Mount Tiedemann, South Ridge, 1983. During five days in August 1983, Jim Nelson and I climbed the previously unascended south ridge of Tiedemann. We started up the Tiedemann-Asperity couloir one afternoon, and climbed the broken glacier to a bivouac on a sérac. The next morning Jim led a very steep and extremely dangerous pitch up the moat to get around an ice wall. We then climbed loose F3 to the notch between the two gigantic towers forming the lower south ridge. After 13 pitches—all but two on the west side of the crest—we turned the second tower. We bivouacked again, then continued along the ridge, turning a gendarme on the west, to the base of the summit mass. We climbed several thousand feet to the summit ridge up 45°-55° ice gullies. A storm forced us to bivouac on the summit ridge for two nights. On the fifth day, the wind dropped and the clouds left, and we did some of the finest climbing we’d ever done along the ridge to the top. We reversed the ridge back to the bivouac, descended to the Tiedemann-Asperity Col, and followed the couloir to camp on the Tiedemann Glacier. Grade V, F8, AO.

William Pilling