Noshaq, North Face. The Konstanz Hindu Kush Expedition was made up of Dr. Wolfgang Heydenreich, Matthias Avirovic, Hans Christoph Engele, Helmut Rüdele and me as leader. We approached Base Camp at the foot of the western buttress with 27 porters on August 1 and 2. For acclimatization we climbed Korposhte Yakhi (18,688 feet), Rakhe Daros (18,668 feet) and Aspe Safed I (21,350 feet). We then ran camps up the west buttress of Noshaq: Camp I at 17,725 feet, Camp II at 19,700 feet and Camp III at 22,300 feet. Two attempts to advance beyond Camp III failed in a ten-day period of bad weather. When the weather improved on August 23, Avirovic, Engele, Rüdele and I began the final try on our new route, the north face. From Camp III we had a two-mile descending traverse along the northern slopes of Noshaq’s western summit to the Darban plateau at 21,325 feet. These slopes were gentle at first and then got to be from 45° to 50°. Conditions were good, but this could have been objectively bad under bad conditions. To save time we did not set up a Camp IV but started up the north face that same day at noon and bivouacked at 23,625 feet. The north face was mostly 45° to 50° with quite a lot of bare ice, not completely free from objective danger. On August 24 we emerged on the summit ridge between the western and main summits and continued on to the latter. We descended the normal west buttress route, in the course of which we found the body of one of the Americans, probably Sheldon Moomaw. We left Base Camp on August 29. Two of our members, who had frozen feet, had to be flown home.

Hubert Weinzierle, Deutscher Alpenverein