On July 7 I reached the summit of Lupghar Sar West (7,157m) via the previously untouched west face. (This peak was first climbed in 1979 via the southwest ridge.) Completely on my own, and after making some good acclimatization loops around base c...
Climbing in alpine style, Czech climbers Marek Holeček and Tomáš Petreček planned to attempt a new route on the Rupal Face to the right of the 2005 Anderson-House route on the Central Pillar. Bad weather and snowfall made this impractical, and whe...
Argentine climbers Lucas Alzamora, Carloncho Guerra, and Diego Nakamura visited northern Mozambique during September, inspired by photos of the granite domes there. Northern Mozambique has many rock walls, some up to 700m high, however the local c...
In early 2016 a friend and mountain guide from South Africa, Neil Margetts, sent me a photograph taken from a small plane of the northwest wall of Great Spitzkoppe. He had seen the photo on a friend’s Facebook page, and he was quick to spot the cl...
TIDES: A CLIMBER’S VOYAGE. Nick Bullock. Vertebrate Publishing, 2018. Paperback, 256 pages, £14.95.When I picked up Nick Bullock’s second book, Tides, which won the 2018 Banff Mountain Book Festival’s Mountain Literature Award, I wasn’t sure what ...
LIMITS OF THE KNOWN. David Roberts. Norton, 2018. Hardcover, 336 pages, $26.95.If I could choose a title for this book, I might change it to "No Limits of the Known,: such is the wide-ranging scope of David Roberts’ reflections.Roberts, who was an...
The high-quality, compact granite in Malawi is so impressive, it leaves one wondering why it has been largely ignored by climbers. The northwest face of Chambe in the Mulanje Massif looksa bit like two Half Domes stacked on top of each other, with...
IT HAD ALL gone wrong. I sat drinking beer in the Edinburgh evening sun, grumpy and frustrated about my flight to Canada the next day. I’d planned a dream trip to see my best friend and old climbing partner in Vancouver, and then, three weeks befo...
The Cordillera de la Viuda is a subrange of the Cordillera Central (see Alpine Journal 2000 for more details about the area). With many 5,000m peaks and moderate climbing, it is an interesting place for exploration and climbing. The highest summit...
From February 8–26, 2018, Rodrigo Lobo Villarroel (Bolivia) and I completed a trip to the Avellano Towers. We approached from Chile Chico up the Avellano Valley—this is the southeast approach, which is the more expensive but “inspiring” option. St...
In August, Argentines Griselda Moreno (leader), Ramiro García, Paula Miranda, and Lelo Saldaña made the first traverse of all the summits of Nevados de Famatina. This traverse was attempted unsuccessfully five times in the 1990s, and it was partic...
In January 2018, our three-woman team from the U.K., comprised of Michelle O’Loughlin, Freja Shannon, and me set off to explore the long and wild Avellano Valley, where the snaking Rio Avellano eventually meets its source: the striking Avellano To...
In October 2018, Chilean mountaineers Harry Brito, Camilo Hornauer, and I made the first ascents of Cerro Dalla Vedova (2,271m) and Cerro Stoppani (2,275m) in the eastern section of the Cordillera de Darwin. Cerro Dalla Vedova is located at the he...
THIS WAS THE THIRD season in a row with fairly poor weather and conditions. After having anomalously dry seasons in 2012, 2015, and 2016, it has come as a bit of a shock to go back to average Patagonia weather. The only extended windows of good we...
In February, Itai Cohen, Elaine Kennedy, and I made an ascent of the west ridge of Cerro Aguda (2,641m; 46°48'51.74"S, 73°09'36.18"W; also called Cerro Agudo or Aguja Aguda) on the eastern margin of the North Patagonian Icefield. The peak had been...
From September 25 to October 13, the French national women’s mountaineering team (ENAF), comprised of Florence Igier, Johanna Marcoz, Marion Pravin, and Maud Vanpoulle, along with two coaches, Gaël Bouquet des Chaux and Antoine Pêcher, completed a...
In December 2017, Australian climbers Colin Barton, Callum Hawkins, Paul Plank, Geoff Robb, Annette Skirka, Raymond Alfred Smith, Neil Thomas, and mountain guides Sören Kruse, Carlos Vasquez, and Steffen Welsch made the second known ascent of Cerr...
In the winter of 2006, during a plane flight to San Rafael Lagoon to begin the first north-south winter crossing of the Northern Patagonian Icefield, I saw through the window a huge mass of ice surrounded by impenetrable forests and a glacier that...
After four years of working in the Exploradores Valley, west of Puerto Río Tranquilo (toward the west end of Lago General Carerra), and always looking at these incredible and barely explored mountains, it seemed time to invest some effort to climb...
Paolo Marazzi and I set off from Italy on December 24, 2018. Once at Puerto Bertrand, we waited in vain for a gaucho to help transport our gear up the Rio Soler valley. In order not to waste the first window of good weather, we crossed Lake Bertra...