Beginning the final push on the northwest face of Little Jamyang Ri. Photo by Stefan Plank. Our arrival at base camp in the Rangtik Tokpo was followed by three days of heavy snowfall. When this cleared, an obvious choice was the northwest fac...
View to the north from Alpomish to Peak 4,643m (sometimes mistakenly called Khazret Sultan), in the center of the photo. Long thought to be the highest peak in Uzbekistan, Peak 4,643m was conclusively shown to be lower than Alpomish during ascen...
Readers of certain sections of the AAJ may notice references to the “Wala maps” and to the numbered peaks labeled on those maps. Polish mountaineer Jerzy Wala created maps from the Karakoram, Hindu Kush, and other ranges over many decades. Even in...
Looking west-southwest to Mt. Andrew, above the Dall Glacier. The first ascent on April 20, 2024, generally followed the north ridge, the long ridgeline diagonaling up to the summit from right to left. The mountain to the right is Peak 8,900’+ (...
In late August and September, a team of four from the U.K. (Clement Attwood, Thomas Walker, Calum Wesencraft, and Nick Whimster) aimed to establish new routes above the Kyzyl Asker Glacier. After acclimatization and several days of effort, an adva...
On May 19, 2022, the mostly French team of Thomas Delfino, Jean-Yves Fredricksen, Léa Klaue (Switzerland), Aurélien Lardy, and Hélias Millerioux skied and snowboarded the north face of Nochnoi Motyl (“Night Butterfly,” 5,056m), the central peak...
In the summer of 2023, our team from Latvia climbed two summits in the Mindzhar Valley near the Kyrgyzstan-Tajikistan border, which I had previously visited twice (see AAJs 2017 and 2018). Nauris Hofmanis, Raivis Hofmanis, Edgars Madzulis, Inese ...
Alex Gonzalez and I took advantage of a good weather window in mid-July to open a new route on Peak 4,300m, a sharply pointed summit nestled between Odessa and Kyrkchilta peaks in the Ak-su Valley. The new route runs up the northeastern spur of t...
Felix Hatzold, Annick Pietzonka, and I entered the Kuilu Valley on July 27 in a truck with the driver blasting Russian rap music. After a bumpy all-day drive from Karakol, we had an exciting crossing of the Kuilu River, which placed us very close ...
Though it was an objective long coveted by Juneau locals, the prominent couloir on the southwest face of Dean (5,883’)—whose name appears on official maps without any modifier such as Peak or Mountain—had, to my knowledge, never received a proper ...
The fifth and final pitch of Tio Charli, on the northeast face of Nieras, as it was climbed in 2019. In 2021, two Swedes climbed an alternate finish up the steep ice visible in the center of the photo, calling it Ghost. Photo by Rafa Vadillo. ...
In August, a team of six climbers—Niels Brack, Miel Cox, Annelore Orije, Loïc Puylaert, Cedric De Smet, and me, Christian Suys—spent four weeks in the beautiful Djangart Range. After three days of driving from Bishkek, we made it to some barracks...
Luka Kramarič, Florjan Lajmiš, Špela Ozimek, Krištof Rener, Nejc Štebe, and Mojca Zajc, all Slovenians, arrived in Bishkek on September 3, 2022. We chose the Djangart region because it seemed like a good location to dip our toes into expediti...
Photos by 100 Limite Filmes / Murilo Vargas Conceiving of and realizing big climbing projects, at least for me, requires an obsessive mindset. I’ve spent many late nights in the last decade diving down internet rabbit holes in search of the w...
I first encountered Pedra Riscada in 2021 during a trip with friends to repeat some lines there. What blew me away as much as the soaring granite walls was that there was no established route up the heart of the steep and beautiful northeast face....
In AA] 2011 we reported the second ascent of Reddomain (6,112m) by a different (northern) approach to the west ridge from that used in 1999 by the Japanese first ascensionists. In fact this was the third ascent, the second taking place on October ...
At the end of February 2024, after a season of bad conditions and weather, a spell of high pressure appeared in the forecast for Southern Patagonia. I prepared to make my third foray into the Bader Valley of the season, hoping to finish a line I h...
The complete traverse of the Torres del Paine went from southwest to northeast over (A) Torre Sur, (B) Torre Central, (C) Torre Norte, and (D) Peineta. The line and bivouacs are marked. Photo by Francisco Bedeschi. On February 22, Seán Villa...
In 1991, Germans Kurt Albert, Bernd Arnold, Norbert Bätz, Peter Dittrich, and Wolfgang Güllich made the first ascent of Riders on the Storm (1,300m, 7c A3). The 38-pitch rock line, which tracks up the center of the east face of Torre Central, wa...
Our “fair means” expedition lasted from July 6 to August 10 and began in Tasiilaq, where Anne Flechsig, Timon Kaufman, Ramona Volken, and I (all Swiss) loaded 250kg of gear and food into four kayaks and spent the next two and a half days paddling ...