Our hopes of taking my 4WD up Kwoiek Creek Forest Service Road were squashed by an impassable slide only a couple of hundred meters up the road. Seb Gulka and I were heading to the long alpine ridgeline that leads westward over four peaks (informa...
Mt. Habrich (1,792m) is located high above Squamish and is accessible either via the Sea to Sky Gondola, followed by a hike of about two hours on the Sky Pilot Valley Trail, or by hiking the Sea to Sky Trail to the upper gondola station, adding 90...
Alan Rousseau below the main north face of Jannu during the 2022 attempt. Rousseau made three trips to the mountain to succeed on a new route. Photo by Matt Cornell. On an especially hot and dusty day in 2020, Alan Rousseau and I were wor...
Italian climbers Alessandro Baù, Lorenzo D’Addario, Jerome Perruquet, and Francesco Ratti arrived at base camp at about 4,000m in the Miyar Valley during the middle of a high-pressure system in September. This was an opportunity not to be missed,...
The sprawling south face of Cerro Nora Oeste. Paolo Marazzi and Luca Schiera made the first ascent of the westernmost summit via a 900-meter route up the west ridge (near the left skyline). Photo: Paolo Marazzi. In November, Luca Schiera and...
In early November, Andres Bosch, Lucia Guichot, Nico Tapia, and I climbed the obvious gully in the middle of the southwest face of Punta Miller (1,930m, 46°25’46.3”S, 72°34’05.4”W), at the head of the Miller Valley. We drove from Puerto Sánchez a...
I’d been looking for something like this all these years, and it was right on my doorstep. I looked at it almost every day without seeing it—until August 2023. A START WITH GLITCHES Peter and I are sitting on the train from Thun, discussing the ...
In 2022, we made an attempt on the unclimbed northwest face of Ranrapalca (6,162m), but we’d barely reached its base before we retreated, exhausted. We had been active in the Cordillera Blanca for two months and found the ascent too difficult in o...
In late summer, the first known climbs were completed on the Great Rapids Ridge, a 70km-long system of granite domes and walls in the Kolyma Mountains of far eastern Siberia, an area better known for former Soviet gulags than for rock climbing. A ...
The east ridge of Flat Top descends east and then northeast toward the camera, as seen from the first camp above col camp on the ridge. Photo by Pete Finklaire. The first ascent of Flat Top was not documented in the AAJ, and other reports wer...
Flat Top (6,100m) from the north. (1) Start of the 1980 first ascent by the northeast and east ridges; a hidden couloir led to a col, above which the team climbed the ridge and left flank. (2) Tomorrow Is Another Day, the first ascent of the 1,4...
Mt. Dickey’s 5,000-foot east face, showing (1) Aim for the Bushes (Cornell-Marvell-Rousseau, 2023) and (2) Blood from the Stone (Easton-Steck, 2002). Other routes not shown. Photo by Matt Cornell. I kept my head down and stared into the ’sch...
The ice around me gleamed as I slid into my dry suit and trusty Crocs. I fashioned an improvised harness out of skinny Dyneema and tied in—it hardly seemed like real life as James slowly lowered me down steep ice into cobalt-blue water. I stretche...
For about the last decade, I’ve made a yearly pilgrimage to the Arctic north, where each winter I hope to squeeze some climbing into rare days off from ski guiding. The Nordland, more than anywhere else I’ve climbed, is a hard place for weather, c...
Patrick Tirler on the crack system of pitch 12 (VII-) on the northwest arête of Jamyang Ri. Photo by Mortiz Sigmund. The Rangtik Tokpo is surrounded by towering granite walls that can be reached in one to three hours walk from base camp. Mori...
Click here to download the comprehensive index for the American Alpine Journal (AAJ), indexing the key place names and people covered in every edition of the AAJ from 1929 to 2024. Some readers may find it helpful to scan or browse subjects in thi...
With its vertical, anvil-like shape, Stetind (1,392m) rises straight out of the ocean, about 80km southwest of Narvik, and for sailors it’s a well-known landmark. In 2002, Stetind was selected as Norway’s national mountain. Stetind has a climbing ...
Greg Boswell starting up The Horns of Segla on the north face of Segla, with the first-pitch offwidth above him. Photo by Hamish Frost. My wife and I visited Senja during a van tour around Norway in the summer of 2022, and I took a photo of t...
Approaching advanced base camp for White Sapphire (6,040m), the sharp peak in the center. The team had hoped to climb the big wall facing the camera, but an early winter storm prompted them to switch to the northwest couloir, left of the wall. F...
During the first modern survey of the Tatsienlu Massif, led by Arnold Heim in the 1930s, nine major peaks were named. Prior to 2023, seven had been summited, leaving only Yipingfeng (5,800m, 30°1’3.73”N, 102°2’27.81”E) and neighboring Erpingfeng (...