Kwangde, North Face Winter Ascent. From November 28 to December 3 David Breashears and I made the first ascent of the north face of Kwangde (6194 meters, 20,323 feet) above the village of Hungo. The face is 4500 feet high and comprised of tongues and smears of thin white ice over boiler-plate granite slabs. The average angle (taken from the Schneider map) is 65°, exceptionally steep for an ice route. In the morning we’d peek out of our Bat tents to see the sun rise over Makalu’s pink granite. During the day we could trace the trade route over the Nangpa La into Tibet. In the afternoon fingers of clouds crept up the valleys toward Cho Oyu, Everest and Lhotse. Supper was accompanied by alpine glow on the tip of Ama Dablam. We spent the fourth night hacking a cave from hard ice of an old cornice just below the summit. Inside the coffin-sized hole, we wondered if the wind would rip our home off the mountain, but we arrived on the summit early the next morning, convinced that we had completed what will become a hard modem classic climb. We descended in two days via the south face, over a notch in the southeast ridge, down its east face and finally around the toe of the northeast ridge to Hungo. The weather was good during the climb with daytime temperatures of 15°F and nighttime ones of —5° to — 10°F. Moderately high winds and spindrift early in the climb made us feel like salmon swimming upstream.

Jeff Lowe