On October 20, Rushad Nanavatty and I completed a likely new line, Lungta (820m, 70° ice), up the south face and southwest ridge of Langpo South (6,857m, 27°50'22.43"N, 88°12'5.57"E). This appears to be the second reported ascent of the peak. Aft...
In 2021, Liu Junfu and I were looking for a mountain on which we could climb a new route of moderate difficulty in a one-day push. We chose Yangmantai (5,666m, 31°11’58.31”N, 102°53’38.11”E). Viewed from the Changping Valley, Yangmantai is an eleg...
In 2008, three Chinese climbers made the first ascent of Xuanwu Feng (“Black Tortoise Peak,” 5,383m), situated at 31°7’14.93”N, 102°48’45.13”E, between Tan Shan (4,946m) and Angry Wife (5,005m). The climbers were Li Hongxue, a professional mountai...
Peak 5,324m lies in the far western sector of the Siguniang massif, at 31°11’22.242”N, 102°41’58.26”E, and is reached via the infrequently visited Jiesi Valley. On December 15, Wang Yongpeng, Wu Yunhe, Xu Gang, and Yang Sheng made a four-hour appr...
Wukuchu is a relatively recently climbed peak that lies around 35km southwest of the Minya Konka (Gongga Shan) group at 29°17’07.1”N, 101°41’24.2”E. It has two tops separated by a rocky col: Chu (west top, 5,526m) and Wuku (east top, 5,518m). A ba...
Climbing solo, Jost Kobusch (Germany) reached the summit of Denali on February 19, 2023. Kobusch made a single-push ascent from the standard 14,200’ camp on the West Buttress route to the 20,310’ summit via the Messner Couloir, believed to be the ...
In September I headed to Pakistan with Nigel Bassam, Ross Bell, Tom Bell, Karim Hayat, and Paul Winder. Karim provided the logistics through his Hunza-based company and also was a full climbing member of the team. The trip had been scheduled for 2...
In September, Cas van de Gevel, Frank Chargois, and I (all Dutch) traveled to the Djangart Range, where the hunters we hoped to hire to carry our equipment into the Djangart Valley were too busy hunting. We had to settle for a base camp in the Kai...
While reading Richard Rossiter’s guidebook to Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP), I dug deep into the section on the park’s less-frequented side—west of the Continental Divide—and in particular, the two pages on Ptarmigan Mountain (12,324’) above...
In August, Alexey Kurochkin, Konstantin Markevich, and Evgeniy Yablokov climbed a new route on the southwest side of Pik Chocolate (3,650m), a granite spire along the ridgeline extending to the north of Pik Dalar. The area is accessed along the My...
Following successful trips in 2017 and 2018, with various new routes opened (see AAJ 2019), I returned to the Spitzkoppe in August 2022 for more of the same. This time I was joined by my partner, Vittoria Camisassi, on her first trip to Spitzkoppe...
The Mulanje Massif in southern Malawi, a sprawling network of forested peaks with myriad granite faces, whose highest summit rises to 3,002m, has seen a renewed burst of development in the past four years. The crown jewel, the two-tiered northwest...
Mt. Kenya (17,057’/5,199m), the second-highest peak on the African continent, has been all but forgotten in the annals of alpinism. Since 2000, only a few new routes have been established on the complex peak, with the most notable, put up by Germa...
As lifelong Kings River fishermen, Daniel Jeffcoach and I have visited the valley below Garlic Dome many times. Talking one day, we decided that a fisherman may be able to spend a lifetime in that valley and never have a problem with that great bu...
The first time I went to Upper Ala-Archa was not at all for mountaineering purposes. We had planned to spend about a week there to do some ski touring. But the idea of potential new ascents settled in my mind almost immediately. When I got home, ...
In early July, Gabriel Beno, Lukas Kroker, and I acclimatized on Pik Legendarnaya Magnitka (4,550m), then traveled to the Koksai Valley, west of the Bor-Dobo border crossing into Tajikistan. We hiked three hours south of the Pamir Highway to our f...
In September, our group of 12 Dutch climbers—Sjoerd Boersma, Dennis Hendrikx, Robert Löwensteyn, Jeffrey Meesters, Martin Platteschor, Michiel Telkamp, Noor van der Veen, Anniek Verschuur, Regien Winnubst, and three coaches, Court Haegens, Boris...
During August my team traveled to the rarely visited Shugnan Range of the southern Pamir. We started our approach from the village of Varshedz, around 85km northeast of Khorog. In three days we reached base camp at 4,520m near the moraine of the V...
The first route up the east-southeast side of Siulá Grande was climbed by Max Bonniot and Didier Jourdain (France) in 2016. Their route, Le Bruit des Glaçons (1,400m, ED 6c WI5), climbed the rocky, lower east pillar and mixed, upper southeast ri...
Marc Toralles leading the second pitch (7b/5.12b) of the east face of Siulá Grande during the 2019 attempt. Photo by Roger Cararach. The adventure to climb the east face of Siulá Grande began in the summer of 2019 when Roger Cararach, Marc T...