From mid-June to mid-July, Brian Houle and I visited the Cordillera Real to explore new technical routes on some of the big ice faces in the range. Our main objectives were the southeast face of Cerro Arkhata (5,650m), believed to be unclimbed, an...
Browsing Google Earth, I came across an impressive wall of 5,000m mountains on the Georgia-Russia border. By searching the AAJ, I soon learned this was the 13km-long Bezengi Wall (named after the glacier on its north side). There was a proud cou...
In the summer of 2010, Boris Avdeev (an American resident) and I went to the Caucasus, where we climbed Shkhara (5,193m) by the Beknu Route on the south pillar (2,200m, 5B 55°). I was then able to make a partial ski descent of this route, from the...
THE IDEA of going to Peru wasn’t sparked by some coveted unclimbed line. It was simply out of convenience and practicality. As the winter season in the Canadian Rockies wound down, I was getting antsy to go on a trip. Peru seemed ideal: big mounta...
THE IDEA of linking the three Howser Towers in a single day dawned on me back in 2010. It was my second season in a row climbing above the East Creek Basin; the year before, Jason Kruk, Matt Segal, and I had done the first free ascent of the west ...
I SAG DEEP INTO MY HARNESS and absently stare upward into a mesmerizing plane of granite. From my precarious hanging position, I am doing my best to keep the moist arctic wind from blasting my skin. Despite wearing every layer that I packed for th...
On April 12, at approximately 1:15 p.m., the Coconino County Sheriff's Office received a call regarding an accident at the Pit. The county search and rescue unit responded, along with the Flagstaff Fire Department and Guardian Medical Transport. I...
Looking west from the summit of Gangapurna. Various mountaineers have ascended the peak labeled "D" from the north (right) and "E" from the south, both using a "Tarke Kang" permit. In fact, it is obvious from this vantage th...
In June, Damien Gildea attempted the south face of CCKN (6,303m, a.k.a. Chau Chau Kang Nilda, the “Blue Moon in the Sky.) Gildea climbed 650m of snow, ice, and rock (50°) to around 6,150m, where he was stopped by a large crevasse. He retreated dow...
On February 16, Tim Nielsen and I hiked up to the north face of West Lion (49°27'28"N, 123°11'11"W), just north of Vancouver in the North Shore Mountains, via the Lions Bay Trail. Our plan was to repeat the North Couloir (300m, WI3+), which Matteo...
FAR FROM the ever-connected hustle of modern life, deep in the heart of northern Chilean Patagonia, the pristine granite faces and snowy caps of the Avellano Towers rise up from a hidden valley at the head of the Avellano River. They say the best ...
IF ONLY I HAD KNOWN how much time, sacrifice, sorrow, and disappointment it would cost me to finish a new route on Gasherbrum I, never would I have started down this road. But I am not a Sibyl, an oracle, and actually it is better this way, becaus...
From February 9 to March 3, 2018, we spent 22 days in Chile’s O’Higgins National Park, hoping to climb Cerro Riso Patrón. This mysterious mountain on the western border of the Southern Patagonian Icefield has seen very few climbers. The central su...
TRYING, FAILING, AND STARTING OVER: It’s the basis of any experience, the thing that pushes us forward. What would we do if everything were easy?Nuptse was a beautiful challenge—an extremely difficult climb in every imaginable way. The technical l...
During the pre-monsoon season, a French team comprising Laurent Bibollet, Lise Billon, Emmanuel Chance, Aymeric Clouet, and Sébastien Corret attempted the unclimbed north spur of Chamlang (7,321m). After acclimatization trips on the west ridge—the...
The elegant south spur of the west ridge of Pico Norte (6,403m), attempted in 2014 and reported to be unclimbed in AAJ 2015, was actually climbed in 1989 by Franco Maestrini’s Italian expedition. Like the climbers in the 2014 attempt, the 1989 tea...
Norman Dyhrenfurth died September 24 in Salzburg, Austria, just short of a century old. He is best known as the creator and leader of the 1963 American Mount Everest Expedition (AMEE), which has been regarded by him and others as the magnum opus o...
The morning of March 14, 2017, Royal Robbins passed away, a man who stamped us with his elegance and class. The American Alpine Journal published an article of Royal’s in 1963, when I was a high school kid. I was moved especially by one line:What ...
ON JUNE 3, I free soloed Freerider on El Capitan, the culmination of an eight-year dream. The year and a half I took to actually realize the climb has, at this point, been well documented. The story of that journey is told in an upcoming documenta...
While researching a trip to India we discovered a Flickr Image folder from Martin Moran, which documented his trek over the Poat La and down the ZK Glacier, past unclimbed mountains he called Zanskar Matterhorn and Badile. Our goal was now clear,...