climbers excel at frigid big-wall climbs. Their new winter route in Greenland last year was a 17-pitch, 700m, M5, A3, C2, VI line they called Fram. It was the first big-wall winter route ever opened in Greenland. ExplorersWeb selected it as one of the top expeditions of 2023.

Evgeniy Glazunov of Russia, missing on 5,355m Ak-Su in Kyrgyzstan’s Pamir-Alai range since last Friday, has been found dead.

Details of the discovery are unclear, but searchers reported the sad news to Anna Piunova of Mountain.ru, who was coordinating the rescue. "He was almost down, only one-pitch-and-a-half above the base of the face," they said. This suggests he might have been hit by falling rock.

Racing against the clock, delays, bureaucracy, and equipment lost between flights, the three climbers traveled non-stop by plane, road, and on foot until they reached the base of the face yesterday.

Unfortunately, clouds enveloped the mountain, and all they could do was yell Glazunov's name, but received no answer. Today, conditions must have improved enough to explore the face or fly a drone, as planned.

Glazunov had just soloed the Chaplinsky route up the 1,000m+ north face of Ak-Su. He was descending via de same route, in bad weather, when he last contacted home. The highly skilled climber had soloed a significant number of long routes, including several first ascents, mainly in Central Asia.

When Sean Villanueva O'Driscoll, Nico Favresse, Siebe Vanhee, and photographer Drew Smith announced they were off to the Central Tower of Torres del Paine to free climb the 38-pitch, 1,300m-long Riders on the Storm last month, it was clearly "The" expedition of the season in Patagonia. When weeks went by without news, we sort of lost hope. Patagonia's vicious weather can foil even the best teams.

But this iron-willed foursome came ready to wait out storm after storm, hanging from a portaledge, armed with patience, music, and skills enough to jump again on the frozen stone as soon as the wind receded a bit. After some days of rumors, the result became public this week.

"February 9, 2024, we stood there again, on the summit of Torre Central (2,460m) of the Torres del Paine," the team reported. "Two days after Sean’s 43rd birthday, seven years after the first free ascent of ‘El Regalo de Mwono,’ 18 years after Nico and Sean climbed Riders on the Storm for the first time. We stood there, wind in our faces, after having done the first team free ascent of Riders on the Storm in capsule style, spending 18 days on the wall."

The crux: pitch 16

One of the major obstacles was a hard aid-climbing section followed by a big pendulum across a blank face on pitch 16. But Mayan Smith-Gobat, Ines Papert, and Thomas Senf discovered a possible way through in 2016 -- a potential five-pitch variation from the 13th belay that would make the route go entirely free.

In the end, the 2016 climbers left four un-freed pitches. "But they can go free for sure," Smith-Gobat said at the time. She launched a new attempt the following year with Brett Harrington and Drew Smith but bad weather kept them from succeeding.

This year, a new -- but highly experienced -- team decided to give it a try after Siebe Vanhee texted his mates the following:

Hey guys, I want to try to free Riders, are you psyched for another sufferfest?

Prepared for a long siege

All the members of the team knew the route. The key was not a fast-and-light ascent, but the opposite: an endurance challenge against the Patagonian weather, exhaustion, and technical difficulties that required both physical and mental strength.

They carried their heavy pigs (big-wall duffel bags) to the base of the wall on Jan. 18, prepared to resist for a month.

"During the first nine days in the [national] park, we managed to climb one-and-a-half days, making it to the top of the pillar at pitch 13," the team reported. "On Jan. 24, a short window without too much wind gave us the chance to commit to the wall in capsule style."

The climbers barely managed to install their portaledges before the rain started hitting the wall that evening.  "Over the next few days, we quickly managed to free-climb the new free variation in harsh conditions, freeing the crux at about 7c+."

The roof

On the sixth day on the wall, the climbers advanced toward Pitch 26, the famous "Rosendach" roof (the feature image in this story).

"From there, we only needed one good day to go to the summit," they reported. "But it’s not called Riders On The Storm for nothing...Seven days later, we still hadn’t gotten past the roof."

The climbers tried and tried, but every time, fierce winds and rime-covered rock pushed them back.

"The only progress was [when] Nico red-pointed pitch 23, a mega-struggle in icy conditions, cleaning the snow off the crimps while free-climbing," they noted.

Otherwise, the team sat in their portaledges reading, playing music, and eating popcorn as the wind raged.

“Every time I climb this wall, I realize I had forgotten what a masochistic experience it is to free-climb here," Favresse said.

The reward

But patience eventually paid off. On the 14th day of the climb, the team made it past the roof, free-climbing several difficult pitches.

"At nightfall, only six 'easy' pitches from the summit, we got shut down by snow and heavy spindrift avalanches," they reported.

Back to the portaledges for two more days until conditions improved. Finally, on Feb. 9, they climbed the remaining pitches to the summit.

"Once again, we squeezed through the eye of the needle, taking advantage of every little opportunity, working as a team, and feeding on each other’s motivation," they said.

The photographer's perspective

Photographer Drew Smith made an interesting point on social media. "These guys spoke about having lots of luck, but I don’t think we had much or any," he said. He explained:

We spent 18 days on the wall of Torre Central in cold storms and up to 140kph winds. The summit was reached far before we stood on top because of the positive energy of the team. I saw friends pushing each other to give a pitch a try when holds and cracks were covered in ice and snow, hands and feet numb. Every little sliver of marginal weather was taken advantage of.

Nico encouraged us that “it doesn’t matter if we get wet the first or last day.” Sean would always say “the summit is inside of us,” and Siebe had the motivation and vision to get a crew together to team-free the 38-pitch, 1,300m line.

It was a dream to spend the past five weeks documenting these three whom I have an immense amount of respect for. They say, 'Never meet your heroes because you’ll be disappointed.' But If you’re fortunate enough to meet any one of these guys, you won’t be.

'Riders on the Storm' was opened in 1991 by a legendary team of German climbers: Kurt Albert, Bernd Arnold, Norbert Baetz, Peter Dittrich, and Wolfgang Guellich. They spent six weeks on the wall to complete the line. It goes directly up the middle of the East Face of the Central Tower of the Torres del Paine group. It was graded as VI 5.12d (European 7c), A3 and tagged as exposed, due to frequent ice and rock fall.

After 18 days on the sheer face of the Central Tower of Torres del Paine, four elite climbers have finally made the first free-climb of Riders on the Storm. Sean Villanueva O'Driscoll, Nico Favresse, Siebe Vanhee, and Drew Smith succeeded 33 years after a German team first opened the legendary route.

The climbers summited on Feb. 9, after free-climbing the whole route by the Mayan variation, first opened in 2016-2017, Siebe Vanhee wrote on social media.

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The team, climbing in capsule-style, persevered through long days of bad weather on the wall, stuck in their portaledges "reading, playing music, and eating popcorn," Favresse reported.

"The only days we could climb, we had to clean ice from the holds and fight with cold fingers and toes to free-climb in sub-zero temperatures," he added.

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History with the route

Two of the climbers had a long history with the route. O'Driscoll and Favresse had done the second ascent of Riders on the Storm 18 years before, together with Mike Lecomte and Favresse's brother Olivier.

"At the time, we were only 23-25 years old and coming mostly from a sport-climbing background," Favresse wrote. "We freed most of the route except for a few short sections and a pendulum which seemed impossible to free."

Since then, the pair has regularly returned to Torres del Paine and free-climbed a series of hard routes there, but Riders on the Storm remained top of mind. Siebe Vanhee attempted it last year, with Brette Harrington of the U.S. on her second attempt and Jacopo Larcher of Italy.

Kurt Albert, Bernd Arnold, Norbert Baetz, Peter Dittrich, and Wolfgang Guellich first opened Riders on the Storm in 1991, after six weeks on the wall. The route goes directly up the middle of the East Face of the Central Tower of the Torres del Paine group. It was graded as VI 5.12d (European 7c), A3 and tagged as exposed, due to frequent falling rock and ice.

The main challenge with skiing the North Face of the Dru is not just that it is one of the biggest, most daunting walls in the Alps. It's that, because of its verticality, there is no way that snow sticks to the smooth granite face. In the words of the late Corrado Pesce, "In winter, it stands steep and dark as a tombstone looming above the tasty powder slopes of Pas de Chevres." So what has Guillaume Pierrel done exactly?

Winter climbers' dream

The mythical spire in the Chamonix area is one of the classic North Faces of the Alps. Climbing it in winter is a dream for elite climbers, on a par with the North Faces of the Eiger, the Grandes Jorasses, or the Matterhorn. Yet a ski descent seems out of the question. In winter, the sheer granite face features a network of ice lines on its cracks and ledges but is otherwise too vertical to hold snow -- except for a distinctive patch on the upper side of the spire. Known as "the Niche", this gigantic terrace fills with snow in winter, creating an ice/snow field with an average slope of 50˚.

Climb + ski + rappel

The Niche's length varies with conditions. On Feb. 7, it was some 250 meters long, according to Guillaume Pierrel, who skied it that day.

Pierrel climbed the classical Allain-Leininger route (which was the route taken during the first ascent of the North Face in 1935). Pierrel carried skis on his back and roped up with Etienne Potof, who was fresh from climbing the North Face of the Droites. Together, they climbed the first 16 pitches (including the crux) of the route until the Niche.

Then Pierrel ascended alone to the top of the Niche, which he reached at 1 pm. On the way, he made sure that the snow conditions were good -- namely, cold and hard. Then he stepped into his skis and glided down the vertiginous route, while Potof waited below.

Pierrel's video shows the descent:

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In Pierrel's opinion, the crux of the day was not the skiing, but the long series of rappels down to the base of the face. It took him 16 hours in all. "Luckily, the rope only jammed once," he wrote.

Pierrel has a soft spot for icy patches on big north faces. In 2022, he skied down Le Linceul couloir on the Grandes Jorasses.

Marlboro Man precedent

This was the first ski descent of the Dru's Niche. The only precedent was a snowboard descent, done in a different but also spectacular style. It was in the spring of 1986. Bruno Gouvy parachuted from a helicopter and managed (by centimeters!) to land on the Dru's summit.

From that point, he rappeled down to the Niche and snowboarded to its lower end. A support team was waiting there for him with a second paraglider. He then BASE jumped down to the valley.

Check the feat in the video below. The quality is not very good, but it's well worth watching for its steep snowboard descent and the background rock music. Incidentally, both the helicopter and Gouvy's suit feature the corporate colors of a famous brand of cigarettes that sponsored the activity. Yeah, that kind of advertising was legal in the 1980s!

"Times have changed,  but passion remains intact." Pierrel wrote about that 1986 feat.

Gouvy, by the way, held the record as the fastest monoski rider for some time, reaching 177kph. In 1988, he used again helicopters to snowboard down the Eiger, the Matterhorn, and the Grandes Jorasses in a day. Sadly, he died two years later, at 27, when he lost control of his snowboard on the Aiguille Verte, next to the Dru.

Young Polish climbers Maciej Kimel and Michal Krol are back in the Karakoram for a second winter attempt on the British route up the Trango's Nameless Tower.

The route, opened in 1976 by Martin Boysen, Joe Brown, Malcolm Howells, and Mo Anthoine, follows a 1,100m line up the South Face. It was graded as VI 5.10 A2 in summer. However, conditions will be much harder at this time of year, with short days, bitter cold, and ice covering the granite face.

Their first attempt took place in 2022, with Janusz Golab also on the team. Back then, bad weather and avalanches forced them to give up at approximately 5,750m, after eight days on the wall.

Lighter, faster

This time, the climbers have brought lighter portaledges and will climb in a lighter, faster style, Polski Himalaizm Sportowy reported.

"We plan to sleep where we finish climbing each day," Michal Krol said. “We will only take a static rope for towing equipment bags and half ropes for climbing."

That means that they will abandon the slower but safer big-wall style, in which the climbers fix ropes as they climb and then retreat to the portaledge. Climbing as the Polish intend will be faster, but they will also need to face whatever conditions they find on the wall as they progress.

"We will also take much less food than before and pack for two weeks in the wall," Krol added.

The Trango Towers are a group of granite spires located on the Trango Glacier, on the way to the Baltoro's 8,000'ers. The Trango Nameless Tower (6,239m), often known just as Trango Tower, is the most slender, symmetrical, and vertical of the group. It has never been climbed in winter.

Planned since Chobutse

The expedition shows that Maciej Kimel has completely recovered from an accident he suffered while climbing in Poland's Jura region last May. He broke his L1 vertebra. The young climber didn't follow the doctors' instructions because five months later, he joined Wadim Jablonski on Nepal's Chobutse (6,686m) in the Rolwaling region.

The pair successfully opened a new route in excellent alpine style: one push, with little previous information, and three bivouacs without a tent. Kimel told ExplorersWeb at the time of the "pure joy of climbing in such a beautiful place, despite the poor protection."

Right after returning home, Kimel -- fully recovered from his back injury -- bought his plane ticket back to Pakistan.

BY ALEXANDER HARO

On a Tuesday afternoon in August of 2022, Alex Honnold took the final steps to the top of a previously unclimbed peak in eastern Greenland. Ingmikortilaq, a 3,750-foot sea cliff, is a daunting feature of nature that juts directly up from the freezing waters of Nordvestfjord in the Scoresby Sound. It’s a fantastically beautiful place full of ice-laden waters –- an unforgiving climate battered by howling, freezing winds.

Although Honnold likely subscribes to George Mallory’s “because it is there” climbing mindset, he had another reason to go to the ends of the Earth to embark on the trip: gathering information about an area of the planet that is a canary in the coal mine of the climate crisis. And on Feb. 4, a new three-part miniseries called Arctic Ascent with Alex Honnold that documents the expedition was released.

Honnold was joined by Hazel Findlay and Mikey Shaefer, both of whom are bonafide climbing superstars. The plan was to assist a French glaciologist named Heidi Sevestre with accessing some of the most remote parts of one of the most remote places in the world. They enlisted the help of Greenlandic guide Adam Kjeldsen and adventurer Aldo Kane to do so.

Hard to access

Researchers have long theorized that the area might be less sensitive to climate change because of its altitude. But given how difficult it is to reach those areas, the data supporting the theory was a little thin.

“East Greenland is one of the most remote and least studied parts of the Arctic, which makes it very important scientifically,” Sevestre told National Geographic a few days after they returned. “We desperately need scientific data from this region. Studying the fiords, the glaciers, the ice sheets will bring so much data to the scientific community that the contribution will be extremely positive.”

Honnold is an interesting man. I caught up with him about Arctic Ascent via a Zoom call. He sat in a small room that served as a sparse office he called “his closet.” Just a few images hung on the walls behind him — a map of the world and a few framed photos of mountains — and Honnold spoke to me about doing things that most people would dream of doing in a calm, measured manner that would normally be reserved for a conversation about an afternoon walk in the park.

For the layperson, Ingmikortilaq looks impossibly difficult to climb. And although Honnold is the world’s most accomplished big-wall climber, he too was awed by the majesty of that bare wall of granite.

Fear factor

“I think we’re more similar than you might think,” he told me when I asked him about his motivation and whether he feels frightened before embarking on an attempt like the one in Arctic Ascent. “When I look at something like that, I’m also intimidated by it. We’re sort of awed by it. I mean, I’m an experienced climber, so I see that it’s possible, but I think that for me part of the pleasure is to look at something that seems so daunting like that, and then to actually be able to achieve it.

"You take something that seems impossible and then, through a long period of hard work and effort, make it possible. It’s not like I look at it and am like, ‘Oh, that looks trivial.’ I look at it, I’m like, ‘wow, that’s really intimidating.’ I like finding things that are right in that sweet spot where it’s challenging enough to be daunting, but still possible, hopefully.”

As a relatively new father of a two year old (and a baby on the way), Honnold doesn’t take these trips as lightly as he might’ve in the past. But as the trip came together, he knew it was something he couldn’t miss. Not just because it was a chance to do something no one had ever done before, but because it was a chance to do something far more important than climbing a mountain.

Family leave

“Would it be worth leaving the family for that long just to go climb a wall?” he said. “Maybe. But if you’re with the right people and you’re doing climate science that will then be broadcast on mainstream media, you’re sort of like, ‘oh, that makes it worth it.’ I don’t want to be gone for six weeks just to have fun with my buddy and climb a wall. It has to be worth it. I think making meaningful contributions to climate science and the climate science communication is important. Eastern Greenland is so fragile and so important.”

Shallow ice cap

Arctic Ascent with Alex Honnold doesn’t only cover the climb of Ingmikortilaq. Just getting to the base was exceedingly difficult. They first needed to get to the Renland Ice Cap, where the movement of the Arctic sea ice has a strong influence on the climatic conditions. Researchers using ice cores from the Renland Ice Cap can look back in time about 100,000 years. And since it’s a relatively shallow ice cap that lacks a brittle ice zone like that of say, the Greenland Ice Sheet, it better allows researchers to look to the past to predict the future.

But to get there, Honnold and the crew first needed to make a 1,500-foot ascent up something called the Pool Wall, then cross the vast, barren expanse of the Renland Ice Cap. Honnold rated the Pool Wall at 5.12c, which is no easy feat even for the most experience climber, weather conditions not withstanding.

“It doesn’t do justice to how mega the wall is,” he said. “It was 20˚F (-6˚C), and we climbed it in a snowstorm.”

Outside comfort zone

Sevestre, the glaciologist with the climbers, was a little nervous. Although she had done some climbing, the Pool Wall was her first real introduction to big-wall climbing. “It was way outside my comfort zone,” she said. “Scientists don’t typically climb big walls.”

Honnold, though, knew she would fare just fine. “She is incredibly fit and incredibly capable,” he told me. “She was actually relatively experienced with rope work, because she’s rappelled in and out of ice caves a lot. She was carrying this tremendously heavy backpack. She had all the scientific equipment and stuff. And she’s just a monster. She’s very strong.”

Even as she gritted her teeth hundreds of feet above the ground, she stopped to take samples of the rock face she clung to. Those samples will help other scientists to understand how fast the ice sheet retreated at the end of the last ice age. That knowledge will in turn help them to make projections relating to future sea level rise as the Greenland Ice Sheet melts.

The Pool Wall was just the beginning. After summiting it, they faced a grueling five-day trek over the Renland Ice Cap, dragging most of the supplies behind them and taking realtime measurements of the snow’s depth and density as they traveled over it. It was new territory for Honnold.

A different, vaster scale

“The whole experience in Greenland was definitely a different scale,” he remembered. “Because the landscape is so vast and we traveled so far across it. Everything was bigger. I think part of the appeal of the expedition was to really experience that landscape.”

Over the course of those days crossing the Renland Ice Cap, Honnold and the rest of the team used a variety of techniques to check in on Greenland’s health. They installed temperature sensors, scanned glaciers with 3D lasers, and even launched a float designed by NASA into the fiord to collect information over the next two years about water temperatures and salinity, both of which are affected by melting ice. And finally, after crossing those grueling miles, they reached their destination — or the bottom of it, at least.

Staring up at Ingmikortilaq, the climbers were struck with the enormity of the task ahead of them. Honnold, who has climbed some of the hardest routes in the world (and famously free soloed Yosemite’s El Capitan), called it “a horrendous, death-defying wall.”

Over the next five days, the expedition team moved fixed ropes up the first half of the wall. Then, over the final two days, Honnold and Findlay pushed hard to reach the top, spending a freezing night on a thin ledge, carrying water and freeze-dried food in their packs as they climbed.

Horrifyingly loose rock

“Hazel and I both thought it was the most serious thing of its kind that we’d ever done,” Honnold told National Geographic as the team was boarding a motorboat for a 20-hour return journey through the ice-choked fiords back to the nearest Inuit village. “To do nearly 4,000 feet of climbing, on horrifyingly loose rock...It felt interminable.”

Arctic Ascent is an important show. It’s much more than entertainment for the sake of entertainment. It packages a message that the whole world needs to hear into a box that even those with only the slightest of interest in the climate crisis will be interested in.

“All people should care what happens in the Arctic, because if the ice melts it will theoretically raise sea levels by up to 20 feet,” Honnold explained. “And that’s a big deal for the several 100 million people that live on coasts around the world. I mean, the biggest mega cities in the world are on the coast. That’s hundreds of millions of people who are affected by what happens in the Arctic.”

We live in a surprisingly fragile world, and our relentless pursuit of convenience is throwing the balance off. It’s easy to ignore it as we bask in the comforts of our ingenuity, but the very lives of future generations depend on change. In order to begin making those necessary changes, we must first be aware of the toll that pursuit is taking on the planet. Arctic Ascent attempts to lay that toll out in no uncertain terms.

More than climbing

“It helps people understand why this matters to the rest of the world,” Honnold said. “I mean, obviously, one TV program isn’t going to change climate policy in any way. On the other hand, compared to everything else that’s on television, I think that this is doing people more of a service than most of TV for sure. If you’re going to go to all the trouble and expense to go to the middle of nowhere, why don’t you have somebody with you who can use that opportunity?

"We were using the opportunity to climb an unclimbed peak, which is cool. But ultimately, that’s not really doing a whole lot of good for the world. It’s important to be able to communicate both those stories to a mainstream audience and hopefully allow people to appreciate the beauty and the fragility of Eastern Greenland. Hopefully, that’s the real service.”

Arctic Ascent with Alex Honnold premiered Feb. 4 on National Geographic and Feb. 5 on Disney+ and Hulu.

Sasha DiGiulian and Mariana ‘Mango’ Ordonez have climbed the Sendero Luminoso route in El Potrero Chico in Mexico. They are the first female duo to do so.

The 455m vertical line goes up the front side of El Toro mountain. It is one of the hardest big wall routes in the area with difficulties up to 7c. The route was established by Jeff Jackson, Kurt Smith, and Pete Peacock in 1994.

DiGiulian led every pitch. She managed to onsight them all except for one, during which her foot slipped. She sent it on her second try.

"My favorite pitch was definitely the 5.12 on pitch 12, so wild how the rock geology changed amidst the route. I have a lot to reflect on about the experience and I felt really proud of the decisions we made as we climbed, and the teamwork that went into making a spontaneous romp up a big wall so successful," DiGiulian wrote on her social media.

It took them two days to complete the route. At the end of the first day, they made a bivy on the wall at pitch 10 before climbing the final five pitches of the route the following day.

A conservative decision, but the right one

The decision to bivy, rather than push to the top in one day, came from DiGiulian.

"I have been dealing with a lot of anxiety before going on climbing trips because of all that I have gone through over the last few years, and residual trauma from a tragic, fatal event that altered the way I think about safety and climbing. My fear comes in waves for me, and I'm learning to respect it and to listen to it, rather than just trying to supersede it and being bold," DiGiulian said.

"I knew I had the fitness and energy to keep pushing it but I also have a scar from the past that does make me nervous to climb on unknown terrain at night, for fear of rock fall and the safety of myself and my team...Spending a bivvy night on a ledge on the wall, and then re-climbing through the five pitches I had done to return to my high point and finish the remaining five pitches felt like the safest decision for us, and the best way to have an enjoyable experience with my friend," DiGiulian explained.

In 2020, DiGiulian lost a friend in a climbing accident. Nolan Smythe, a climber and BASE jumper, died on El Gigante in Parque Nacional Cascada de Basaseachi, Mexico.

Don't meet your heroes. That's how the old saying goes, and it's stuck around because it carries an unimpeachable nugget of truth. It is, almost always, a disappointing experience.

But the day up-and-coming climber Jordan Cannon met Yosemite climbing legend Mark Hudon? That's an exception.

What happened when the two men meet — each representing a distinct generation of climbers, each with his own techniques, tools, and strategies — is the subject of Free as Can Be, a powerful documentary from the filmmakers at Arc'teryx.

The two connected at a climbing event in Truckee, California, and quickly formed a connection.

"I was very aware of the climbing he did in the 70s," Cannon says in the opening moments of the film. "I thought it was like the coolest thing ever. He was the man because he started a movement of free climbing in Yosemite 40 years ago."

Free climbing Yosemite

To avoid getting bogged down in climbing jargon, it's worth pausing here and summarizing Hudon's Yosemite career: he and partner Max Jones tackled some of the hardest routes in the world at the time.

They did it "free as can be," meaning they tried to make each ascent without bolts or cams as artificial handholds. It's called free climbing, and it's pretty darn tough — especially on the rock Hudon and Jones were tackling. And though they were climbing at a level on par with the greats of their day, they didn't get a ton of recognition. These days, you have to be a pretty obsessive climbing nerd to geek out over Mark Hudon.

But Jordan Cannon? He's a pretty obsessive climbing nerd.

"I love the movement of climbing and challenging myself on hard things. But it's the history and the tradition and the mentality from the past that inspires me to go outside and have these adventures of my own," Canon says.

Legendary free soloist Alex Honnold agrees with Cannon's self-assessment, though he takes it a step further in a typically blunt fashion.

"He cares about climbing history in a way that I find sort of refreshing," the climbing phenom says. "Though it might be to his detriment a little bit too. Because if he didn't care about climbing history and just trained in the gym all the time, he'd probably be a stronger climber."

It's this love of climbing history that prompted Cannon to ask Hudon if he had any project he'd always regretted not sending. Hudon mentioned Freerider, a ferociously difficult, 975m line on El Cap that Hudon's tried and failed to free climb for decades. Hudon told Cannon it would take a year of his life to prepare for the attempt and he'd need a partner willing to commit to such a thing.

And then, to Hudon's surprise, Cannon said he'd be that guy.

A year of training. A week of sending.

The two strangers quickly developed a powerful friendship that reached across climbing eras to get to the core of what it means to trust someone on a big wall. Cannon gave Hudon his year, with the two traveling all over the American West to train on some of the hardest problems around.

And then, finally, it was time to tackle Freerider.

For Hudon, the crux of the attempt would be The Teflon Corner. This 5.12d slick-as-hell nightmare requires the climber to, as one interviewee put it, essentially levitate upwards. It would be one notch more difficult than anything Hudon had ever achieved in his long and illustrious career.

No spoilers here. I'll tell you this though, the film's final ten minutes had me wiping at my eyes. And as the below picture shows, I wasn't the only one.

I'll leave you with a final quote from Hudon, a line that perfectly summarizes the legend's outlook.

"I'm not going to have a tombstone because I'm going to get cremated. But if I did have a tombstone, and on it, it says 'as free as can be,'...that would be all right. That would be good. As free as could be. And he had a lot of fun."

The first free climb of Riders on the Storm on the central tower of Torres del Paine is one of Patagonia's most coveted challenges. The feat is yet to be achieved, despite repeated attempts from a handful of cutting-edge climbers. Sean Villanueva O'Driscoll, Nico Favresse, Siebe Vanhee, and Drew Smith, all veterans of the route, are currently on their way for another round with the 1,300m granite face.

Vanhee revealed the plans a month ago in a short Instagram video:

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The climbers showed up in Puerto Natales (Chile) last weekend, ready to go as soon as the weather allowed. And that may be the problem: Climbers in the area report relentless bad weather this season, Carlos and Victoria Garranzo of the Alpymon blog told ExplorersWeb.

First ascent in 1991

Riders on the Storm is named after the song by The Doors, but also goes well with the vicious Patagonian weather. It was opened in 1991 by a legendary team of German climbers: Kurt Albert, Bernd Arnold, Norbert Baetz, Peter Dittrich, and Wolfgang Guellich. They spent six weeks on the wall to complete the line. It goes directly up the middle of the East Face of the central tower of the Torres del Paine group. It was graded as VI 5.12d (European 7c), A3 and tagged as exposed, due to frequent falls of ice and rock.

After 25 years and only three repetitions, it was two women who first attempted to free climb the route, in addition to bagging the first female climb. Ines Papert of Germany and Mayan Smith-Gobat of New Zealand managed to free all but four pitches. They did a new variation with difficulties up to 7C+ (5.13a).

A close call

Papert had a close call when a falling rock cracked her helmet in two. She decided that she had had enough of Riders. However, Smith-Gobat returned the following year with Brette Harrington. They fought for weeks against very bad weather and eventually retreated. But as Planet Mountain points out, they were convinced that the challenge was doable: "The crux pitches go free for sure."

Check here the film by Drew Smith on the attempt by Mayan Smith-Gobat and Brette Harrington in 2017:

Of the current climbing team, Sean Villanueva and Nico Favresse completed the third repetition of the route in 2006, together with Olivier Favresse and Mike Lecomte. At the time, they managed to free some of the previously aided pitches.

Siebe Vanhee again attempted Riders on the Storm last year, with Brette Harrington of the U.S. on her second attempt and Jacopo Larcher of Italy. Again, Patagonia's notoriously bad weather beat the climbers.

Three months after attempting Cerro Torre solo during the austral winter, Colin Haley is back in Patagonia, with a couple of cool climbs already under his belt.

First, Haley teamed up this time with Fabian Buhl to climb the Potter-Davis route on the north face of Aguja Poincenot. Haley describes the climb as "challenging, sustained, and very high quality." He notes that other climbers have compared this line to the North Face of The Rostrum in Yosemite.

Dean Potter and Steph Davis first climbed the route, graded V 5.11 C1 WI4, in 2001. Read the route details on PATAclimb.com and in Davis's AAJ account of the first climb, done in a 25-hour, non-stop push.

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In a note to ExplorersWeb, Haley said that his and Buhl's was not a cutting-edge achievement.

"This route has been climbed at least four times before, and while certainly a challenging route, is not super-extreme," he said.

Yet he admits the route is one of exceptional quality, "even by Chaltén standards, which are already much higher than almost any other mountain range in the world."

After Aguja Poincenot, the pair “cooled down,” by climbing Aguja Guillaumet by the Brenner Ridge. Haley described it as "another quality route, albeit much easier."

He did note that both himself and his partner made an effort to capture some cool pictures. Besides the selection of his photographs featured here, Haley posted some of Buhl's on IG:

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Spiritual home

"El Chaltén certainly is a sort of second home for me, even if I have to find a different place to sleep every time that I come," Haley told ExplorersWeb. "This month marks 20 years since my first trip here. In total, I think I have made 20 trips to Patagonia, and in total spent well more than four years of my life here."

Marcin Tomaszewski and Pawel Haldas "fell in love with a frozen piece of rock," Greenland got its first big wall winter climb, and the two Poles escaped narrowly with their hides.

Oqatssut is one hell of a massif: overlapping, glacier-protected, and hulking. The two climbers targeted it on instinct but reaching it in winter was a travail. So was getting out before the surrounding sea ice broke up.

They called their route Fram, after Fridtjof Nansen’s polar ship. The locals' name for the wall is Oqatssut. Tomaszewski and Haldas climbed it in February: 17 pitches, 700 meters, M5, A3, C2, VI Big Wall 10-24.02.

Bitter cold was a constant enemy. So was loose rock, darkness, the waning winter, dangerous climbing, and, well…pretty much everything. But you wouldn’t know it from Tomaszewski.

"We didn't experience any bad moments. We knew what to expect in this place and we were prepared both physically and mentally. We knew that the wall might be fragile and we assumed it would be cold," he said. "No amount of physical exertion or endurance could have given me a greater feeling of accomplishment."

Weather forces pivot, locals lead the way

It’s the first reported winter ascent of a Greenland big wall and like the voyage of its namesake ship the Fram, perseverance defined its authorship.

Oqatssut thrusts from the sea in a big inlet near the picturesque West Greenland town of Uumaanaq. Local hunters pointed Tomaszewski and Haldas to the area.

But it wasn’t the climbers’ first choice. Oqatssust was a forced decision.

The team had targeted Agpat, Uumaanaq, and Storoen Island. Decaying ice forced an adjustment.

"The tactics we had set up and the areas where we were going to look for our walls landed in the trash a moment after arrival," Tomaszewski explained on Facebook. "The ice cover on the fiords is not constant. It is influenced both by the air temperature and by the wind pushing warm water from Baffin Bay."

Undeterred, he and Haldas pivoted on the local advice. A compulsion based on something beyond pragmatism propelled them.

"We looked for it instinctively, without a map. It was a real journey into the unknown, just like in the times of the first explorers that I read about as a child. At that moment I felt like the child I was, dreaming of such discoveries," Tomaszewski said. "For me, the greatest moment of the trip was this moment."

Stoic progress

They pitched their tents at the base of the formation on February 9 and headed up the next day. Temperatures plummeted to -40°C during the 17 hours of night they experienced each day. Locals marked the low temperatures as exceptional.

"Climbing the lower part of the wall was not technically difficult but was very demanding because of loose rock," Tomaszewski wrote. "Black bands of rock enveloping the wall at two levels meant poorer quality granite and a high risk of spontaneously falling fragments. The short seven-hour day meant that we were unable to complete more than one or two pitches a day, either by aid climbing or free climbing up to M5."

They proceeded methodically. Tomaszewski relied on significant winter climbing experience as he and Haldas weathered the conditions.

"We had to check our fingers and toes every minute of the climb. A moment of inattention would result in frostbite.

"After my previous winter climbs in the Karakoram, Baffin Island, and Norway, I knew we couldn't make this mistake," Tomaszewski said. “And we didn't."

All in, it was 14 days up and down the wall — leading and fixing pitches, creating bivouacs, and staying warm.

"One wears light clothes and moves all day, while the belayer wears his warmest down clothes to survive a day on the wall," Tomaszewski wrote. "The cold is our biggest opponent. After a moment of rest, the body cools down, cutting the heat from our fingers, which then requires warming them up again and again. There must always be time for this!"

'Black magic of climbing'

Haldas drew the stiffest pitches, but that didn’t mean Tomaszewski was out of harm’s way. Continued Tomaszewski:

The cavernous weaknesses in the wall forced us to do some real acrobatics and reach for the black magic of climbing. After passing the second visible strip of black rock, Pawel pushes on to the demanding A3 pitch. I can hear the rumbling flakes and see thin slabs stuck to the wall, and I am standing directly underneath them! I feel like a condemned man under the guillotine.

This pitch took Pawel a good couple of hours in silence. He climbed in terrible wind and spindrift. He was extremely brave, I was proud of him. Thanks to this progress…we had the chance to summit the next day, on the last day of good weather.

From the summit, Tomaszewski contemplated the scene below him.

"The icebergs below us, trapped in the frozen fiord, looked insane…it’s hard to describe what we felt, what we saw. This moment was composed of many brief moments from the past days, months, and life. It is impossible to describe," he said.

Narrow escape

There was no time to linger at the top. Forecasts called for punishing 110kmph gusts, and the ice entrapping Oqatssut would not last. ExplorersWeb reported that the climbers scrambled down the wall to arrive at the base at noon on Feb. 23. There they met a hunter, who hustled them back to Uumannaq.

The sea ice broke up an hour later, as the wind began to hammer the cliff.

"We can’t imagine what would have happened if we hadn’t made it," Tomaszewski said.

Shifts this rapid can happen in Western Greenland when warm water and wind plow in from the Gulf Stream. Tomaszewski was judicious in describing the potential consequences of getting trapped.

"The thought kept running through my mind that a one-day delay might have resulted in us being cut off from the world for longer than we would have liked," he said. "We were extremely lucky."

The climbers walked away with a landmark Greenland climb. It was a vindicating effort for Tomaszewski, who has long held a special connection with the world’s largest island.

"This expedition closed a certain process around my long-term relationship with Greenland, during which I always felt at home," he said. "Because of its wildness and the small number of climbers, this island is one of the places where I feel safe. In life, I follow my heart more than my mind, and it is my heart that has always shown me the way north."

The climbers created a film, somewhat improvisationally, along the way. INUSSUK is playing on the festival circuit now, promoted by the industrious Tomaszewski.

Inussuks are stone markers created in the image of humans, signifying contact with the land.

It is worth a watch.

The new route up 6,873m Military Topographers Peak has won the Russian version of the Piolet d'Or. Alexey Suharev, Ratmir Mukhametzyanov, and Alexandr Parfenov received their award for this new direct route up the southwest wall this past weekend in Moscow.

The route, named The Lost World, was the fifth ever up this fourth-highest peak in the Tien Shan. It was the first up the southwest face. According to Parfenov, it was "the most difficult climb of my life."

The ceremony also commemorated the 100th anniversary of the Russian Mountaineering Federation. It began after an ascent of Georgia's 5,033m Mt. Kazbek in 1923.

The Steel Angels

This year, the presentation featured an award for female teams, called the Steel Angel, granted for only the 15th time. The winners were Galina Terentyeva and Olga Lukashenko for their free climb of the Perestroika Crack on Slesov Peak (4,240m), in the Pamir-Alai range. Theirs was the third female free ascent of the route. American Lynn Hill climbed it with Greg Child in 1991 and Nastja Davidova of Slovenia and Iva Bozic of Croatia did it in 2016.

Terentyeva and Lukashenko had hoped to climb the route within the day, but bad weather kept them on the wall through two rainy nights and a severe shortage of food and water.

In both categories, an international jury selected the winners from two short lists of five candidates each. All the Steel Angel candidates came from big-wall climbs, including one in winter. They included Nadezhda Oleneva, for an impressive climb of a 1,200m route on Peak 4810 in Kyrgyzstan, with Daria Seryupova and Anastasia Kozlova. Oleneva sadly perished some weeks ago on Dhaulagiri.

Candidates (male and female) for Russia's Golden Ice Axe included:

• Yuri Koshelenko and A. Lonchinsky for their recent first ascent of Rolwaling's Kang Shar (6,645m)
• the first ascent of the northwest face of Peak 4433 in Kyrgyzstan, by D. Prokofiev and M. Popova
• the first ascent of the South Buttress of Ulun Peak (5,588m) in Kyzyl-Asker, by E. Murin, I. Penyaev, and O. Lukashenko
• the impressive Aksai Horseshoe (4,895m) Traverse in the Tien Shan. Egor Matveenko, Tikhon von Stackelberg, and Roman Abildaev were the first to complete this traverse, in winter, no less.

Check the video presentations here.

Noah Besen, James Klemmensen, Shira Biner, and Amanda Bischke spent 20 days climbing on the granite walls around the Coronation Glacier on southeastern Baffin Island. The team kept a low profile but has just reported on their expedition to the American Alpine Club. These might not be the hardest routes in Canada, but the young climbers showed a real sense of adventure in a difficult arctic environment.

Inspiration

A Cutting Edge Grant helped fund the expedition. The films of Sean Villanueva O'Driscoll gave them the idea to start searching for objectives on Baffin Island. For digital natives like them, it was funny that they chose their goal based on a landscape painting by the late Canadian artist Cory Trepanier. It showed the granite cliffs surrounding the Coronation Glacier.

The team used kayaks to bring their gear to the glacier, although they had to find a suitable launching point because the sea ice was thicker than usual this season.

"It was the first crux of the trip," the climbers admitted.

Once on the glacier, they made several trips hauling gear to their base camp, set at the point where the glacier bifurcates.

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After some days of looking for routes on the granite faces, the climbers split into two pairs with different goals. The first route, close to base camp, was an 800m, 20-hour climb. Besen and Klemmensen slept on the summit and returned to camp the following day. They graded the climb as V 5.10 and named it Salami Exchange Commission because of all the salami they ate as fuel during those weeks.

Salami-fueled firsts

This was Klemmensen's first experience opening a line.

"By today's standards, I don't expect our route to turn any heads, but damn, I'm proud of it," he wrote. "This route was probably the single most meaningful climbing experience of my life, but it's hard to find the words without babbling clichés. So I have chosen instead to write about salami because that's a lot easier."

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Meanwhile, Biner and Bischke opened The Big G (350m, III 5.8 ), further up the glacier. Here, the climbers said, the rock was not so chossy.

After waiting out a week of rain, they went for a second round. Besen and Klemmensen opened Escape from Azkaban, a 650m route (IV 5.10+). Despite looking difficult, it provided "the best alpine rock ever" Besen told the AAJ.

"Escape from Azkaban looked heinous," he said. "Blocky rocks and blank faces...but once up closer, perfect splitter cracks formed the route."

They encountered the greatest difficulties they descended along a side glacier with a river running along it. They had to make their way back to Coronation Glacier around the river and over a boulder field with water running beneath it. Said Klemmensen:

We had no choice but to spend several hours detouring back uphill and around the obstacle, through treacherous terrain...By the time we reached the Coronation Glacier the next morning, our souls had been completely drained. With several hours of walking still between us and our base camp, we decided to call it a day there...right in the middle of the Coronation Glacier! As the saying goes, it doesn't have to be fun to be fun!

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All four climbed the final route together. A pond of blue water between the glacier and the rock face forced some ingenuity. Besen had brought his dry suit. Anchored with ice screws, Besen crossed the moat and installed a Tyrolean traverse for everyone.

From that point, the route took all day to climb. The team descended at night -- likely twilight in the arctic summer -- and managed a similar amphibious operation to return to the glacier. They named the route Raise the Drawbridge! (400m, grade III, 5.10)

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Elisabeth Lardschneider, a young promising member of the Italian sport climbing team for the next Olympic Games, swapped the climbing gym this year for the remote valleys of India's Himalaya. On her first experience in the Himalaya, she showed her true colors by climbing a new route on a granite big wall to a 5,600m unclimbed summit, together with Markus Ranalter. A new dimension of climbing was opening for her, but tragedy struck five days later: Lardschneider fell to her death on another peak. She was only 20 years old.

This is a story we never expected to write. Many cool climbs in isolated places pass unnoticed, and the same happens with a number of climbing accidents. Yet we hope the report of her first and last first ascent may be a sort of tribute.

Unclimbed spires

Earlier this fall, we reported on the first ascent of Jamyang Ri (5,800m), an impressive granite wall in Ladakh, India. Climbers Patrick Tirler and Moritz Sigmund were part of a larger Italian team, which spent most of July in Rangtik Topko, a side valley of Zanskar (Ladakh area).

According to Tirler, two members of the team did another, even harder first ascent. Elisabeth Lardschneider and Markus Ranalter succeeded on a line previously discarded by Tirler himself as too difficult.

"Only two lines seemed to be climbable through the 500m high, virgin northwest face of Small Jamyang Ri (5,600m)," Tirler wrote. "One of them turned out to be much too hard for us after three days of trying. The other also seemed impossible after the first attempts.

"But Lisi and Makke [Lardschneider and Ranalter] did not give up on their vision. They showed extreme determination and extraordinary skill, and finally managed to reach the crack that cuts through the whole wall up to the summit."

The climb

Lardschneider and Ranalter went for the Jamyiang Ri's secondary summit (the one they call Small Jamyang Ri) not because it was the most difficult, but because it was the most accessible. Days of bad weather had covered the valley with fresh snow and increased the avalanche danger on most peaks. But this face was steep enough to shed the snow as soon as it fell.

"It was our first experience with a first ascent," Ranalter admitted. "Choosing the steepest wall in a remote valley at the other end of the world at an altitude of over 5,000m sounds a bit ambitious."

Yet the pair eyed a long crack that started around 100m up the face and snaked to the summit. The challenge was to reach that crack through the brittle rock of the lower sections.

On their first attempt, they thought about giving up, but their partners encouraged them to try again.

"Without snow and clearer weather, the rock didn't look that bad anymore," they said. In fact, they made good progress. As they returned to base camp for the night (they climbed big-wall style, fixing pitches and retreating), they knew they wouldn't surrender so easily a second time.

'Overjoyed'

Finally, the pair took six days (with a couple of rest days in base camp) to summit the unclimbed wall. It included two nights on a portaledge -- one on the way up and one on the way down. The pair reached Base Camp "overjoyed, with an indescribable sense of achievement."

They climbed the 560m line in 18 pitches and graded it as VIII, A1 (X-?). "We call [the route] Nurbu Duk Lam, which means Special Valuable Line," they wrote, after the very special moments they had lived during the climb.

Markus Ranalter explained the rating to ExplorersWeb:

VIII (7a) is the obligatory difficulty that must be climbed in order to complete the sections that are not technically climbable. As we were not able to redpoint every pitch (all individual moves were climbed but not linked together), we just suggested a degree of difficulty for these lengths. This is why a question mark follows the difficulty degree of X- (8a).  We noted A1 (aid climbing) for the 5th and 8th pitches, where we couldn't climb all the moves.

First experience

Elisabeth Lardschneider and Markus Ranalter were not life partners, just a great climbing team. This was their first experience trying to open a new route and their first time at altitude. They didn't have a clear plan about how to distribute the tasks when climbing, so they just let the climb flow.

"It was clear that Elisabeth was the better climber and I was better at technical things and rope handling," Ranalter told ExplorersWeb. "Most of the time, however, we simply alternated after each rope length and we also took turns on the difficult lengths."

There is a detailed account of the climb on the South Tyrol Alpine Club's website. Oddly, there is no mention of what happened next, and the climbers consulted by Explorersweb said nothing either until a reader pointed it out to us when we briefly published an earlier version of this story.

When we asked for confirmation, the climbers confirmed the sad facts. "The accident happened on July 26," Ranalter said. "She slipped on the snow/icefield of Chanrasrik Ri and fell 100 to 150m. She died instantly. it was an indescribably sad moment...We all still can't believe it."

Elisabeth Lardschneider of Ortisei (near Val Gardena) was one of the most promising sports climbers in Italy. She was a high-level athlete since she sent her first 8b at 14 years old. A member of the National Sport Climbing team, she was going to participate in the Paris 2024 Olympics.

Last year, she also acquired experience on higher peaks by climbing the west face of Pik Odessa (4,810m) in Kyrgyzstan. She dreamed of eventually becoming a mountain guide and rescuer at her home in the South Tyrolean Dolomites.

Climbing a 1,400m line with difficulties up to 6b+/A2 M5+ 80º is tough. Spending seven days on the wall and seven nights on a portaledge with near-strangers is possibly even riskier. But it worked out great for four Spaniards on 6,454m Bhagirathi III in India's Garwhal Himalaya.

Mikel Saez de Urabain, Chemari Andres, Ruben Perez, and Alexander Kammerlander successfully followed the old mountain adage, “Come back safe, come back as friends, make the summit -- in that order."

"The team was just excellent," Perez told Explorersweb. "For me, it was the best of the entire experience."

Probably the fact that all of them are seasoned big wall climbers helped. The lovely scenery, amid giants such as Shivling, Meru, and Thalay Sagar, did the rest.

The altitude, however, was not so easy to deal with.

The climbers all had day jobs and families and could only devote a month for the whole expedition. This prompted them to hurry to the foot of the wall with less acclimatization than they had wished. It also forced two of them to retreat to Gangotri village for several days before rejoining the team.

"We wanted to complete the route known as Stairway to Heaven, following its originally planned line to the summit," Perez explained.

The German team that opened that route in 2004 had to alter their course when a storm left a pillar on the upper side of the wall in very bad condition. About halfway, they had to rappel in a big pendulum in order to move to a previously climbed the 1982 Scottish route.

The Spaniards hoped to do the final pitches that the Germans had left undone. But after five days on the portaledge, they realized they didn't have enough time. They had to choose between climbing some more pitches of the Stairway to Heaven or reaching the summit via the Scottish route.

They chose the second and launched a final push on Oct. 25 at 2 am. They climbed all day and through the following night.

"[Finally], we came to the end of the rock face," said Perez. "Theoretically, above us should have been snow ramps leading to the summit. But this year, the mountains of Garhwal were extremely dry. Instead of snow/ice ramps, we found rocky slopes of 60º, steep and rotten. We split into two rope teams, each using one of our two ropes."

While on the face, the team proceeded capsule-style: They set up a portaledge midway up the route and fixed the pitches above it, returning to the bivy every night. They then jumared up again on the following day and continued working. They didn't return to the base of the wall until they summited.

The team fixed a total of 500m of rope on the 1,400m route and set up two bivouacs: one at the base of the face and the second -- consisting of two portaledges -- at about midway up the wall. Their bivy was very close to the point where they traversed from Stairway to Heaven to the Scottish route.

The team took shifts to fix, climb, and carry loads. They also had to stop at the base of the face because of a storm.

"We had no weather forecasts because satphones are forbidden in India," Perez noted.

They reached the summit at 9 am on Oct. 26 and returned to the portaledge for a final rest on the face.

"We descended down the same route, in order to retrieve all their gear from the wall," concluded Perez. "We left the route completely clean."

Adventure climbers in the UK don't need to head to Yosemite to experience the thrill and exposure of big-wall climbing. Tucked away high up in Northern Scotland is a 350m face called St John's Head, which is the world's hardest sea cliff climb.

A two-hour boat ride is required to reach Hoy, a remote island in the Orkney archipelago off the north coast of Scotland. Here, the moss-encrusted St John's Head rises vertically from the sea. Back in the 70's, the legendary Ed Drummond assaulted the huge sandstone cliff over seven days.

Drummond and company created a 493m aid route called The Longhope that went unrepeated for decades. Then in 2011, the Scottish polymath climber Dave Macleod freed the whole thing in nine pitches at a whopping grade of E10 (5.14).

Over the years, the massive sandstone outing has been a siren call for only the most adventurous trad climbers. Prerequisites: a penchant for loose rock, big run-outs, and vomiting sea birds.

Putrid vomit

The latest Longhope wannabe, who stars in this week's video, is Robbie Phillips, one of the UK's leading trad climbers. He first teamed up to tackle the Longhope with Emma Twyford, another British trad god. They were beaten back by the unique challenges of this Scottish coastal monolith.

"Extremely poor rock quality and some squeaky bum moments slowed us down and drained us mentally. Then we had the local inhabitants to deal with: the fulmar. It's a bird that spits putrid vomit at you if you come too close," Phillips later told UK Climbing.

A year later, the dynamic and motivated Scotsman returned with strongman boulderer Alex Moore. Tagging along behind the lens was Ryan Balharry, a climber and adventure filmmaker. A couple of months ago, I happened to bump into Balharry when hiking in Greenland and was captivated by his tales of filming on this wild and exposed headland.

If ripped gear, loose rock, heavy winds, putrid vomit, grassy pitches, slime-filled cracks, ledge crawling, and humorous belay chat sound like your thing, then watch on to find out how Phillips and Moore fared on this infamous Longhope route.

The fastest man on The Nose of El Capitan just lost his title.

Alex Honnold held the solo speed climbing record on The Nose (5.9 C2) until a man from Bloomington, Indiana snatched it from him on Tuesday.

Photographer Tom Evans reported 28-year-old Nick Ehman dispatched the 900m route in 4 hours, 39 minutes. He climbed in a mixed free and aid (or “fraid”) style, and his mark soundly beat Honnold’s existing 5:50 record.

Google Ehman’s name and you’ll find a Mountain Project profile with one item on his to-do list: an easy, nondescript 30m trad route in Tuolomne Meadows.

He brought the sauce this week, though, and plenty of it to douse a juggernaut. Honnold still holds the overall speed record on El Cap, at 1:58:07, along with Tommy Caldwell.

5:50 also doesn’t come close to Honnold’s fastest solo time on El Cap; that came during the events of Free Solo, when he climbed the Freerider in 3:56.

But none of that makes him faster than Ehman on The Nose, for whom yesterday brought an impressive tick. The logistics of climbing alone on a route that complicated and challenging are titanic. And earning a speed record on any Yosemite classic means defeating the best climbers of a generation.

Honnold has shown a penchant for snatching his lost records back. Watch for him to check in at El Capitan soon — if he’s not too busy being dad.

On September 21, Vivian Bruchez, Aurelien Lardy, and Jules Socie skied a big wall on 3,002m Aguja Poincenot in Patagonia. The Whillans-Cochrane route (5.5/E5/300m) had been skied once previously, by Andreas Fransson, who described the ski descent as the steepest and most exposed line of his life.

Bruchez wrote on social media that he agreed with the difficulty: "I have the same opinion [as Fransson], 11 years after his death I can confirm that I have never skied something as difficult as this line."

"It's a wall that, from a distance, the ramp looks wide. But in reality, at its narrowest part, it measures 1m and 80cm wide, suspended with 1,000m of space under the skis. I honestly didn't measure the slope because I was getting scared, but I think it was 60°," Bruchez added.

The following day, the team made a second ski descent. This line was less exposed and they named it Mini-Whillans (5.3/E4/300m).

Fay Manners and Michelle Dvorak have left two new routes on East Greenland: one on their own and another with German climber Martin Feistl.

The two women intended to climb on their own but decided to join forces with Feistl and his climbing partner Felix Bub when they met at Mythics Cirque.

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After a failed attempt on Siren Tower, they spotted an alternative line on the impressive Father Tower. They went for it in one push instead of big wall style (hauling gear up the face). A shoulder injury kept Bub out of that particular climb.

"We didn’t want impossibly heavy haul bags because on the upper section slabs, it looked as though hauling would be difficult," Manners wrote.

Some surprises

Like most first ascents, the route involved some surprises. The biggest were "the so-called hand cracks...actually a set of unbelievable off-width climbing," she added.

However, in Manners' opinion, the crux was the 65m, 7b+ section that Feistl opened. "And then after that, [he led] another very serious pitch which involved a terrifying hollow flake!"

Dvorak wrote: "After a very long day I may have started crying at a belay I’d built when my ropes got tangled yet again, inspiring the 'Mental Breakdown' name for the route. Each of us took it turns experiencing the feeling over the two days it took to climb it and descend on foot."

"The long walk down the crumbly ridge on the second day with heavy rucksacks was the most mentally drained I have felt in a while," Manners admitted. "Seven hours of easy yet extremely serious and consequential terrain." They graded the route 580/765m, 7b+, R.

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Second climb

After the men left, Manners and Dvorak borrowed packrafts from an all-female Spanish team and paddled out to a nearby spot by Kangertittivatsiaq Fiord. There, they bagged a second, shorter route on Chastity Tower. it was that tower's second ascent, after a climb by Sean Villanueva O'Driscoll and Nico Fabresse last year. Manners described that route as:

A classic line of cracks with 370m of climbing on the west face of Chastity Tower.

The route starts up a slab and wanders into a series of chimneys and wide cracks. Later, the crux is where the rock steepens, and as the protection becomes sparse, some moves on crumbly rock across a diagonal traverse are required.

Some enjoyable 5c-6a climbing take you to the summit. There are six abseils that...take you directly down the north face.

Check the route map and details of the "Princess Brides" route on Chastity Tower on Manners' Instagram:

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Note: Sean Villanueva and Nico Favresse were also in Greenland this summer. They attempted a new big wall climb on the Mirror Wall with Franco Cookson and Ben Ditto. It was, they said, “the most ambitious line we have ever attempted.”

In July, a quiet European team headed for one of the hidden valleys of Ladakh, in northern India. Still relatively wild and lonely, the area offers plenty of potential for exploration, first ascents, and new routes. Patrick Tirler and Moritz Sigmund opened one of these on the smooth granite spires of 5,800m Jamyang Ri.

Tirler described the 700m line, done in an 18-hour push on July 21, as the most beautiful route he has ever climbed and his proudest achievement. That's a lot to say for someone who grew up in the Italian Dolomites.

A crystal tower

The new route highlighted a three-week expedition in Rangtik Topko, a side valley of Zanskar. The smooth granite faces of Jamyang Ri rose right behind their tents and are also visible from the road from Padur, the closest village.

"The peak resembles a rock crystal, with smooth sides and clearly visible edges that mark the change in light/shadow at different times of the day," they wrote in their detailed report on Tirler's website. "One of these striking edges pointed directly into the valley and attracted our attention every morning as soon as we crawled out of the tents."

Of course, they went for it.

The first attempt to climb the central part of the northwest face to a fore summit failed after six pitches and three days of intense work.

"[Then] we decided on the gully between the main and secondary summits, and goes down to the base of the wall," they wrote.

They left at 4 am, carrying minimal gear. Seven hours and 10 pitches later -- they shared the four first pitches with a previous Slovenian route -- they reached the top of the gully. Here, the real work began. They had no clue whether a climbable line ran from there to the summit.

The first pitch took us directly to the edge of the "rock crystal" and into a crack that we could already see from base camp. Never in our best dreams could we have imagined that this crack would turn out to be one of the most beautiful alpine cracks we have ever climbed. We enjoyed this happiness for two whole pitches.

Sharp angles, few features

As the crack ended, the climbers had to find a way across the smooth face. They tried traversing left and right and risked a pendulum fall on highly difficult terrain. Eventually, they continued up a thin crack, then dodged a roof by a short rappel to another little crack. Finally, they made the last meters to the summit.

As far as the climbers know, they are the third team to reach that summit. Don't miss the entire report and images on Tirler's website.

The climbers used no bolts on the way up. They did, however, hand-drill a bolt when they got lost on the descent. They had tried to follow the details provided by the 2017 Slovenian team but found themselves in the middle of the face, at the end of their rope with nothing but smooth rock around. It was impossible to manage a belay station there with only the natural rock features. They reached base camp 18 hours after departure, exhausted but happy.

Francesco Ratti, Alessandro Bau, Jerome Perruquet, and Lorenzo D’Addario are aiming for a new route on one of the the spires in the Miyar Valley, which Chris Bonington once described as "India's Yosemite." The Italians reached Base Camp last Sunday, after a three-day trek from Manali.

They then spent three days acclimatizing and having a good look at potential lines. At the moment, the climbers are back to Base Camp, waiting out bad weather.

Originally, they were considering either the Neverseen Tower (5,800m) or Mahindra Peak (6,080m) but they have not specified which wall they have decided to attempt.

The team has only a satphone, so they will send pictures and more details when they return to civilization around the beginning of October.

The North Face of Eiger, the 1,800m wall of vertical limestone in the Swiss Alps, has fed the imagination of generations of adventure lovers. Three weeks ago, Silvan Schupbach and Peter von Kanel proved that new routes are still possible on this legendary face.

The climbers spent six days on the wall between August 19 and 24, dealing with a new 1,200m line that they have called Renaissance. The route finds it way among other previous lines, and was almost entirely free-climbed, except for short sections of aid-climbing. The climbers used no bolts (permanent anchors) along their 30 pitches.

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In an interview with Planet Mountain, Schupbach remarked that the challenge was to apply today's climbing skills to the Eiger, but without using bolts. Von Kanel said that sending the new route was the peak of his career so far.

"The combination of climbing, route-reading skills, ability to place gear, and continuously assess the risk allowed me to move efficiently and in control," he said. Schupbach admitted that nevertheless, the route pushed him to his limits several times.

The North Face of the Eiger is one of the most famous walls in mountaineering. Its many dramas included the epic first ascent in 1938. Heinrich Harrer's book about that climb, The White Spider, is a classic of mountain literature. No less famous is the tragic earlier attempt in 1936, when all four perished. The face also featured in the popular '70s film The Eiger Sanction (starring Clint Eastwood and with Reinhold Messner as climbing advisor). More recently, younger generations followed Ueli Steck's speed ascents on YouTube.

It was Chris Bonington who described Miyar Valley, in India's Himachal Pradesh, as "India's Yosemite." Like the Californian valley, it offers endless climbing possibilities on granite peaks, many of them ranging between 5,000m and the 6,443m of its highest peak, Mount Menthosa.

Several teams followed Bonington's advice and trekked to Miyar Valley which saw quite a few first ascents during the first 15 years of the 21st Century.

However, it is still a lonely, off-the-beaten-track climbing paradise. Exactly what Italian mountain guides Francesco Ratti, Alessandro Bau, Jerome Perruquet, and Lorenzo D'Addario were looking for.

A line to choose between two peaks

The team will depart from their usual playgrounds in the Dolomites and the Aosta Valley for Delhi on September 3. Once they reach Miyar Valley, they will focus their efforts on one of two peaks, either the Neverseen Tower (5,800m) or Mahindra Peak (6,080m). Both peaks have been summited before, but still have plenty of potential new lines waiting to be climbed.

The climbers have eyed up some lines already. "We have different ideas developed on the basis of the pictures that we have of the area, but we know from experience that reality is often different from what one can imagine looking at a picture," they explained.

"We are ready to adapt and to improvise, according to what we will find once we arrive in front of the walls."

The Italians will look for a suitable, highly technical route. Despite their extensive experience both in the Alps and the Himalaya, none of them have been to the area before, so it will be a completely fresh experience. "We can’t wait to leave," Ratti told the expedition press team.

The Neverseen Tower, an aesthetic granite spire, was first climbed by Italians Leone Di Vincenzo, Massimo Marcheggiani, and Alberto Miele in 1992. Americans Dave Sharratt and Freddie Wilkinson made the first ascent of Mahindra Peak in 2007.

The approach

The team will fly to Delhi and then drive to Manali, in Himachal Pradesh. From there they'll move to the village of Shukto. From Shukto, it is a three-day trek to Base Camp, located at about 4,000m.

Miyar Valley lies northwest of the Lahaul and Spiti districts of Himachal Pradesh and stretches for over 75km. More than 50% of the valley is covered in glaciers but it is the granite spires around the valley that fascinate climbers.

This summer, climber and adventurer Leo Houlding, along with his two climbing partners, Wilson Cutbirth and Waldo Etherington, returned to Mount Asgard on Baffin Island.

On August 13, we reported that the trio had been unlucky with the weather and that Houlding's expedition had ended unsuccessfully after 34 days. We based our news on Houlding's first posts after his expedition. But we were wrong. Houlding got in touch and informed us that for the last two days of the expedition when the weather finally stabilized, they made some interesting climbs.

The east face

Though they could not carry out their original plan on the north face of Mount Asgard because of bad weather, they had a new idea. "The massive north tower of Asgard only revealed itself through the clag a handful of times while we festered beneath in the tent. As precious time slipped by, our ambitions for the north wall were turned to the more approachable but even taller, 1,220m east face," Houlding said.

Their attention focused on a hard-looking line directly up the center of the lower east buttress. "In between rain showers and snow flurries, on the rare occasions when the rock dried, we snatched brief chances, barely a pitch each try," he said.

Their line is "Loki's Mischief," Mount Asgard, Baffin Island, Arctic Canada, 5.11+, R (E5 6b)/A3 (TR 5.13-, E7 6c), 1,372m. The line has 29 pitches and 12 of them are new.

"More rotten weather drenched our dreams," recalled Houlding. "All flights to Pang were canceled and the Park was closed due to dangerously flooded rivers. At last, Loki, the Norse god of mischief relented, and summer arrived the day before we had to leave. I took the lead up brilliant untouched stone above, while Wilson [Cutbirth] flashed Waldo's [Etherington] A3 on top rope (E7, 6c / 5.13-), but there was no time for the send."

A brief window

In the time they had, the trio opened 12 new pitches, "around 457m of virgin terrain to a spectacular bivy above a sea of cloud," Houlding wrote.

Then, after a few hours of sleep, they joined the great Doug Scott's classic 1973 route that takes the path of least resistance up the endless headwall, abandoning their kit to move fast.

Houlding, Cutbirth, and Etherington summited under the midnight sun, "euphoric...but accepting defeat." They descended their route in 20 rappels to collect their gear, reaching the ground in a 48-hour trip. "You get what you give, and we gave it our all," wrote Houlding.

Against all odds, Houlding always manages to make an expedition interesting.

Miquel Mas and Marc Subirana set off on Tuesday night Pakistan time to complete the new route they started last year on Latok II in Pakistan's central Karakoram.

So far this summer, bad weather has limited the climbers to just two days on the face. On one of those days, they reached a gear depot that they had left last year at 5,700m. On another day last week, they reached their previous highest point (6,000m) and replaced two damaged ropes, they told the Alpymon blog.

Beyond that lay the crux of the climb: a technical, overhanging section. At that time, the pair decided to rest and wait before setting off on their final push, which is finally underway.

The face that Mas and Subirana are climbing leads to a secondary point of Latok II, some 6,400m high. Latok II's main summit is 7,108m. They have to climb 400 to 500m to complete their roughly 1,000m-long route.

Miquel Mas and Marc Subirana of Spain have returned to Latok II to finish the new 1,000m route they started last year.

The pair reached base camp on July 21 and seized the short periods of acceptable weather to pitch an advanced base camp at 4,950m at the foot of the face.

They then climbed the lower part of the wall until they reached a gear depot they had left last year, hanging on the face at 5,700m. In 2022, they climbed six more pitches, until 6,000m, and left some ropes. But it seems that some of the ropes may be damaged, the climbers told their home team.

Mas and Subirana are currently waiting out more bad weather in base camp. Once it improves, their plan is to reach their 2022 high point and proceed further from there.

 

Latok II's main summit is 7,108m, but the line that Mas and Subirana are climbing leads to a secondary point, which is 6,400m high.

Close to the Latok group is Baintha Brakk I, also known as The Ogre. Here, the strong team of Francois Cazzanelli, Matteo della Bordella, Silvan Schupbach, and Symon Welfringer called off their expedition last week, because of the same relentless bad weather.

In a world gone mad for bouldering gyms, an intrepid few lay it all on the line for a climbing art that’s scarcer by the day.

While growing hordes of climbing influencers dance up giant, colorful plastic molds bolted to anonymous indoor walls, Jacob Cook has kept himself more than busy on real, big rock all over the planet.

The Englishman recently helped his longtime partner in crime, Bronwyn Hodges, resurrect a Mexican big wall shrouded in a supernatural fog. The pair also opened Sea Barge Circus, a 900m ocean cliff masterpiece in Qaersorsuaq, Greenland, as part of a massive two-month trip.

Cook’s latest video, though, colors in the background for these recent escapades rather than cataloging another.

The Horn of Upernavik towers 1,000m above northeastern Baffin Bay. Cook and teammate Ian Faulkner pulled off the first ascent back in 2013 — but just now excavated the footage from their files and dusted it off for general consumption.

No guarantees

The adventurers launch with a cavalier disregard for objective danger that anyone familiar with the boys of Dodo’s Delight (released two years later) will likely note. The climbers recruit grizzled northern boat captains to ferry them toward their objective. The ensuing passage takes place under circumstances of grim sensory deprivation.

Their little boat churns through water densely packed with jagged ice, inside a visual void that looks like the inside of a ping pong ball.

The ride was a gamble; the seafarers Cook and Faulkner originally conscripted backed out because of the ice hazard.

“I quote the guy from the petrol station [who directed us] to the boats, who said, ‘There’s hardly any ice! What kind of p***ies are they?' ” Cook recalls from the cabin. “So now we’ve managed to hitch a lift with some seal fishermen, in this tiny boat. And the crunching you can hear is icebergs going underneath the boat.”

Giggling all along, he notes the massive icebergs passing by outside the tiny boat’s portholes.

Yet, the inscrutable crew (and the man who seems to be their captain, who for some reason briefly wields a rifle) do land the climbers safely at a waypoint that leads to their objective.

Giant gray slab

It hulks: a giant gray slab, laced with endless cracks and crumbling pillars, steepening toward a craggy pinnacle against the equally gray sky.

It’s dual action on the face. Having linked up with fellow arctic rock hounds Tom Codrington and Pete Hill, Cook and Faulkner tackle one aspect of the cliff while they explore the other.

What you’ll find: good, old-fashioned climber chicanery and down-home attitudes toward adventure. Self-deprecation intertwines with survival.

Don’t miss the episode where Codrington and Hill, hundreds of meters above Cook and Faulkner, unwittingly trundle rock straight past their position. “Like being shot at,” Cook says, “it was f***ing terrifying.”

Laughter — maybe more timid now — ensues. It’s 36 hours in, and Cook and Faulkner are still a long way from the top.

Basically, all the Greenland climbing ingredients play up here. Eccentric sea captains somehow navigate terrible waters. Exhausted climbers somehow ascend (and descend) prohibitive formations. There’s glee, camaraderie, chagrin, perseverance, and uncanny vigor.

It’s hard to tell how much of that adventure climbing requires — versus how much of it the discipline gives back in return.

In recent years, adventure polymaths Erik Boomer and Sarah McNair-Landry have mashed together their skills in sledding, kite skiing, couloir skiing, rock climbing, and kayaking. The result has been a series of envy-inducing adventure "vacations" in their Baffin Island backyard.

This spring, the arctic veterans teamed up with Brady Johnstone for 25 days of climbing, couloir skiing, and kite skiing. The trio headed to a remote fiord on the east coast of Baffin Island on May 12.

Around 100km north of the Inuit hamlet of Clyde River lie spectacular Sam Ford Fiord and neighboring Stewart Valley. For over three decades, climbers and skiers from around the world have made pilgrimages to the region's sea cliffs. These pillars rise from the water to over 1,000m in height.

Imagine a giant had plucked the granite monoliths of Yosemite Valley and dropped them on the shores of a frozen Arctic shoreline, and you'll get some idea of the scale and uniqueness of this remote adventure Mecca.

Big walls and classic couloirs

Having dabbled in big-wall climbing in recent years, Boomer and McNair-Landry set their sights on the striking Polar Sun Spire, one of these 1,300m sea cliffs. They summited with Johnstone via "amazing splitter" climbing, at a grade of 5.11. The Spire was first climbed in 1996 over 39 days by an American team that included Mark Synnott.

Not satisfied with simply going up, Boomer and McNair-Landry also skied down the classic Polar Star Couloir. A 1,100m, 40-50 degree chute laser cut into the granite walls of Beluga Spire. They also shredded deep powder in other long couloirs in the valley.

Polar Star Couloir. Photo: Tom Grant

During their 25-day sojourn, they kite-skied between peaks and over to the Stewart Valley. They lucked out with clear late-spring weather and even managed to fit in some casual bouldering on the big blocks along the shoreline.

During three days in early June, Italians Stefano Ragazzo and Silvia Loreggian opened a new line in the Kichatna Mountains of southwestern Alaska.

Their route went up 2,300m Cemetery Spire in the Cathedral Spires. They named it "Gold Rush" (600m, 5.12a A1+).

"For years, I dreamed of opening a new route big-wall style," Ragazzo wrote. Especially, he added, climbing as freely as possible and finding perfect granite cracks on a big spire in a remote place like Alaska.

They climbed during a marginal weather window, buffeted by wind for almost the entire time.

Indeed, the weather in the Cathedral Spires is almost always harsh, but the granite is very good. As Richard Millikan and writer David Roberts wrote in the American Alpine Journal in 1966, these spires are probably North America's nearest equivalent to the towers of Patagonia.

"No other area combines heavy glaciation, remoteness, and bad weather with such an abundance of vertical walls, pinnacles, and obelisks," the authors recalled.

Once we arrived there, I was stunned by the beauty of the place," Silvia Loreggian recalled. She added that the weather dictated their choice of the route because snow covered many walls, which became very wet during the few hours of sun. Avalanches coursed down every steep section.

"It was a logical climbing straight toward a long and perfect corner until the top," she added. "After a week of bad weather, we used a couple of days with no precipitation (but a lot of wind) and all our energy to climb our dream. It was a real Gold Rush!"

Three weeks after arriving on Greenland's west coast, Marcin Tomaszewski and Pawel Haldas completed an awesome new big-wall route near the town of Uummannaq.

At first, it looked like everything had gone smoothly. In fact, it was quite tricky. Here is their complete report, with some stunning images and video from their winter climb.

Choosing a target

Tomaszewski and Haldas aimed for big walls on the Stor and Agpat Islands, near Uummannaq. To pick a climbing spot, they sought the advice of local hunters, who told them about some big cliffs they had passed during hunting expeditions.

"We wanted to get a close look at them. This was possible thanks to the snowmobiles and local fishermen's knowledge of the current state of the ice cover," the climbers wrote. "We saw plenty of interesting alpine-type massifs, a real climbing El Dorado, and above all, a beautiful exposed rock wall about six kilometers wide and of unknown height. The decision was made in silence, we fell in love with this piece of frozen rock."

Getting started

On February 9, the pair pitched their tents on the ice, secured with ice screws. The following morning, they headed for the wall.

They did the climb in capsule style. First, they fixed the lower part of the wall in sunny but cold conditions. Temperatures dropped to -40ºC, a particularly frigid spell for the region, according to locals. And so the first stage of the climb was mainly a fight against the cold.

They managed to fix a section of the wall and set up a portaledge.

"Climbing the lower part of the wall was not technically difficult but was very demanding because of loose rock...Black bands of rock enveloping the wall at two levels meant poorer quality granite and a high risk of spontaneously falling fragments. The short seven-hour day meant that we were unable to complete more than one or two pitches a day, either by aid climbing or free climbing up to M5."

Climbing at night was out of the question. At that latitude in mid-February, the sun is only up between 9 am and 3:30 pm. Nights are long and dark and even colder than the days. Their priority was not to get frostbitten, so they stopped when the cold became unbearable, even if that meant slower progress.

"Every day we were on the verge of frostbite on our toes and hands. Now and then, we lost feeling and they turned white. A moment's negligence would have ended our expedition and our dream of a new route on this beautiful wall."

Their chosen line was crystal clear to the climbers.

"As it turned out, the only last-minute change [of direction] came at the top where we had a choice between two big exit corners."

Both options looked too brittle and loose, but they found a stripe of orange rock in the middle and took that. It was the best choice.

The final push

"On February 18, we set off for the wall for good. We deliberately avoided bivouacking lower down the face because of falling rocks," Tomaszewski wrote. Instead, they hauled their equipment up to the portaledge, installed above the ninth pitch. From there, they got started on the strict routine of big wall climbing.

"The cold is our biggest opponent. After a moment's rest, the body cools down, cutting the heat from our fingers, which then requires warming them up again and again. There must always be time for this! We take turns leading each day. One wears light clothes and moves all day, while the belayer wears his warmest down clothes to survive a day on the wall.

"During the climb, we go through several chimneys and overhangs that are too wide for our six cams, forcing us to do some real acrobatics and reach for the black magic of climbing. After passing the second visible strip of black rock, Pawel [Haldas] pushes on to the demanding A3 pitch. I can hear the rumbling flakes and see thin slabs stuck to the wall, and I am standing directly underneath them! I feel like a condemned man under the guillotine.

"So we decided to use some bat hooks to reach safer formations. This pitch took Pawel a good couple of hours in silence. He climbed in terrible wind and spindrift. He was extremely brave, I was proud of him. Thanks to this progress...we had the chance to climb to the summit the next day, on the last day of good weather."

Summit day

"We woke up at 5 am to an amazing day, a real reward: windless and seemingly warmer than usual. I sped off and led two long, exposed A1/C1 pitches to the top of the wall. It was beautiful! On leaving the wall, we untied ourselves, and after another few dozen meters, we stood at the summit."

"The icebergs below us trapped in the frozen fiord looked insane...It's hard to describe what we felt, what we saw. This moment was composed of many brief moments from the past days, months, and life. It is impossible to describe."

They named their new line Fram, after Fridtjof Nansen's famous polar ship. The wall is locally known as Oqatssut, and the route's details are as follows: 700m, 17 pitches, M5, A3, C2, VI Big Wall 10-24.02. It was, the climbers say, the first big wall winter climb in Greenland.

A rapid descent

The descent the following day from their bivouac site was a race against the weather. The forecast predicted 110kph winds. Luckily, the climbers made it back down at noon, just in time for an Inuit hunter they were dealing with to pick them up and drive them back to Uummannaq.

One hour later, "the ice cracked and began to turn into a thick soup. In the evening, the wind hit with full force. We can't imagine what would have happened if we hadn't made it."

Tomaszewski said that over the following days, most of the ice around the walls of Stor Oen (Big Island) disappeared. Western Greenland gets a spur of warm water upwellings from the Gulf Stream, and changes can happen quickly.

"The thought kept running through my mind that a one-day delay might have resulted in us being cut off from the world for longer than we would have liked," he said. "We were extremely lucky."

As for Oqatssut, the climbers warn it is brittle and could prove quite risky in summer. "However, it is still worth examining it closely," they added. "There are quite a few interesting places for new routes."

There are more details and pictures on Tomaszewski's Facebook page.

Twenty-six days had passed without news from Marcin Tomaszewski and Pawel Haldas on their winter Greenland expedition. Finally, we received a text from them yesterday with a photo showing the line of a climbing route straight up a huge rock wall. Clearly, the guys had found the winter El Dorado they sought.

Moving by snowmobile over the frozen ocean from the town of Ummaannaq to the nearby islands, they pick a huge vertical wall they described as Greenland's El Capitan, and prepared to climb in -36ºC temperatures. Since then, there had been no further reports -- just climbing.

Other than the new route map, there are no details yet. Tomaszewski only said that they were both okay and back in a warm place, presumably Ummaannaq. On social media, they promised to send a report soon. They included some amazing photos that tell a story of their own. Below, some examples.

Legendary rock climber, BASE jumper, and Yosemite speed master Ammon McNeely (52) has died in an accident near Moab, Utah.

As Gripped Magazine reported, McNeely fell from a cliff. No further details are known at the moment, except that it was not a climbing-related accident.

McNeely was one of the best big-wallers in the world. His speed climbs on the most difficult routes and walls were known worldwide. He also was a much-loved figure within the climbing and BASE jumping communities.

McNeely survived two serious BASE jumping accidents around Moab in 2013 and 2017. After the second one, part of one leg had to be amputated.

"I would rather live 40 years of excitement and fun and exhilaration than 80 years of la-de-da-de-da boring," he said once.

On Sunday, Poland's Marcin Tomaszewski and Pavel Haldas head to Uummannaq, Greenland to open a new route on the cliffs near this west coast village. It's an old-fashioned expedition, with a lot of unknowns and done in good Polish style, in midwinter.

"According to our information, we are the first team to climb in Greenland in winter," Tomaszewski told ExplorersWeb. "It's really exciting."

First, the climbers will do a reconnaissance ski around the islands of Agpad and Stor Oen (Big Island), looking for the right place to climb. Tomaszewski already set a new route on Agpad Island in 2017, as part of a larger team.

"There are seven walls on the island and none of them showed any human footprints," he recalls. "The rock in the area was quite fragile, but I expect conditions will be better in winter, with the routes iced-up. Stor Oen's cliffs, as far as I know, have not been climbed yet, and we have some ideas about potential routes of high technical difficulty."

Once they pick their goal, the pair will climb capsule-style, with a portaledge.

Winter is the future

Over the years, Tomaszewski has specialized in off-season big-wall climbing, which he sees as the future of technical climbing.

He has opened winter routes on Baffin Island's Polar Sun Spire and Norway's Troll Wall. Last year, he changed the game with Fabian Bielecki, by opening a route on Uli Biaho Tower, in Pakistan's Karakoram.

"We chose the tower's North Face, totally without sun, and climbed in December when the days are the shortest," he said. He pointed out that even in December, south faces are milder, like the European Alps in winter.

It might seem that Tomaszewski is purposely adding to the difficulties. "Ours is an exploration expedition in the full sense of the word," he admits. "This way of exploring the world has fascinated me since I was a child."

First-time partners

Tomaszewski has not climbed with Pawel Haldas before, but their backstory is interesting.

"Climbing together for the first time will certainly be an expedition within the expedition for both of us," Tomaszewski said. "However, we both have a positive attitude toward life and people...He is a great ice climber and a mentally strong person."

Haldas was supposed to be part of the Karakoram winter team last year, but his visa was rejected at the last minute because it lacked some papers related to COVID.

The climbers met in quite an unusual way. In 1995, Tomaszewski opened a very difficult winter route on Kazalnica Mięguszowiecka, one of the hardest walls in the Tatras. "Despite several attempts over 25 years, no one had been able to repeat it," he said.

So he threw out a challenge: a case of beer to whoever did. And in 2020, Pawel Haldas, Damian Bielecki, and Marius Fedorowicz succeeded. "They got their beer and we've gone on trips together since then."

One elegant new route on Torre Trieste — a rarely climbed, hulking limestone tower on Mount Civetta in the Dolomites — would be cause for celebration. But when two accomplished groups of climbers both put up a route at the same time in the same place, well, that's worth pausing for some details.

Alessandro Bau, Alessandro Beber, and Nicola Tondini's "Enigma" is a 28-pitch climb on the south face of the tower. According to Bau, the three climbers created the line between September and early November.

"From the first ledge, the rock is superb, and I dream of the spring to go back for the one push," the Italian guide wrote on Instagram.

 

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A post shared by Alessandro Baù (@ale.bau.mountainguide)

"A great adventure on a great wall with great friends," Nicola Tondini added in a post of his own.

 

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A post shared by nicola tondini (@tondininicola)

Meanwhile, climbers Simon Gietl, Vittorio Messini, and Matthias Wurzer were putting up a route of their own. According to Planetmountain, Gietl, Messini, and Wurzer's 20-pitch climb originates from the same starting place as two of the earliest routes on the formation: "Carlesso-Sandri" and "Cassn-Ratti." Those lines went up in 1934 and 1935, respectively.

The website says that the two parties were a little surprised to find each other on the wall. In the end, they "managed to work well together and encouraged each other to complete the lines."

Well done, boys!

Three Swiss climbers just freed a massive new route in India on a wall that struck them (justifiably) as similar to Yosemite's El Capitan.

Stephan Siegrist , Jonas Schild, and Andy Schnarf have established a new 350m route on Kirti-Nose rock in the Indian state of Uttarakhand. They named the 10-pitch 7b, A3 route "Between Two Parties".

Apparently, the route is named "after a legendary party with brothers Thomas and Alex Huber and Tad McCrea" Siegrist wrote on Instagram.

But this massive rock wasn't initially in the climbers' plans. They'd arrived in Uttarakhand to climb a different and taller peak that they refrained from naming. However, the region's monsoon season proved much more destructive than usual. It caused dangerous floods and avalanches throughout India and Nepal.

 

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Una publicación compartida por Stephan Siegrist (@stephansiegrist)

In early October, for example, an avalanche occurred on Mount Draupadi Ka Danda-II. So far, 26 bodies have been recovered and three more trainees remain missing. The mountain is located just 25km from the base camp of the Swiss team.

"The monsoon was unusually long this year, and it quickly became clear that mountaineering and climbing would not go according to plan," Siegrist wrote. "The large amounts of new snow caught us by surprise, and facing the increasing avalanche risk, we had to accept that after four weeks of anticipation, our main target would, unfortunately, remain unclimbed."

While waiting in base camp at the unknown mountain, "a beautiful face caught our eyes," Siegrist said. The wall rose for 400m and had an "astonishing resemblance" to El Capitan, he said.

So the Swiss climbers decided to embrace the unknown and try for something entirely different from the objective that brought them to India in the first place.

Climbing the Kirti-Nose

Having found a new objective, the Swiss climbers started preparing to tackle the mountain's accessible south-facing wall.

Stephan Siegrist, Jonas Schild, Andy Schnarf have established a First Route on unnamed and unclimbed mt 4,950m, Uttarakhand, India
Since this pillar has a similarity with the Nose on El Captain and located on Kirti Glacier, they named pillar "Kirti-Nose"https://t.co/fxWtppoEGb pic.twitter.com/Wnxmu5TfE3

— 4sport.ua (@4sportua) November 11, 2022

Its southern exposure meant the face dried quickly in the sunshine, 4sport reported. With the summit altitude at about 5,050m above sea level, it seemed a perfect project to avoid the worst of monsoon conditions.

With a brief four-day weather window, they committed to completing the new route as fast as possible. They named the line "Kirti-Nose" for its resemblance to El Capitan's most famous route and its proximity to the Kirti Glacier.

The climbers followed a high-quality crack system for the first 150m of the route. Then it turned more difficult, with fragile rock and uncertain terrain. The team discovered old equipment from previous expeditions to climb the face, though the gear seemed at least 20-30 years old, 4sport wrote.

Ultimately, the route finished with another 120m of stellar climbing, and the party could claim a new big wall route in India's Garhwa region.

But when Siegrist posted on Instagram about the achievement, he only described the route briefly before acknowledging the tragedy on Mount Draupadi Ka Danda-II, which they didn't know about until returning home to Switzerland.

"Hard to find the right words for this," Siegrist wrote. "We wish the relatives and friends a lot of strength and confidence in the difficult hours."

Last month, American Alex Honnold and Hazel Findlay of the UK made the first ascent of Ingmikortilaq, a huge granite-gneiss monolith in Eastern Greenland.

Honnold and Findlay climbed the north-facing wall via the northeast ridge within five days. On this 1,140m wall, they fought subzero temperatures, loose rock, and storms. They had to access the climb directly from the cold fiord waters.

"It's definitely one of the biggest first ascents I've ever done, and one of the most stressful because of how dangerous the climbing was," Honnold said.

Without a doubt, this was an impressive climb of a huge cliff. But it raises an interesting question: Should this be considered a big wall or a mountain in the form of a monolith? Honnold believes it is more a mountain than a true big wall.

What makes a big-wall climb?

What's the difference? As big-wall climbers John Long and John Middendorf wrote in their book Big Walls, there is no precise definition to automatically qualify a cliff as a big wall. Any chunk of steep, mostly vertical rock that's high enough is a candidate.

A basic definition of big-wall climbing is a multi-day rock climbing requiring mainly artificial techniques to ascend multiple pitches on very steep, highly technical rock faces, typically vertical walls.

"As opposed to free climbing, artificial or direct aid climbing entails the mechanical, mentally taxing, and sometimes perilous task of ascending steep rock via strings of weight-bearing equipment fitted, slotted, and hammered into the rock," Long and Middendorf wrote. However, a big-wall climb may also contain some sections where the climbers have to free climb.

Big-wall climber Chris MacNamara wrote in his book How to Big Wall Climb that "Big walls are all about vertical exposure; climbing and sleeping with thousands of feet of air below you and thousands of feet of rock above you. There is nothing else like this."

An interesting debate

A few years ago, on Mountain Project's big-wall and aid-climbing forum, there was an interesting discussion: What exactly is a big wall? Most agreed that the height needed to be at least 450m or more and that a climber had to spend more than one day on a practically vertical wall, aid climbing, on a multi-pitch route.

However, others noted that some traditional big-wall routes were now being climbed in a day, and even free climbed, and therefore the definition became less clear. However, that shouldn't change its original meaning, where the keywords are: steep, vertical, rock climbing, artificial aid, portaledge and hauling system, multi-pitch, aided climb, and two or more days to complete the route.  It doesn't matter that some climbers managed to ascend certain big walls in free climb or even a free solo.

One climber added that he had climbed El Capitan a couple of dozen times, sometimes in a day, sometimes in multiple days: "I count all of them as a climb of the big wall."

Confusingly, some commenters tried to draw a distinction between a "bigwall" and a "big wall", stating that you can climb a big wall fast, but a bigwall is very slow to ascend. Another suggested that you could define a big wall as a steep rock wall of grade IV or greater. These tall or steeper faces have few ledges and small cracks.

Whatever the definition, for some climbers, size matters. Though any near vertical rock wall longer than 50m will do, the pursuit of the world's largest big walls is part of the allure.

The name game

What is a wall?

Every mountain has different faces.  These faces can include a buttress, ridge, wall, pillar, etc.

When the massive, compact character of part of the the face is evident, we call it a wall.  For example, the East Face of 6,344m Siula Grande in the Andes. The first climbers to ascend the East Face of Siula of this "Touching the Void" peak were Max Bonniot and Didier Jourdain in 2016, via the East Pillar/Southeast Ridge.

In July 2022, two Catalan climbers, Marc Toralles and Bru Busom, climbed the East Wall of Siula Grande for the first time (Anima de Corall route). Their overall climb is considered alpine style, although the difficult first part was in big-wall style.

And what about the Rupal Face, the Shining Wall of Gasherbrum IV, the North Face of the Eiger or the Matterhorn, or Masherbrum's West Face? They can't be considered big walls, from the point of view of big-wall climbing.

For example, El Capitan, or the Grand Voyage route on the Great Trango Tower, are pure rock, and they are different from those huge walls that include mixed terrain, where the use of ice tools is necessary, as in the case of the Shining Wall and the others above. There, the climbing is alpine-style, not big-wall style. The wall is not vertical, it's not pure rock-climbing, and the tools are different too.

The late David Lama once described Masherbrum as like the Eiger, with Cerro Torre above.  Certainly, the upper section may require big-wall climbing techniques.

Big wall, big-wall, or bigwall?

Try to wrap your head around this: While all bigwalls or big walls are big (huge) walls, not all big (huge) walls are a bigwall (or a big wall) for the reasons we mentioned above.

As a matter of writing style, big-wall climbing is usually written with a hyphen, while "big wall" as a noun does not have a hyphen. But climbers often write bigwall as something specific to climbing, while "big wall" means something more general.

ExplorersWeb asked John Middendorf and Damien Gildea about the terminology.  Middendorf preferred "bigwall" but admitted that it was a made-up term. Gildea said that "'big wall' is not wrong but is a bit general."

Does it matter which wall is the largest?

John Middendorf points out that people like to use superlatives when talking about big walls: tallest, hardest, longest, most overhanging. "But that is not the point," he says. He prefers not to make comparisons and believes that it is not a competition.

Middendorf and Xaver Bongard climbed the incredibly large Grand Voyage route on Great Trango Tower in 1992. It is one of the largest big-wall climbs ever completed. Speaking to ExplorersWeb, Middendorf was modest and careful not to over-hype their climb.

"I'm not sure I am happy saying that my route was the biggest," he told ExplorersWeb. "I think it is correct to say that Great Trango is the biggest overhanging/vertical chunk of rock in the world, as I have not seen anything that matches it. [Rival candidates] like Polar Sun Spire and Thor, are not as big."

Middendorf explained that they weren't climbing for a record or because of the length of the route, but to have fun.

Middendorf is technically right. Their Grand Voyage route took in 1,340m of exposed big-wall climbing on what might be the world’s biggest wall, but the Norwegian route (the Route of No Return) is longer, at over 1,520m.

Of course, the Norwegians did not finish their climb on No Return, suffering a fatal fall during their descent.

According to Middendorf, some walls in the fiords of eastern Baffin Island may be even larger than Great Trango Tower, but most of their bulk are underwater.

What makes big-wall climbing different?

Difficulty

"Big wall climbing is not about summit glory, pulling off a single hard move, or savoring the rush of adrenaline, although all three of those things will happen," McNamara wrote in How to Big Wall Climb. "The experience is much more complex and rich. You don't flirt briefly with gravity as you might while BASE jumping or doing a hard single-pitch climb. You live with the pull of gravity and daunting exposure 24 hours a day."

It is a game of patience, where resistance and mental strength are important. A climber sometimes spends several days or even weeks on a wall. Depending on its location, you may be a long way from help if an accident happens. If you sleep on a portaledge, you can't drop anything into the void.

Tackling a big-wall climb alone heightens the commitment still further.

Strategy

Calculating enough food and drink for the team during such an open-ended climb is vital. "Big walls require putting together a lot of unfamiliar skills and logistics," McNamara wrote.

Climbers often get in trouble because they have made simple mistakes in food arithmetic or because adverse weather has led to long waits on the wall. This happened to the Norwegians on Great Trango Tower. Short of food and water, two of the four decided to turn back before reaching the top, so that their teammates could advance. But perhaps it was their salvation. The two summiters later died on the descent.

Two people need a minimum of 30 litres of water for five days on a big wall and they have to schlep it all up with them. McNamara points out two keys: Keep it simple and master the basics of aid-climbing. This sort of climbing is never about speed. It's about climbing efficiently, which is different.

Conclusion

You could argue that big-wall climbing is one of the most honest forms of climbing, together with free climbing and free soloing. Trackers aren't needed, there are no false summits, no supplemental oxygen, no confusing stories, and no need for detective work based on witness testimonies. You can be seen on the huge wall, like small beetles, moving up the granite. You top out or you don't. There is no in-between.

There's nothing quite like watching elite climbers wax poetic about routes beyond the ability of mere mortals.

So it goes with the latest climbing documentary from Arc'teryx, which follows a good-natured duo ascending one of the Alps' hardest routes.

Technically speaking, the WoGü route stretches for 10 mega-hard pitches in the centre of the spectacular Rätikon range of Switzerland. It's a 350m, 8c climb that's as demanding as it is beautiful.

And the poetry? WoGü is "extreme." It's a "dream and it's an illusion."

That's Nina Caprez, who climbs the insane route with Cedric Lachat. They are elite climbers, long-time accomplices, and "greater-than-life characters," according to the video description.

Caprez and Lachat, who call themselves former lovers turned climbing buddies, have no problem working together.

"It's just like before," Lachat says of their relationship when climbing. "It's super efficient."

WoGü's limestone wall offers mostly small handholds, microscopic foot holds, and sustained climbing at an elite level.

But though he's clearly stoked for the route, Lachat barely seems deterred by the difficulty.

"The objective is simple," he says. "I'm going to crush it in one day: period."

Linking up 10 brutal pitches

It's impossible not to feel endeared by Lachat's boyish description of this brutally difficult route.

You start off following a grassy ledge to get to the start, he explains. Then there's a pitch of super-slabby 6c climbing with just three bolts. That's followed by a "super committed" 7a slab. Then a grueling 8c pitch with a "nasty crimp" before a dyno to a not-great two-finger pocket.

Then there's a "very hard" 7c section where Lachat adorably explains the technical wizardry of his partner.

"This is where Nina puts in a heel hook," he says. "She does an alien open-hip move that looks like a stroll for her while I have to be pulling with all I have."

That's hard enough, but the climb isn't over. The two climbers then have to send an 8b+ section that's "super hard" and nothing but tiny crimps.

"Crimps, crimps, crimps, crimps, crimps!" he says.

Then there's another 8b section, this time in a tight dihedral unlike anything else that Lachat has ever seen. That's followed by an 8c traverse with a hand switch that serves as the crux of the route.

For the finish, they must then climb an 8a+ pitch followed by a 7c. Both of which Lachat says he "did not find to be too hard."

Camera crew included

WoGü also offers humorous and insightful perspectives on the day-to-day work of big-wall climbing — from both sides of the camera.

"When we get on the wall on the first day, we are petrified," cameraman Julian Christe says. "The first pendulum when you let go of a hold — it stops your breathing. Then little by little, you get used to it."

Big-wall adventures like these offer emotional highs and lows like nothing else. Perhaps it's the raw excitement of the climbers involved, but their poetry seems to have rubbed off on the video's marketing team.

"Deciphered, decrypted, WoGü no longer remains a mysterious hieroglyph carved in limestone, but turns into an open book," the description says.

As Lachat and Caprez stand on the summit, praising each other's performance, it's hard not to feel swept up by their obvious affection for climbing, and for each other.

There is little shelter on the huge faces of the world's best big-wall climbs. When you finish a section, another one might appear that you had not imagined. You may have seen a photo from a previous climb and be perplexed when you reach the foot of the wall and the reality looks totally different.

In the Karakoram, above 6,000m, you must take on freezing temperatures, a lack of oxygen, avalanches, wind, and storms. Big-wall climbing tests your knowledge, your skills, your assertiveness, and your mental strength.

This article looks back at the first big-wall climbers to take on Great Trango Tower, culminating with John Middendorf and Xaver Bongard's epic 1992 route, The Grand Voyage.

The first ascent of Great Trango Tower

Great Trango Tower, part of the Trango Towers, lies north of the Baltoro Glacier in the Baltoro Muztagh subrange of the Karakoram. Great Trango has four summits: central (the main summit), east, west, and south. All exceed 6,200m. The towers offer some of the most difficult big-wall climbing in the world.

The 6,286m central summit was first climbed on July 21, 1977. American climbers Kim Schmitz, Galen Rowell, John Roskelley, Dennis Hennek, and James Morrissey ascended a route that started on the west side and ended at the top of the south face.

Galen Rowell, always searching

Rowell was best known as an incredible mountain photographer but he was also a great climber. In his book Mountain Light, he wrote that he might never have made the first ascent of Great Trango had it not been for a photo he took two years earlier. In 1975, while on the approach trek to K2, he awoke to see the Trango Towers, brilliantly lit by the morning sun.

"Dawn light illuminated the peaks through the exceptionally clear air that follows thunderstorms, while a Beethoven concerto played on a stereo. Without even getting out of the bag, I shot image after image of the snow-rimmed towers and spurs, all of them still unclimbed," he wrote.

The north pillar to the east summit

In the summer of 1984, a Norwegian team made the first ascent via the north pillar to the east summit (6,231m). Their route took them up the most impressive and striking vertical buttress of the whole massif and was quite the mountaineering feat. Unfortunately, their climb was not all smooth sailing.

Hans Christian Doseth, Stein P. Aasheim, Dag Kolsrud, and Finn Daehlie saw a photo of the impressive wall in a 1983 edition of Mountain Magazine. "Like many other projects...the idea was conceived at home in the living room," Kolsrud wrote.

When the Norwegians arrived, they set up their base camp in a small, flat, sandy hollow between moraine ridges and the mountainside.

They didn't know much about the pillar beforehand. They only had three or four photos taken from the Baltoro, in which only the upper part of the wall was visible. The massive lower section is only visible once you hike onto the Dunge Glacier.

The Norwegians were amazed at the unbelievably elegant line, a beautiful initial buttress more than 900m high leading to a headwall of more than 600m.

Pushing the vertical limit

Rated A4, the wall pushed them to their limit. The four Norwegians took a long time to overcome the lower part of the wall because of bad weather and the weight of their gear. But they knew that the greatest challenge would be the 500m still to come.

They were now low on food, and there was still a long way to climb. Kolsrud suggested that two of the four go down (completing only 90% of the route), while the other two push on.

But at first, no one wanted to leave. For a couple of days, they discussed the issue. While they debated, they advanced further up the route. Finally, they came to a point where the crack they were climbing opened to an off-width of such difficulty that, because of a lack of protection and general exhaustion, it was impossible to free climb.

They knew that this was the moment to make a decision. Daelhie and Doseth would continue to the summit, Kolsrud and Aasheim would head down.

Five days after Kolsrud and Aasheim made it safely back down, they watched their companions summit through binoculars. Then, Daelhie and Doseth began to rappel the headwall before disappearing out of sight behind a shielding ridge.

Kolsrud and Aasheim thought that everything was under control, and both left Base Camp. Aasheim returned to Islamabad and Kolsrud traveled to a nearby village to run some errands.

No return

When Kolsrud returned to Base Camp, there was no sign of Daelhie and Doseth. Scouring the wall with binoculars turned up nothing. He was certain that they had suffered an accident. Three weeks later, a Pakistan Army helicopter arrived and located two lifeless bodies lying in the snow at the foot of the wall. They could not pick up their bodies because of bad weather. By the time they returned in better conditions, there was no trace of the two deceased Norwegians.

Perhaps an avalanche had ripped them from the wall, or a piece of protection came loose from its anchor, causing a fall of more than 1,500m. Since the tragedy, this route has been called No Return.

"The tragic Norwegian effort proved to be a milestone of style and commitment in big-wall climbing that paved the way for future landmarks," American climber John Middendorf wrote in an article for the American Alpine Club.

1992 Swiss-American expedition

In the summer of 1992, a Swiss-American team decided to take on the 1,500m of smooth granite on the east face of Great Trango. Since the Norwegian tragedy, no one had been able to repeat the route, either directly, by a variant, or via a new route to the east summit.

The team consisted of Swiss climbers Xaver Bongard, Ueli Buhler, and Francois Studemann, American John Middendorf, and photographer Ace Kvale.

On June 24, 1992, the team made its base camp near the Dunge Glacier.

But the group soon split. Buhler and Studemann opted to climb the Nameless Tower, while Middendorf and Bongard started planning a new route on the east face of Great Trango Tower.

Middendorf told Explorersweb that when scouting the line, they both saw the potential of the east wall. It was shorter than the 900m initial buttress of the Norwegian route, but steep and overhanging the whole way, full of emerging lines very similar to the right side of El Capitan. The overhanging wall then continued along a 200m tall summit pyramid.

Scouting the line

Middendorf, with a wealth of experience on big walls, studied the line for a week with binoculars. In between, they ferried loads up to a small camp a few hundred metres above the glacier. He felt that there was a good line there, one that only needed a few dozen rivets and bolts.

The upper headwall had two distinct lines on its buttress. The Norwegians had taken the left one, facing east. It was a smart move, as that route received more sun. But Middendorf and Bongard wanted to do something new and chose the right, north facing-line. Both of these lines are cracks on either side of a gargantuan 600m flake that leans against the upper headwall.

After 20 days of planning, it was time to begin.

Ali Baba's Couloir

The approach to the base of the wall was very dangerous. The glacier was full of crevasses, and two seracs sent down avalanches of ice and snow. Above the second serac, a huge couloir that they dubbed Ali Baba's Couloir led along the base of the east face to the start of their chosen line.

During the warmer hours of the day, the couloir was very active, full of avalanches and ice falls. So the two climbers opted to climb at night. But even in the wee hours, piles of ice and rock still cascaded down regularly.

At one point Bongard called out, "Get out of the gully now, in a minute you will die!” Subsequently, a huge avalanche came down that would have wiped Middendorf out, had he not moved. Through this minefield, they carried all their food, water, and equipment for the new route.

Starting the climb

On July 13, 1992, they spent their first night on the wall. They hung in a two-man portaledge designed by Middendorf for the climb. They climbed in the purest and most committed way, with only six ropes for climbing and hauling. They moved up in capsule-style and fixed rope above each camp until they decided it was safe and timely to move each camp higher.

Many of the belays were in near-suicidal positions because of ice. Moving between their camps required all their skill, strength, and brains. Mistakes didn't bear thinking about. They also had to ration the water they had, at least until they could reach the upper part of the wall where they could collect snow to melt.

Dehydration is very dangerous in the mountains. If a climber runs out of water, they get tired quickly and struggle to think clearly. Making mistakes becomes much more likely. "It was a full-time job melting snow," Middendorf recalled.

They named the most hazardous section of the climb "Gollum’s Gully", a 150m long corner with a lot of avalanche danger.  A few small avalanches struck Bongard and Middendorf at various spots on the wall. They also saw some massive ones not too far away. This hazardous section began to the left of the Norwegian route. Halfway up, at the top of the snow ledge, they climbed along the Norwegian route for three rope lengths. Then they continued to the right, to the summit.

A storm around a portaledge

On July 25, a big storm trapped them for three days. On the one hand, Middendorf and Bongard were grateful for a break. Water was easy to make, as their ledge was covered with ice and slush. They still had fuel for five days, so they were not worried.

The wind buffeted the portaledge, which flexed but held up. It is almost impossible to prevent a portaledge from moving during a storm, let alone at 6,000m in the Karakoram on an exposed wall. The loss of any essential piece of gear, whether a glove or a boot, could have spelled the end of the climb, or even death.

Middendorf told Explorersweb that every day he reckoned that there was a good chance something really bad could happen. That it could be "lights out" at any moment. But they stayed busy and determined. It was a lot of hard work, long 16-hour days. They never felt recovered, but part of the strategy of big-wall climbing at altitude is to keep a good pace and deal with the challenges as they arise. "You don't have much time to get scared," Middendorf explained.

The second ascent of the east summit

Bongard and Middendorf summited on July 28, 1992. There was a final pitch of mixed ice and rock, then a short snow walk to the summit. They found one of the Norwegian's pitons that had been used for rappelling. This proved that the Norwegians had also topped out on the east summit of Great Trango.

Middendorf recalls that the most important thing was that they both had fun. "On a steep wall, there is a lot of opportunity for monkeying around. We were both pretty proud to show each other our work on lead while the second cleaned the pitches. But mostly, we were just aligned with a goal of climbing that wall with as little impact as possible, with minimum drilled holes, and as efficiently as possible."

Bongard and Middendorf became the first climbers to return from the east summit alive.

The finished route

On the summit, "the first thought that came into my mind was 'What a view!' Then 'How the hell are we going to get off this mountain?' The overwhelming feeling is very transitory and probably cannot be fully remembered except in spirit," Middendorf recalled.

Their route, parallel to the Norwegian route, consisted of technical aid climbing, some pitches of free climbing, vertical ice climbing, and rotten aid and free climbing. They needed 44 rappels and three days to complete the section they named Gollum's Gully, all the while avoiding constant avalanches.

They named their route The Grand Voyage, Grade VII, 5.10, A4+, WI3. They climbed 1,340m from the base to the summit, in 33 pitches, with a 60m lead rope.

John Middendorf still designs climbing gear for big walls and is active in climbing gear research on Bigwallgear.com.

Xaver Bongard died on April 15, 1994, during a 300m BASE jump near his hometown of Interlaken. Jumping from his favorite cliff, both his main and reserve parachutes failed.

"I miss him all the time. He was an amazing individual, his wild sense of fun was contagious," Middendorf said of his friend.

From April 19 and April 21, 2022, U.S. climbers Anna Pfaff and Priti Wright climbed the challenging 1,200m Harvard Route on Mount Huntington in Alaska.

However, after the successful ascent, Pfaff has been dealing with extreme frostbite on her feet. Over the last month, her toes have not improved and Pfaff will now face the amputation of five toes this week.

The climb

Wright and Pfaff found the climbing harder than expected. It was early in the season on Mount Huntington, and the pair were the first to summit. The climb and descent took them three days.

After ascending the Harvard Route, Pfaff and Wright returned to base camp down the West Face Couloir.

"I pulled my boots off as soon as I arrived in the tent and changed out of my socks and clothes. At that time, I noticed my right foot was swollen and whitish," recalls Pfaff. The whitish color is the first sign of frostbite.

Frostbite

Pfaff, a trauma nurse by profession who has completed several difficult expeditions, knew she had to warm up her feet as soon as possible. She kept her feet in her sleeping bag and felt relief during dinner.

Pfaff had been wearing an excellent pair of boots. She changed socks at night and hydrated during the climb. Pfaff says that her feet never felt extremely cold, and the two climbers made no obvious mistakes. However, the temperature dropped noticeably during the night as they descended to Base Camp.

They told Talkeetna Air Taxi (TAT), the operator that provides logistical support in the area, that they needed to leave the mountain. However, the weather worsened and there was no visibility for the plane to reach the glacier.

"My heart sank when I realized that another night on the glacier was imminent," remembers Pfaff. This second night was even colder.

When the two women checked Pfaff's feet again in the morning, they were shocked by the state of her frostbitten toes, especially those on her right foot. The plane finally managed to pick them up from the glacier on April 23, and Pfaff was rushed to hospital.

Could anything be done?

When a vascular surgeon first examined her in the Anchorage ER, he told her that nothing could be done. She was too late to receive blood-thinning meds.

However, with the help of fellow climbers Priti Wright, Andres Marin, and also Wright's partner, Jeff Wright, Pfaff was treated in the Harborview of Seattle burn unit. Later, in Louisville, Colorado, she began receiving Hyperbaric Oxygen Treatment (HBOT). The treatment, still classified as experimental in the US, has been shown to help reactivate and improve circulation in similar cases.

Doctors told Pfaff that the mild cold injuries she had sustained through more than 15 years of alpine climbing had likely contributed to what she was dealing with now. Even light frostbite to your extremities might lead to worse consequences during subsequent frostbites.

Pfaff has now received several HBOT sessions, consisting of two hours of treatment twice a day. The temporary side effects are not nice, affecting her hearing and vision. Coping with this process has not been easy. Pfaff describes these weeks as an emotional rollercoaster.

Necrosis

At first, Pfaff noticed improvement. However the injury is very serious, and when the necrosis is deep or comprehensive, not much can be done.

A few days ago, Pfaff stated on social media that this week was her "last dance" with her toes. The climbing community has expressed its support and empathy for Pfaff, who is one of the best rock and ice climbers in the world.

In 2018, Hansjorg Auer planned to lead a group of fellow athletes deep into the Baspa Valley of the Indian Himalaya. He died in an avalanche in the Canadian Rockies, along with David Lama and Jess Roskelley. A year later, North Face athletes Matty Hong, Jacopo Larcher, Siebe Vanhee, Iker Pou, and Eneko Pou did the trip to honor the dream of their friend.

No one aim

The expedition had no single aim. They were simply there to explore what the valley had to offer.

All five athletes revel in the exploration of a new place. "You can feel the energy from the valley,” one says.  The beautifully shot film showcases the richness of this part of the Himachal Pradesh and what it offers the climbing community.

Part of what makes this trip so successful is the attitude of the climbers. Each day, they set out to find something new, but do not pressure themselves. A number of times, they break into smaller groups. Matty Hong, the final addition to the team, admits that this type of trip is new to him. He usually focuses on sport climbing and bouldering, and big-wall challenges in an exotic location pushed him out of his comfort zone.

As the title suggests, the film explores the need to adapt to the unknown and conditions you can’t control. Weather typically dictated their activities. The film shows the five take on granite faces in snow and rain. They move seamlessly between single-pitch sport climbing and big-wall climbs.

Open-toe climbing shoe

Iker Pou broke his toe shortly before leaving on the trip and at first, was unable to climb. Still, he was determined to go. As soon as his toe healed a little, he cut open his climbing shoes and climbed open-toe style. Throughout the trip, he put up a lot of new routes, but one was particularly important to the Pou brothers. That was their first ascent of a 7c+/560m route they called Latin Brother, in honor of Hansjorg Auer.

While they opened Latin Brother, Hong, Larcher, and Vanhee were on the other side of the valley on their own first ascent, the 7b/450m Toby’s Shipwreck.

“It’s not just about first ascents or finding rocks and climbing them," Hong said later. "It’s about stepping into the unknown.”

The 19-minute film gets this point across.