Several years ago, Tom Ruddy climbed an independent, direct line up the striking west face of Moro Rock, with hopes of completing an all-free ascent in the future. After several years of work, he had freed most of the route but moved away before p...
The North Sentinel is a tooth-shaped granite face on the north side of Kings Canyon, across from North Dome and below Grand Sentinel. With a straightforward approach, we were surprised it had not seen any previous attention from climbers. Over the...
Ushba is symbolic of the Caucasus. It is no surprise that this double-summited peak was an emblem of Soviet mountaineering clubs—and of Soviet mountaineering itself. There are many legends, songs, and stories connected with this harsh mountain. Th...
When Glenn Exum made the first ascent of the upper south ridge of the Grand Teton in 1931, he did so ropeless and wearing football cleats two sizes too large. The 18-year-old aspiring mountain guide negotiated an exposed traverse by leaping from...
Climbers have been belaying for as long as they’ve been using ropes. We use some type of belay in almost every roped climbing context—it is the essential skill that unites all disciplines. It’s interesting, therefore, to see how little agreement t...
Through my work as a guide, I’m privileged to see corners of the Lofoten Islands that a short-term visitor might not. Abrahamstind (ca 900m) is not in one of those corners. The northwest face is front and center and staring at the road, though gua...
On June 13 the well-known tourist attraction of Preikestolen (Pulpit Rock), which rises above the Lysefjorden in Rogoland and is internationally famous with BASE jumpers, gained a five-pitch new route from local climbers Jon Egil Auestad and Øyvin...
If somebody said you could still find 6,000m peaks in Nepal that were easy to approach, not technically challenging, and still unclimbed, would you believe them?In 2013, I had planned to explore a new route on Chulu East, but several weeks before ...
Standing on the edge of the moraine and surveying detritus of other climbers, Simon Verspeak and I saw our first ascent potentially unraveling. It was not surprising that another expedition had attempted the peak—its snowy pyramid of over 6,200m s...
Sometimes we simply need to change the way we look at a mountain in order to rejuvenate our climbing game. We did this with Himlung Himal, a classic 7,126m mountain above the Phu Valley. It is usually crowded with big groups in the autumn, but in ...
Tiquimani is the last great mountain in the central cordillera before the Altiplano slips east toward the Bolivian jungle. Situated to the northeast of Huayna Potosi, it appears as the guardian of the Zongo Valley and, indeed, in Aymara its name m...
July and August saw the first stage of the Mujer Montaña and French Mountaineering Federation’s High Mountain Women Group project. On August 1, two of the participants, Susana Rodriguez (Venezuela) and Denys Sanjines (Bolivia), made the first asce...
On September 17, Henry Chaplin, Caradoc (Crag) Jones, David Lund, Skip Novak, Stephen Venables, and I left the yacht Pelagic Australis to attempt a 15-day ski traverse across the rarely visited Salvesen Range in the southeastern part of South Geor...
From November 19–December 19, Albert Argemi (Spain), Ken Ellison (Canada), Julie Jones (U.K.), Arnount Wittert (Netherlands), and I, as leader, summited and skied 12 peaks on the Peninsula. Six of these, located between Andvord Bay and Paradise Ha...
In 2008, Kathrin Münzel and I reached the eastern end of the Wakhan Corridor and Oxus Snow Lake (AAJ 2009), and subsequently several expeditions followed this pioneering trip; Alan Halewood's parties (AAJ 2011 and AAJ 2014), Bartek Tofel's Polish ...
The Bond: Survival on Denali and Mount Huntington. Simon McCartney. Mountaineers Books, 2016. Paperback, 304 pages, $19.95.Standing beneath the north face of Alaska’s Mt. Huntington, one cannot help but feel an overwhelming sense of terrifying awe...
During the summer of 2010, a series of violent acts against foreigners in northern Afghanistan led our team to explore an area of the Rushan Range in Tajikistan instead of the Hindu Kush. We drove from Dushanbe to Khorog, from which I hoped we cou...
What to do next? This question lingered in my mind after I completed all the 8,000ers without supplementary oxygen. Like everyone else, I don’t have a compass that keeps me directed on the right line to follow. So I thought about my lifelong passi...
Having only soared around the unclimbed mountain on Google Earth, it felt wild to cross a river into the winter-shadowed valley beneath its north face. The mountain was what I called Bhandar Lek (6,024m), what some locals call Dhaule, after the na...
On January 15, 2017, a British military group commemorating Henry Worsley and comprising Alex Brazier, Chris Brooke, Jamie Facer-Childs, Alun George, Lou Rudd, and Ollie Stoten made the first ascent of Roberts Massif (ca 2,700m), while returning f...