[Editor’s note: Pat Goodman won a 2009 Lyman Spitzer Cutting-Edge Award from the AAC. This report on his permit frustrations in October 2009 is reprinted from the AAC’s trip reports.]The five Chinese men and women stood confident, and in an odd wa...
In 1989 Kurt Albert, Wolfgang Güllich, Milan Sykora, and Christoph Stiegler climbed one of the most beautiful routes in the world: Eternal Flame on Trango Tower. They aided only four pitches, climbing approximately 80 percent of the route free on ...
As far as we know, there have been only two or three attempts on Gasherbrum VI (7,004m), all via the south face, directly above Gasherbrum base camp. The latest was by Jean-Noël Urban and two friends in 1998. They retreated from very high on the m...
Our group of 10, with Kiomars Babazadeh as leader and me as climbing leader, started toward Broad Peak on June 23. Our goal was the first new route in the Himalaya by Iranian climbers. On our way to base camp, we met the French climber Ludo Giambi...
Basile Petiot, Benoit Monfort, and Mathieu Detrie from France and I (from Belgium) traveled to Pakistan in July, hoping to climb the direct northeast pillar of Uli Biaho (6,109m), a virgin line of 2,100m. This is composed of two distinct parts. Th...
Only six Korean teams have successfully put up first ascents on 7,000m peaks. Nearly all of these have been made in either capsule or expedition style. Kim Hyung-il, who in 2009 climbed a new route in alpine style on the northwest face of Spantik ...
In 2011, together with Alex Txikon from Spain, we spent more than 50 days making the first attempt to climb Gasherbrum I in winter. The approach to this mountain had never been done on foot in winter; we took seven days to walk from Askole to base...
A new route on the huge northwest face of Great Trango, climbed by Galina Chibitok from Russia and Marina Kopteva and Anna Yasinskaya from the Ukraine, was awarded the 2011 Russian Piolet d’Or, the first time such an accolade has been bestowed on ...
In August Dmitry Golovchenko, Sergey Nilov, leader Viktor Volodin, and I, from the Moscow Mountaineering and Climbing Federation, planned to climb a new route on the north face of Trango Tower. However, prevailing conditions made the approach dang...
The Polish Winter Gasherbrum I expedition was organized by the Polish Alpine Association (PAA) and financed by the Ministry of Sports, as well as a group of commercial sponsors. The expedition was part of an important PAA program dubbed Polish Win...
At 10:30 a.m. on March 9, 2012, as Polish climbers Bielecki and Golab were descending from the summit of Gasherbrum I, having made the first winter ascent, Austrian Gerfreid Goeschl contacted his home country by satellite phone to say that he, Ced...
The Karakoram 2009 Trentina Expedition—Michele Cagol, Fabio Leoni, Elio Orlandi, and I, all over 40 years old—proved to be a success, without injuries or other nasty surprises. We managed a new route up the southwest pillar of K7 West, reaching an...
In August, the four-man team of Adrian Laing and Scott Standen from Australia and Bruce Dowrick and Jon Sedon from New Zealand free-climbed a variation to the route Ledgeway to Heaven (Favresse-Favresse-Pustelnik-Villanueva, 2007) on Nafees Cap, a...
The Swiss team of Simon Riediker, Mirco Stalder, and I completed several routes in the Charakusa Valley, including the first ascent of a 6,200-meter peak. We arrived in the valley on July 19 and left August 15. In order to acclimatize, Mirco and I...
Bad weather thwarted our plans to attempt unclimbed Hassan Peak. Instead, Lorenzo Angelozzi and I looked elsewhere and attempted three other summits, on two of which we were successful. Our first ascent was Margherita’s Peak, a previously unclimbe...
Miguel Anta, Ruben Calvo, and I spent 35 days from mid June to the end of July on the Charakusa Glacier. For the first 10 days base camp was covered with snow. We planned to attempt a new line on the southwest pillar of K7 West.As temperatures wer...
In April 2010, Tim DeRoehn and I were awarded one of the inaugural Copp-Dash Inspire Awards. It would be our first trip to Asia. We had big goals, specifically to make the first complete ascent of the southwest pillar of K7 West, and to explore th...
Our party of eight departed base camp (ca 6,400’) for the Easton Glacier route at approximately 1 a.m. on June 9, 2013. It was very windy and cold. We had to shout to be heard, even in close proximity. I noticed on the Roman Wall (steepest secti...
Ondrej Mandula and I climbed a new route on the southwest side of Latok IV (6,456m) in July. We established advanced base camp four or five hours up the Baintha Lukpar Glacier from our base camp by the Biafo Glacier. The next day we crossed the he...
In May 2008, when I was making my first ski traverse from Shimshal to Askole via the Lupke La, the high pass connecting the Braldu and Sim Gang Glaciers, I climbed an easy peak north of the Sim Gang Glacier (36°01’36.8” N, 75°41’41.1” E) while the...