As Jed Brown observed in a report about his and Colin Haley’s first ascent of the southwest face of Abercrombie Mountain (7,037’) in 2007, good spring alpine conditions around Valdez are hard to come by. The mountains begin at sea level and rise t...
On April 7, Laron Thomas and I set out to explore a likely unclimbed 3,500’-plus couloir that slashes up the southwest face of Hearth Mountain. Standing at 6,182’, Hearth is located up the South Fork of the Snow River in the Kenai Mountains. We s...
The relative ease of access to Nenana Mountain, at the western margin of the Hayes Range, makes it well suited for smash-and-grab trips during short Alaskan high-pressure systems. On August 1, Tristan O’Donoghue and I returned to Nenana Mountain (...
After climbing a new route on Mt. Huntington (see story here) with Zac Colbran, Dane Steadman and I bumped over to the Southeast Fork of the Kahiltna Glacier at the end of April. In ten days, we caught just one frigid day to climb between weather ...
On June 5, Jack Kuenzle (USA) climbed and descended the West Buttress route on Denali (20,310’), using skis, in 10 hours, 14 minutes, 57 seconds. Kuenzle followed the Rescue Gully cutoff between the two highest camps on the route. The previous fas...
Silvia Loreggian and I arrived in Alaska in mid-May for our first expedition to the Alaska Range, unsure what lay in store. At the first opportunity that weather allowed, we flew into the Kichatna Mountains and established a base camp on the Cul-d...
Tobias Wolf tiptoes across one of the amazing dike features of Karma on Half Dome. Photo by Oliver Schmidt. In 2017, when I climbed Growing Up (VI 5.13a A0, Borchard-Jones-Jones-Montoya- Watson, 2007) on the south face of Half Dome, I had a l...
Hard Mox (8,504’) is considered the most difficult of the Bulger List (Washington’s 100 highest peaks) and was previously unclimbed in winter. [Hard Mox is the southeastern of the two Mox Peaks and is less than four miles south of the Canadian bor...
Capping an extended bike-and-climb journey from Colorado to British Columbia and a sail up to Petersburg, Alaska, Tommy Caldwell and Alex Honnold made a one-day traverse of the Devils Thumb group. The Diablo Traverse, pioneered by Colin Haley and ...
The Taku River flows from British Columbia and eventually empties into a glacial fjord east of Juneau. Its environs are a landscape of 5,000’ to 8,000’ peaks that fall all the way to sea level. Mt. Swineford (58.43548, -133.72378) rises from the T...
In every part of Felix Bub’s and my expedition to the Mythics Cirque, we placed the “how” above the “what.” Our journey to East Greenland from Innsbruck was made by train and yacht. This resulted in a direct carbon cost of only 280kg per person, r...
Fay Manners (U.K.) and I arrived in Tasiilaq on August 7, after a delay of several weeks due to reports of impassable sea ice in the east coast fjords. A boatman then took us on a journey north of about 350km, and on the 10th we arrived in the alp...
Having climbed with Sam Boyce on several occasions, including a handful of first ascents, I’m well aware that he is into the kind of weird, ungroomed terrain that most strive to avoid. I also knew—despite never having climbed with him—that Kyle Wi...
In 1973, an Italian expedition led by Carlo Nembrini climbed Illampu (6,368m) and then moved to Illimani. After climbing that peak, they joined a search for the bodies of Pierre Dedieu (France) and Ernesto “Coco” Sanchez (Bolivia), who had been ki...
On April 19, Kurt Ross, Nelson Neirinck, and I landed on the Trident Glacier with three weeks of food and one guaranteed day of good weather. We left our base camp the next morning at the comfortable time of 6 a.m., planning for two days on the no...
Cerro Capicua is a 1,000m wall whose name derives from a Catalan phrase meaning “head and tail.” In early 2017, during my first trip to Cochamó, a new aid route on Capicua called Picaflor (Spanish for “hummingbird”) caught hold of my imagination ...
In January 2024, I led a team of six aboard the yacht Icebird to make a number of ski ascents in the Grandidier Channel and Crystal Sound areas. After an ascent of frequently climbed Mt. Scott (880m), the team summited a 530m peak on Lahille Islan...
Fanny Schmutz, Maud Vanpoulle, and I all came to El Chaltén for the first time around ten years ago. When I first saw Cerro Torre (3,128m), I knew that one day I’d stand on top of that mountain. Cerro Torre is quite intimidating, but our previous...
The austral summer of 2022/2023 started off with the first ascent of a route 30 years in the making. Situated on a sun-drenched north-facing wall in the Wilkin Valley near Wanaka, The Dark Side of the Moon (305m, 26/5.12c) climbs 13 pitches of com...
Please click here to download the trip report (PDF) from Nikhil Bhandari and Suraj Kushwaha's October 2023 expedition to Rathan Thadi Dome.