On January 20, Sergio Condori and I deviated from the road leading to Zongo Pass a few meters after the police checkpoint, leaving the car as close as possible to the south side of Pico Milluni. After a one-hour approach, we geared up under a gran...
On June 3, Marcelo Gomez (Bolivia) and I climbed a 150m, three-pitch, traditionally protected route on the south face of a granite buttresses of the Khala Cruz group, to the east of the 5,200m highest summit. We started our climb at 2 p.m, at ca 5...
On April 29, during a course for aspirant UIAGM guides, Carlos Vasquez and I, closely followed by a second team of Max Alvarez, Juvenal Condori, and Roberto Gomez, climbed a mixed line on Janchallani (IGM 5943 III map; other maps refer to it as Ve...
On May 19, members of the 2016 IFMGA aspirants guides’ course, with instructors Roberto Gomez and Eduardo Unzueta, climbed a new line up the north ridge of Pico Mesili, a summit on the northeast ridge of Huayna Potosi. We approached the previous d...
On May 13, during a UIAGM aspirant course, Pacifico Machaca, Sebastian Rojas, and I climbed a new route on the Cuernos del Diablo, right of the established route Inti Wiracocha. We believe our first four pitches were previously unclimbed, given th...
Fastness Peak (2,383m) dominates the skyline above Ruth Flat in the Mt. Aspiring region. The east face is a forbidding wall of compact schist streaked with ice runnels. The first winter ascent was made in 1997 by Clinton Beavan, Al Uren, and Al Wo...
“You should try your hand at Mt. Wilson,” touted a climbing partner. “I know a guy, he's always stoked.” A quick phone call later, the plans were made. Before I knew it, Kyle Willis and I were on the summit of Mt. Wilson via the classic Inti Watan...
On September 14, Chris Knight and I climbed a nice, diverse line that combined ridge climbing on good granite with the crossing of beautiful fields of penitentes. We drove to Laguna Jankho Khota, camped, and the next morning continued by car to an...
Between May 10 and 12, Mike Gardner and I climbed a variation to First Born (Helmuth-House, AAJ 1996) on Denali’s Fathers and Sons Wall. To our knowledge, ours was the fourth ascent of the wall. [Editor’s note: The Fathers and Sons Wall, which ris...
Maiun (Mayun) Chhish (5,880m, 36°20'13"N, 74°27'58"E) rises directly above the western end of the main Hunza Valley and offers panoramic views of the Batura chain to its north and Rakaposhi to the south. The only known prior ascent was on August 9...
Longing for a true wilderness experience, in August I made two trips to the Cirque of the Moon, a desolate cirque approximately four miles east of the Cirque of the Towers. The result was three new routes of varying difficulty and quality. On Augu...
Climbers tend to snort when I suggest we visit my favorite crag. The slur “Pete’s Pile” was first hurled at this dirty, lichen-encrusted collection of basalt columns back in the late 1980s, when it was being developed by a scruffy ski patroller of...
On May 1, Damien Mast and I made the first ascent of the 2,200’ north face of Sheepshead (9,417’) in the Mission Mountains of northwest Montana. (This peak is also known locally as Sheep’s Head or West McDonald Peak.) The face had been attempted m...
Over three days in early July, Jonathan Schaffer and I established four new lines on Flatiron Butte's prominent east face. All routes were free-climbed ground-up, each in a single push and each about 900’ in length. To the best of our knowledge, o...
Adam Pecan and I met in Li Ming (Liming) and spent October and November establishing free routes to the tops of impressive walls in the main valley described in AAJ 2012 and 2013. The highest wall in the area, at just over 200m, is dubbed the Prim...
On June 13, Len Vanderstar and I set out on an expedition to make the first ascent of Thunder Mountain (9,097’, a.k.a. Mt. Nirvana) without air support. Before 2016, this peak—the highest mountain in the Northwest Territories—had seen five documen...
On June 24, Damien Nicodemi and I climbed a new route on the east face of Flatiron Butte, located to the north of Yosemite National Park in the Hoover Wilderness. The stunning prominence of the face and the solitude of the cirque where the peak is...
On June 5, Neal Harder, Chris LaBounty, and I established the Surge (1,000', 5.8) on the Fortress, in the Castle Rocks area of Sequoia National Park. Our route follows face and flake features to the right of the only other established route, the S...
When you're driving toward Kings Canyon, there are some giant marble buttresses on the left side of the road, but you have to cross the Kings River to get to them. In the case of Boyden Cave Wall, near the popular Boyden Cavern in Giant Sequoia Na...
Between April 1 and 11, Canadian alpinist Marc-André Leclerc and I climbed three new routes in the Valley of the Ten Peaks. We had only recently tied in together for the first time, sharing a rope on March 27, when we climbed the Greenwood-Locke R...