As climbing tools improved, so did the envisioning of routes up the tallest rock walls in remote mountain ranges, leading to the first ascent of Trango Tower in 1976. Let’s begin with a brief recount of the era’s equipment for first ascents in the 1970s: the pitons, ropes, bolts, strong carabiners, and clean-climbing gear. In Volumes I and II of Mechanical Advantage: Tools for the Wild Vertical (John Middendorf 2022-2023), the history of evolving climbing techniques and technology is outlined from the 19th century to the 1950s (plus a brief overview of ice gear to the 1970s) when mild steel pitons and carabiners, and natural fiber ropes were the state-of-the-art.

In 1955, Walter Bonatti extended the boundaries of bigwall climbing when he climbed the southwest pillar of the Dru using his “System Z” solo system, dependent on piton anchorage every twelve meters using a 36-meter rope. His 28 kilograms of equipment included 79 thin pitons, six wooden wedges for large cracks, fifteen carabiners, a dozen slings, three rope stirrups, and two hammers. The pitons and wood wedges covered thin and wide (~50mm) cracks—but not sizes in-between—and were placed and removed multiple times, with 50 pitons left in place as he ascended. Ropes were state-of-the-art: one 36m nylon rope, and one 36m silk rope. The route involved difficult snow and ice climbing, free climbing, and tenuous dependence on pitons and hammered-in wood blocks to make upward progress. Bonatti’s story of the climb in On The Heights (1964) is full of pre-climb angst and depression, followed by complete focus and technological prowess amidst great suffering and storm during six desperate days and frigid nights on the successful climb. The proof that a self-supported solo climber equipped with specialized gear could establish an elegant new climbing line on Chamonix’s tallest and sheerest cliff set a new standard and inspired others.

In 1956, ten Italian, Swiss, and French climbers repeated the route in teams of two, using the traditional double rope lead/aid system (see Volume 1, ibid). The climb was done with only pitons and without any bolts drilled into the rock, a tool that Bonatti believed carrying, even “at the bottom of a rucksack … destroys the spiritual value of a climb” and voids the meaning of the word, “impossible” (On The Heights, p.88). As bolts were added with subsequent ascents, controversies around style and the means of ascent became everpresent, but climbers’ inspiration to climb even bigger and steeper bigwalls persisted, and with it, tools and techniques evolved in the decades that followed.

Materials

The expanding availability of three new materials in the 1950s—nylon, aluminum, and high-strength steel—led to new tools and strategies for bigwall climbs. As the era progressed into the mid-1970s, lugging less heavy gear to climb bigger things safely became the trend as tools evolved. Nylon ropes were lighter and stronger, and aluminum clean gear replaced chunks of heavy piton steel. Lightweight shelter and outerwear designs had matured, proven, and optimized on the 8000m peaks, where ultralight alpine ascents with single rope and light descent gear were possible, such as Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler’s 1975 first ascent of the northwest face of Gasherbrum I (Hidden Peak) in three days.

Without going into the same detail as the Mechanical Advantage: Tools for the Wild Vertical research of the evolution of equipment and climbs for the period from 1950-1975 (which is largely covered in other literature, and weaves many international innovation threads), we’ll consider some of the major equipment developments that specifically pertain to essential tools for the bigwall climbs of the 1970s.

Pitons (Pins, Pegs)

Students of Yosemite climbing history know well the moment, in the late 1940s, when the Swiss blacksmith John Salathé forged high-strength alloy steel pitons and established new routes on Lost Arrow Spire in 1947 with Anton Nelson, and the north wall of Sentinel in 1950 with Allen Steck in Yosemite Valley, two of the world’s most technical bigwalls at the time. In the 1950s, bigwalls were coming of age in North America and Europe, and the Valley climbers realized alloy steel anchoring devices completely changed the game for long routes, simply because they were tough and reusable, in contrast to softer pitons of similar designs made by most European suppliers, which would quickly mangle when repeatedly hammered in and out of cracks. (footnote)

Footnote: Technically, the European steel (NOT ‘soft-iron’) piton materials were mild steels not as hardenable as high-strength steel. ‘Softer’ in this sense means more malleable and not as hard. Many pitons made in Europe and other countries were designed to only be used a few times, then intentionally left fixed, considered a public service for the next team. With time, classic bigwall routes like those on the Tre Cima di Lavaredo in Italy became almost entirely fixed. Contrary to common wisdom, some European manufacturers, such as Charlet Moser, were also making tougher pitons in this period, they were just not as common, as for limestone climbs the softer pitons were preferred and easier to place in brittle rock. The early Fritsch pitons might also be of higher grade alloy steel. Recently Yvon Chouinard wrote to me, “You’ve done a great job with a complete history of the gear. I only have a minor comment.If you use 1010 or 1020 mild steel and heat and pound it enough times it absorbs carbon from the coal or charcoal and becomes harder. I’ve made some pitons this way and they are much superior to the usual Euro pins that were heated only once or twice. The best Euro pitons I’ve tried were hand forged by Fritsch in Switzerland. Plus, they had a good shape with wide necks which made them even stronger.” Also see this post: 1950s USA Climbing Gear notes V2

With the new tougher steel pitons, climbers could gather a few dozen alloy steel pitons, and place and remove each one a dozen or more times, enabling climbs of thousands of vertical feet of all crack sizes to be ‘nailed’, as the parlance went. Piton counts became standards in first ascent reporting; Warren Harding reported ‘about’ 675 piton placements for the 1958 first ascent of the Nose of El Capitan (plus 125 bolts); while Robbins precisely recorded 484 pitons (plus 13 bolts) placed on the first ascent of the nearby Salathé Wall in 1961.

Piton Material Evolution: chrome-molybdenum steel (SAE 4130) 

In the mid-1950s, 4130 alloy steel (‘chromoly’) was used almost exclusively for alloy pitons, thanks to its standard availability and wide range of heat treatability. Chuck Wilts engineered, then shared with the climbing community, the design of a thin knifeblade piton so hard it could be hammered into the thinnest granite seams, and also examined the steel’s wide range of properties for more malleable (but still tough) designs optimized for a wider range of cracks. Piton hammers from the same steel were forged and hardened a few points higher. Refinements in piton shape, particularly the taper angle, eye design, and overall length, also evolved and increased versatility.

In addition to thin pitons, larger pitons of a folded design called ‘angles’, were also made from stronger alloy steels (mild-steel angle pitons tend to flatten out when hammered into granite cracks). No longer would climbers have to tentatively depend on weak wooden blocks or hope for a thin piton crack to appear for protection, wider cracks on the walls could now be mechanically ascended with a reasonable ‘kit’. Jumping forward to 1975, a wide range of alloy steel pitons became readily available from many suppliers, ranging from hairline seams to 4” wide cracks (100mm) (footnote).

Footnote: The first alloy angle pitons were developed for the horizontal cracks of the Shawangunks in the early 1950s, and in the decade that followed, California and Colorado climbers created collections of all sizes of custom-made tough pitons with alloy steels, optimized and bashed to their maximum potential on bigwalls in the 1960s and 1970s (this history of development is well evidenced in the Karabin Climbing Museum in Phoenix, Arizona; the innovation aspects are also examined in appendix: 1950s USA Climbing Gear notes (including important material and design contributions made by Bob Owens, Bob Bruning, Norton Smithe, Chuck Wilts, Bill Feuerer, Richard Long, Jerry Gallwas, and others).

Full Sets

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Great Pacific Iron Works (USA), led by Yvon Chouinard and Tom Frost, produced complete sets of pitons—knifeblades, Lost Arrows, and angles (including bongs), and became the major piton supplier for the granite bigwall climbs around the world. Starting in the mid-1960s, Clogwyn (UK) was also a producer of high-quality high-strength alloy pitons, and by 1975 also offered a full range. Other manufacturers, notably Hiatt and SMC, also produced quality angle pitons and other shapes from high-strength alloys in this period.

Clean Climbing Gear (Chocks, Hexagons, Wedges, Stoppers, Nuts)

Even though British bigwall climbers adopted pitons on ‘offshore’ walls in the post-WWII era, antagonism toward piton use at home as ‘unsporting’ led to the development of points of protection that could be creatively wedged in natural cracks, a developing artform often called ‘nutcraft’, as modified machine nuts were among the earliest technology. In addition to a range of production pitons, Clogwyn also became a leading manufacturer of aluminum ‘clean-climbing’ tools in the 1960s, and these soon became essential tools for efficient bigwall climbs, quicker and less effort to place and remove as a point of security in natural fissures. Originally called “artificial chockstones”, the names and designs soon expanded, and in popular granite training grounds like Yosemite, chocks were readily adopted in response to the deep piton scarring caused by repeated placement and removal of alloy pitons on popular routes (See “Preserving the Cracks” compiled by Tom Frost, 1972 American Alpine Journal).

A hammer tap was still common in setting this gear in the days of mixed piton/chock racks, and offshoots of various designs became primarily hammered tools, such as simple copper or aluminum swages on the end of a wire loop (generically called ‘copperheads’). Optimization continued, further reducing the need for a hammer, and in 1971, Tom Frost and Yvon Chouinard started making ‘Hexentrics’, a clever patented design that allowed for each size to be useful for three different crack sizes, followed soon by seven sizes of ‘Stoppers’, which evolved to an elegant set of twelve sizes to incrementally fit cracks from 2.5mm to 32mm.

Typical 1970s Gear ‘Racks’

Rather than having full sets from a particular manufacturer, however, most 1970s bigwall gear racks were comprised of wired and slung chocks/nuts/stoppers of various shapes and sizes, homemade and from various manufacturers, and a mix of high-strength alloy pitons and mild steel pitons (called ‘soft-iron’). For multi-day bigwalls in the 1960s and 1970s, the typical piton rack was comprised of 45 various sizes, including one or two ‘bong bongs', a selection of chocks, at least 35 carabiners, and a dozen or more webbing slings draped over the shoulder.

Other Gear 1970s

Nylon Ropes and slings

Kernmantle ropes for climbing, with a nylon core and a sheath, designed with a balance of handling, stretch, and strength were first developed in the 1950s, and by the 1970s, had fully matured with consistent quality, though still over twice the cost of the traditional 3-ply twisted nylon ropes. By 1975, 11mm diameter kernmantle ropes had become the standard climbing rope, generally in 45m or 50m lengths, and the single lead rope technique was largely preferred for bigwall climbs over the traditional double rope systems, and with it came the plentiful use of 25mm webbing slings (aka ‘runners’ and ‘tapes’).

Aluminum Carabiners to 1970s

Steel carabiners, cheap and in plentiful supply from WW2 military surplus, were largely replaced by aluminum carabiners by the 1970s, lightening typical bigwall racks by several kilograms.

Ascenders and other hardware 1960s-1970s

Although not the first mechanical rope clamps, the Jümar design invented by Walter Marti in 1958 in a short time replaced prusiks as the main way to ascend fixed ropes and follow pitches on bigwalls. Jim McCarthy procured his first pair of Jümars from Sporthaus Schuster in Munich in the early 1960s, and recalls, “They were not yet widely accepted in 1963, and our use of them on Proboscis (1963) could well have been the first on a big wall first ascent,” and notes that Layton Kor was also an early North American adopter (conversation with Jim, 2023). After REI began importing them in 1965, they became ubiquitous on Yosemite’s and the world’s bigwall climbs. Other brands including Clog and Gibbs were produced and preferred for certain environments, for example, the Clog design had better safety features for diagonal rope ascents, and the Gibbs design provided better grip on icy ropes.

Next: the first ascent of Nameless Tower in 1975 and 1976 (using most of these tools).

APPENDIX/Miscellanea

Techniques to 1980s here: John Middendorf’s Big Wall Tech Manual (1988)

The first route on Great Trango Tower, then known as Middle Trango Tower, was climbed in 1977. Galen Rowell called it ‘Shipton’s Dream’, referencing the response of Eric Shipton, who died that year, when asked what he would have done differently in his climbing and mapping career: “I wouldn’t have spent as much time mucking about Mount Everest. I would have gone to lower peaks that could be climbed with a few classic tools by a few friends.”

Himalayan Climbing

The expeditions to the 8000m peaks like Everest were generally huge affairs in the era, with leaders managing multiple teams partnering with high-altitude Sherpas. John Roskelley reflects on climbing the third ascent of Dhaulagiri (8167m) via the northeast ridge in 1973 with Nawang Samden and Lou Reichardt, a ‘quiet, introspective man’ and the sole survivor of the ‘Death of the Seven’ (AAJ, 1970), when on the same peak in four years prior half of his team perished in an avalanche: “I didn’t really get to know (Reichardt) despite months on the same team. In ten days of living in separate tents within twenty feet of each other in Camp III, we had talked only once or twice.” Objectives and strategies on peaks like these involved multiple teams working on different dangerous components of the ascent to get someone on top, which then becomes the success of the team.

Karakoram Access

Mustagh Tower was first ascended by two routes in 1957 (British and French teams), and Masherbrum in 1960 (American/Pakistan team), but by 1963, most of the technical challenges of the Karakoram were closed to mountaineering as border conflicts between Pakistan, India, and China flared (footnote). As regions along the Baltoro batholith re-opened, an Austrian team in 1970 climbed K6 in the Hushe Valley, and initial forays on the steep walls along the Biafo Glacier began with an attempt on Baintha Brakk (the Ogre) in 1971. In 1974, Momin Hamid fell to his death during an attempt at Paiju, and Masherbrum La was traversed, but the rocky granite towers further along the Baltoro Glacier were among the last Karakoram peaks to open due to its access to Sia La, the pass to the Siachen glacier near the line of control between Pakistan and India.

footnote: On one of the last 1960s mountaineering expeditions to the Baltoro, on August 4, 1963 a team from Japan summited Baltoro Kangri (formerly Golden Throne). Professor Seihei Kato, leader; Dr. Hyoriki Watanabe, deputy leader; Sumio Shima, Keiko Fujimoto, Kiyoki Okada, Takeo Shibata, Shoji Seki, Masaru Kono, Matoo Yanagisawa, Naoyuki Morita, Yoshichika Takenouchi, Tokutaro Noguchi; and the Pakistani liaison officer, Captain M. Afsar Khan. 200 porters stocked basecamp and Camp II.

Tools

In the decade of the Baltoro’s closure, standards had risen, and as access increased, and in contrast to expeditions with dozens of personnel and hundreds of porters stocking basecamp, the idea emerged that small lightweight teams could climb even the giant alpine challenges in the Karakoram. Lighter-weight expedition clothing and shelter, improved ice and clean climbing tools, and increased skill simplified the trade-offs between the climb’s technical severity and natural hazards, as smaller teams could more efficiently dispatch dangerous ice couloirs, often found on the approaches to major features. New Karakoram challenges became envisioned as the new tools enabled faster vertical travel on ice and rock, expanding ideas of what was possible.

Yosemite Super-Alpinists

In the 1963 American Alpine Journal, Yvon Chouinard predicted that "Yosemite will, in the near future, be the training ground for a new generation of super-alpinists who will venture forth to the high mountains of the world and do the most esthetic and difficult walls on the face of the earth." James P. McCarthy, Layton Kor, Richard McCracken, and Royal Robbins immediately proved the prediction in 1963 with their ascent of the southeast wall of Mount Proboscis, "one of the most elegantly direct routes that one can hope to climb." (Jim McCarthy); in the decades that followed, Yosemite continued to foster super-alpinists who ventured forth, and it was in this spirit that the 1977 Great Trango team gathered.

Footnote: In the 1966 Alpine Journal (UK), Chouinard’s quote appears with a ‘merely’: “Yosemite Valley will in the near future be merely the training ground for a new generation of alpinists who will venture forth to the high mountains of the world to do the most aesthetic and difficult walls wherever they may be found.”

Dennis Hennek

The 1977 American Karakoram expedition was led by Dennis Hennek, who thrived in one of Yosemite’s interim periods, between the fading ‘Golden Age’ of the later 1960s and the well-known long hard and free climbing era of the early 1970s (when Hennek was venturing in the high mountains). In 1966, Hennek climbed a three-day first ascent on Sentinel with Ken Boche, quite a feat in the days of only pitons for protection and aid, and in 1968 the five-day second ascent of the North American Wall with Don Lauria, then considered one of the hardest bigwalls in the world. In 1971 and 1972, Hennek spent his summers among the rock walls of Baffin Island, climbing many Sentinel-sized bigwalls in arctic conditions in fast time with various partners. With Doug Scott, Paul Braithwaite, and Paul Nunn, they climbed the east pillar of Asgard and attempted the prize bigwall line envisioned on the imposing west wall of the north tower, which was later soloed by Charlie Porter in 1975. Hennek was also at the forefront of new clean technology with the first clean ascent of the northwest wall of Half Dome with Doug Robinson and Galen Rowell in 1973.

Hennek’s first trip to the Karakoram in 1975 (see sidebar) did not go as planned or hoped, but the experience flowed into the 1977 American Karakoram Expedition.

SIDEBAR: 1975 American Karakoram Expedition.

When Galen Rowell wrote in Climbing Magazine in 1979, “To date, only a very few Americans had taken technical climbing in the Himalaya. In 1977 I was lucky to be a member of the only expedition from America that had successfully broken the trend. We climbed the virgin Great Trango Tower in the Karakoram Himalaya,” he was glossing over an expedition organised by Dennis Hennek in 1975. This included an all-star cast of climbers including Don Lauria, Yvon Chouinard, Doug Tompkins, George Lowe, and Micheal Covington, all among the best alpinists and bigwall climbers of the era. A film crew also accompanied the team. In 2017, Don Lauria wrote one of the best Supertopo trip reports of the 1975 expedition, which, unlike the famous First California Funhog Expedition to Patagonia with several of the same team who climbed Fitzroy in 1968, the trip sounds like a very trying expedition for all involved, with more than the usual spirit-destroying trip delays due to paperwork in Rawalpindi, stomach problems, transport and porter challenges.

The plan was to set up their main base camp at Urdukas, with a grand view of the Baltoro Cathedrals. From there, they would scout and climb objectives on the other side of the Baltoro Glacier and set up advanced camps. Without a specific objective, the team split into smaller groups with some successes and frustrating failures, often due to severe weather or sickness. After summiting Lobsang Peak (6225m) at 2:45pm, Hennek, Lauria, and Covington decided on the summit, “Such a nice day we decided to stay,” and Lauria wrote of the sunset scene: “Mustagh Tower, Pyramid Peak, Broad Peak, Gasherbrum IV, Chogalisa, Nameless Tower, Masherbrum – alpenglow like no one ever sees. Also noted some dark ominous clouds drifting in from the west – not a good sign.” Indeed, in the middle of that Karakoram night, exposed with no tent, at high-altitude on a steep peak, a storm moved in, resulting in an epic descent the next day back to Mustagh Meadows, their advanced camp, racing “the impending and certain avalanches that would fill our tracks”. The trip might not have extended technical climbing in the Himalaya, as Rowell noted, but the experience provided valuable information about alpinism in the Karakoram and a clearer strategy for climbing objectives in the future.

END SIDEBAR

Kim Schmitz, Galen Rowell, John Roskelley

The other super-alpinists of the 1977 American Karakoram Expedition team were Kim Schmitz, Galen Rowell, and John Roskelley, with a vast depth of experience; stories of their amazing climbing careers fill books. Schmitz was one of the fastest bigwall climbers of the era, having climbed a new route on El Capitan in three days in 1971 with Jim Bridwell (amidst media circuses focused on the longest time ever spent on El Capitan), and was known for his fearlessness and as a dancer on hard alpine climbs in North and South America. Galen Rowell needs no introduction, well-known for his mountain photography; in the 1970s he was among the leading Sierras climbers, honed on hard vertical alpine rock and ice, experience on K2, as well as an extensive record of technical bigwall climbs in Yosemite, Bugaboos, and other North American bigwalls.

The team had plenty of bigwall and alpine climbing experience but Roskelley perhaps had the widest-ranging ‘training grounds’ on the testpiece alpine and ice climbs. For Roskelley, Yosemite was not as much his primary training ground but perhaps more his exam room. During his ‘brief stays’ in Yosemite, including a full spring to fall season in 1971, he consistently made noteworthy bigwall ascents, and set records unmatched for years, including a three-day third ascent of the North American Wall with Mead Hargis (footnote). Also on the Great Trango team were two doctors: Jim Morrissey, a member of the 1969 and 1973 American Dhauligiri Expeditions, and Lucian Buscaglia, who helped fund the expedition.

Footnote: In the mid-1980s, Mead Hargis was a Park Ranger, and worked with our Camp 4 climber rescue team on many search and rescues. We often wondered at how he had climbed the North American Wall in the pre-cam days (1971) in three days (two point five days more precisely) with Roskelley. Mead always just said, humbly, ‘I guess we were fast.’ Note: In his collection of vignettes with morals, Stories Off The Wall (Mountaineers, 1993), Roskelley does not relate the story of climbing Great Trango Tower (but covers Uli Biaho in depth—next chapter).

The first ascent of Great Trango Tower

With the team’s vast experience, it was time to merge their skills to summit the unclimbed high-altitude Great Trango Tower. The team arrived in Rawalpindi during one of Pakistan’s frequent military coups—the Pakistan army had recently deposed Prime Minister Bhutto and declared martial law. Remarkably, the team was able to fly to Skardu after a speedy week of expedition paperwork, and seven days later, with the help of twenty porters hired in Dasso, they established basecamp on the Trango Glacier near the junction of the Baltoro Glacier. Galen describes their basecamp as a sandy moat with running water and “countless wild roses, fireweed, buttercups, and the tracks of ibex, mountain sheep, brown bear, fox and snow leopard.”

The climb, day 1

After waiting out a few days of storms and avalanches, the team began their ascent on July 19. A major objective hazard of their line on Great Trango is a huge hanging snowfield that forms the south side of the Pulpit. The snowfield frequently avalanches, funnelling debris into a steep couloir below the notch between Great Trango and the lower peak to the south (Trango Château). Starting before dawn, soloing with four ropes in their heavy packs, the team started up this funnel. After four hours of rapid climbing and ever-aware of the snowfield’s afternoon avalanche pattern, Galen, John, Kim and Dennis reached the notch at noon. Jim Morrissey, following behind more slowly, was in the gulley when the snowfield avalanched, and was nearly swept away with Lou Buscaglia but soon rejoined the team, and set up their first bivouac in the notch (footnote).

Footnote: In Baltoro,Montagnes de Lumière (mountains of light), Louis Audoubert describes this moment (translated from French): “On July. 19, as soon as the good weather returns, they begin with the prospect of alpine or semi-alpine style climbing. It is with great apprehension that they pack their bags and head out into the hallway. Around noon, they took shelter of the large bastion and began to prepare the bivouac. They believe that the time of choice has come: not everyone can climb, but who will give up? Should we eliminate the two doctors: Lou Buscaglia and James Morrissey? But they are precisely the ones who participated most financially in the expedition... However, they have less experience... They are at this point in their procrastination, when the much feared avalanche is triggered. However, Buscaglia and Schmitz are still going up in the corridor. The waterfall of blocks rushes into the corridor and it is by a miracle that the rope party avoids it. Faced with these dangers, Buscaglia withdrew. They will therefore continue with five, Buscaglia will be waiting for them in the tent.” note: both Hennek and Rowell report it was Buscaglia and Morrissey who were still in the gulley when the snowfield avalanched.

The climb, day 2

From their camp at the notch, the next morning Galen and Kim continued up steep rock to the lower part of the snowfield which involved difficult free climbing and some aid, trailing ropes for Dennis, John and Jim, who followed with the food and bivouac equipment (Lou stayed remained the notch camp with the team’s only tent). In repacking loads at the notch, somehow much of the food got left behind. Once on the snowfield, all five followed a fresh avalanche tracks up the snowfield, and at the base of a steep ridge that led to the summit, chopped out a bivouac platform for their second night.

The climb, day 3

The upper part of the route finally visible, on the third day, the team awoke to a clear, sub-freezing day—perfect conditions for the final climb. John and Dennis set off, trailing ropes for Kim, Galen, and Jim. Dennis recalls, “This section offered some of the best climbing of the entire route. Orange granite as solid as any I have ever seen, formed the gradually steepening walls of the chimney. Using nuts and (ice) screws for protection, we cramponed up the chimney’s back. In the upper section, mixed rock and crampon techniques brought us back on the ridge again. The ridge disappeared gradually into a gulley that led to a corniced notch below the summit. John led the last roped pitch above the notch that ended in some boulders below a snow plateau leading to the summit. By 4:30 all five of us stood on the summit. The afternoon was warm and clear, with an unobstructed unforgettable view in all directions. We all agreed that there could be no better view of the Baltoro Karakakorm” (Hennek, 1978 AAJ).

The team descended in two days, “bursting with joy inside”, and once safely back to basecamp, “renewed their contacts with running water, living things, level ground, and the trail homeward.” (Rowell, Climbing 53). As Rowell noted, the first ascent of the Great Trango Tower might not have raised the “standards of height or difficulty in Himalayan climbing,” but it merged the full range of climbing and alpinism disciplines, and the elite teamwork for their three-day ascent led the way for future small-team super-alpinism on the rocky challenges of the Baltoro. Hennek sums up in the 1978 American Alpine Journal, “We proved to ourselves that a small, well-organized party can be successful in the Himalaya.”

Postscript/reference

(notes on post-GT climbs and guiding tk)

APPENDIX more 1970s bigwalls:

Alps, 1980s.

In terms of training grounds for hard bigwall routes like those in the Trango Towers, in the 1980s Chamonix was one of the world’s great locales—plenty of climbing partners and cheap living in Snell’s field (closed in 1991) brought comers from all over the world, and every season natural climbing lines were envisioned and weaved between the classic bigwall routes of the prior era. Free climbing was of the highest standards, but the stigma of every move needing to be ‘free’ was often preceded by a style that preferred efficiency over the eventual rating. Some called the style “French free” which occasionally involved pulling or stepping on gear for short sections, but mostly boldly climbing in rock boots with clean climbing gear, the limits ever-expanding each year with improving skills and tools—ever more precise ranges of camming devices and small nuts that could be wedged in natural cracks of all sizes and shapes. Hammered-in pitons and sometimes bolts were also used for these first ascents, and generally left fixed in place for future parties following without a hammer, This pragmatic style was well-suited to the region's unpredictable weather and short windows of opportunity for climbing between storms, and leading practitioners were creating elegant and fun lines that could be climbed fast and light. In 1985, Mountain Magazine called the style the “modern idiom” of hard rock routes and noted activists such as the Swiss guide Michel Piola as “the most prolific pioneer’ on the Chamonix granite, and known for his ‘eye-for-a-line’ (as well as the skills to climb them).

Topos

Not only was Piola eyeing and climbing aesthetic lines of travel up the granite walls, but he was also the leading topo artist of the era. His guidebooks such as his Le Topo du massif du Mont-Blanc guide published in 1985 inspired a whole generation of climbers who could imagine the pitch-by-pitch climbing with a line illustration overlaid on a sketch of the feature, much better than the written descriptions of earlier guides. The guides and topos helped foster a new breed of popular ‘classics’ on the rock towers of Chamonix.

Danse Trango

In 1987, Piola joined the Franco/Swiss expedition to Trango, to first climb the west wall of Trango Tower, an imposing overhanging buttress no one had yet attempted. The team included two highly experienced Himalayan and Karakoram climbers and guides, Stéphane Schaffter (Club Alpin Suisse), and Michel Fauquet (Club Alpin Français), who had both planned Himalayan/Karakoram double-headers that season—to climb an 8000m peak and a new route on Trango Tower, between attempts of the south face of Lhotse and Makalu. Patrick Delale, who with Schaffter had experience on technical walls in Peru, and Piola traveled to Skardu where they met the two seasoned Himalayan climbers on May 24.

The expedition was a three-sport adventure: mountain bikes for the approach, climbing gear for the wall, and a parapente for the descent. Mountain bikes at the time were in their infancy (hardtails and hard fronts, too), and were ridden on the approach to the Baltoro Glacier. Back then it was a three-day trek along the steep sides of the Braldu River from the closest road in Dasso to Askole, with steep but well-trodden paths between villages, and from there another three days to the Baltoro Glacier.

The line

In his article Danse Trango in Mountain Magazine reporting of the Franco/Swiss ascent of Trango Tower in 1987, Piola notes the tactics as ‘bigwall climbing California style’, where the eye for an aesthetic line, linking natural features, is a core skillset of the style. Fauquet, too, had bold visions of the possible; his bold attempt on the Ogre in 1983 was legendary—as a team of two, with Vincent Fine they climbed 900m of the difficult south pillar of the Ogre using modern aid techniques amidst hard free climbing, 24 pitches in 5 days with hanging bivouacs and no fixed safety rope to the ground—a committing effort and one of the boldest alpine bigwall forays at the time. Storms prevented the final 200m to the summit, but the attempt opened eyes to a new level of alpinism that wasn’t matched for some years.

The west buttress of Trango is steep and long (1100m), with the difficulties beginning much closer to the Trango Glacier than the British and Slovene route, the latter being climbed at the same time from the Dunge Glacier—see this post). The initial shield of the west buttress is overhanging and fractured, and picking out a safe and elegant line was the first order of study. The plan was to climb and fix ropes through this shield up to the first natural ledges on the route, 600m up, followed by an uncertain link to a crack system on the upper headwall, and from there go fast and light to the summit.

Piola explains the strategy in Mountain 119, “We split the team as follows: Stéphane with Tchouky, Patrick and myself. The two teams worked together better and better as the expedition progressed, alternating days on the mountain fixing the route and then resting.” After five weeks of hard climbing and hauling, the ropes were eventually in place and anchored above the lower wall’s final overhanging pitches, and Camp Two was set up on the snow ledges above. After a false start requiring descending and reascending the fixed ropes from basecamp, and a few days rest in between, on June 22 the team began a final two-day light and fast climb up through the final headwall, which began as a knifeblade crack and widened to an offwidth chimney. The summit reached, they found no sign of the Slovene team’s ascent who had been there a week before, and set up for their third “first world’s record” (Bal à Trango), a paragliding flight from the summit of Trango Tower.

Parapente technology, 1987

Like mountain biking, in 1987 paragliding was in its infancy. People had been foot-launching skydiving parachutes for over a decade, but in the mid-1980s, new parapente-specific designs became available. The first production designs were square canopies, like skydiving parachutes, but without the need to withstand the high shock forces using new lightweight non-porous fabrics, stiffer lines, and cell openings designed to enable easier launching from a running start. These first-generation parapentes generally had 7-cell or 9-cell openings, a low stall speed, and terrible glide performance (3:1 touted, but generally less). Cliff launching these early wings usually meant a drop of a dozen meters before actual flight began, but the advantage of the simple square design with large ram-air openings is that these early wings generally did not stall or collapse during low-wind, short take-off, cliff launches.

With Chamonix as the epicenter, with its easy teleferique rides to launch sites, incredible feats were made possible with the new descent tool. People were climbing Mont Blanc in hours and descending in minutes. In March 1986, Jean-Marc Boivin climbed four north walls one winter day: Aiguille Verte (2hrs), Les Droites(3.5hrs), Des Cortes(2.5hrs), and finishing with the Shroud on the Grandes Jorasses(6.5hrs), with quick paragliding descents between each climb, landing in Chamonix at 10:30pm, less than a 18-hour round trip. Christophe Profit descended from the Walker Spur with a paraglider for a winter solo trilogy in 1987 that included the north walls of the Eiger and the Matterhorn, and would later become the first to paraglide from Everest in 1988. These early wings were touted, and well used, as climbing descent vehicles, and amidst a lot of accidents, climbers were extending their potential to launch from tight summits.

[The original simple designs began evolving into higher performance elliptical designs in 1989 when competition began and paragliding boomed as a sport. The second-generation wings (1989)were larger and had more cells, and were not as suitable for low-wind, short take-off cliff launches due to a higher stall speed, and more lines to evenly load.

First paraglider descent, Trango Tower 1987

For the expedition’s goal of a third “world’s first” (in addition to mountain biking and climbing), once on the summit of Trango Tower, Michel Fauquet prepared a launch site on the west shoulder, and with Piola and Delale holding the wing in position, he took a few strides in the light evening breeze and launched over the cliff; ten minutes later, 2000m lower, he landed in basecamp, proving that from even the world’s tallest and high-altitude rocky tower could be flown and descended by paraglider. It was a bigwall climber’s dream come true. The rest of the team descended by rappel over two days, removing most of the fixed ropes. After a four-day trek, the team returned to Islamabad with its endless expedition paperwork requirements, celebrating their first ascent on Trango Tower and a fantastic adventure.

Authors Note: I was also trying to find the launch limits of these early paragliders. John Bouchard was importing ones made in France to the USA under the brand ‘Feral’, and I was the recipient of one of the first four he brought to America. After a couple of days of frustrating ground handling in strong winds in Bishop, California, my very first flight was a 2000-foot cliff launch in Baffin Island in 1986. It was an exciting start, and I continued to push my limits of cliff launching with the idea that one day I would use my paraglider to descend from a remote bigwall. My best cliff launch was from the Moki Dugway in Utah, which involved pulling the glider overhead in a light wind followed by a step off the edge of a 300m cliff (boldly or foolhardily uncertain).

Postscript notes:

From Alpinist 11 (Michel Piola, translated from the French by Eric Bye): A brief reflection on the real or relative commitment of a big wall, wherever it's located in the world. I have always been convinced that total commitment has to be seen more in light of a team's reduced size (two people) and a climb's remoteness rather than a chosen style of ascent. In fact, a rock wall is never committing per se, even on the Trango Towers; by definition descent is always possible by rappelling. So it's the ascent and the effort as a pair (rather than as a team of four with alternating days of action and rest), it's the moral responsibility and the difficulties of escaping a bad spot or ensuring an evacuation that define the commitment.

Also, the tendency to discriminate, even for a "light" roped party, against a method that uses a few fixed ropes at the bottom of a wall, is incomprehensible to me! My experiences have shown me that lighter is always quicker. This formula is one I've arrived at by way of some epic nonstop assaults on summits without bivouac equipment; it's quicker than the more generally adopted capsule style, a technique I have also tried and one that is, in fact, often more comfortable. But doing big walls surpasses this little quarrel of styles, for climbing these walls represents an art of living fully that improves everyone and that you practice as close as possible to your dreams, your courage and your passion.

Second Ascent, 2006 report (Lindsay Griffin): Gran Diedre Desplomado (VI 5.11 A4, 1100m, Delale-Schaffter-Fauquet-Piola, 1987). In July, the Swiss team of Francesco Pellanda, Giovanni Quirici and Christophe Steck, accompanied by photographer Evrard Wendenbaum, made the second ascent of the route, freeing all but three pitches. After twelve days' work, and five nights on the wall, the Swiss reached the summit on August 2. Though they had completed the route's second ascent, they had used aid on pitches 13 (A4), 15 (A3) and 16 (A3). They estimate the 13th pitch would go completely free at around 5.13b. It is notable that despite the efforts of some of the world's best climbers, the Tower continues to put up a stiff challenge. This route involves considerable amounts of hard aid climbing, more or less confirmed by the highly experienced Spanish big-wall climber Alfredo Mandinabeita, who attempted the second ascent of the route, solo, to half height in 2004.

More Trango Tower history series by John Middendorf:

Trango Towers chronology of climbs

Minamiura’s Solo of Trango, 1990

Trango 1988a—Geology of the region 

Trango 1988b—Kurtyka-Loretan

Trango 1988 sidebar—meeting Erhard Loretan 

Trango 1987a: —The Slovene Route (1987)

What’s in a name?—Trango—history of the mapping and naming of Trango Towers

Trango 1987c: Le Trango Château (Castle)

Trango 1987b-3rd ascent Trango Tower (this post)

On overcoming challenges (slowly)

When I was a boy in the 1960s and 1970s, I was fascinated by those who were ‘great’ at something, the word ‘great’ made most famous at the time by Mohammed Ali, the greatest at punching others and surviving bouts of bashing. I figured there must be other ways to be ‘great’, perhaps less painful, and I admit I sometimes imagined the feeling of being great, looking up into the sky, arms outreached, with a victorious expression, just like Ali.

The trouble was, that I was pretty bad at just about everything, even schoolwork in my early years. I was born with a legbone disease that had me in a metal brace and cane for years, and the cure was awkward socially and physically (one of my legs was several inches shorter than the other, and the cure was to wear a high-lift shoe on the longer leg, so the shorter one grows by necessity). The experience set me back physique-wise, too, but probably provided a good base for the fine balance climbing skills I was later to develop.

Also, I had pretty severe asthma, so wretched sometimes I had to be hospitalized. So the mandatory sports in school were always trying periods of humiliation. Playing right field for a couple of Little League games was the highlight of my young teenage years in terms of sports. Some were destined for higher greatness in sport, some were on a path of high athletic skills, while others were considered to have missed the boat, and sat on the sidelines, where I spent a lot of time. Luckily, I mostly outgrew the asthma, or perhaps compensated by sometimes pushing harder, and by the end of high school could hold my own in track and rowing events. I recall it took a lot for me to get there, expectations were low, but generally, I kept ahead of the lagging lasts, and occasionally was able to push beyond my own expectations. It is fun to see my son follow a path of hard work and results, finishing in top of his rowing season last year. In my later years, I came to appreciate that the lack of natural-born athletic talent was frustrating, but probably helped my rock climbing career in a way, as vertical skills could be continuously honed with fun practice, until almost by surprise, one day I found myself partnering with the top climbers in Yosemite on the latest testpieces, and taking risks I could never have previously imagined. Taking risks became my joy; often I would begin my day soloing a few long routes, then seek out like-minded partners to further explore the edge on the Valley’s walls and cliffs. Billy Joel’s “Only the Good Die Young” was a favorite song and indeed, sadly, many of my good friends died young in that era. It wasn’t just physical risk, the risk of choosing less-traveled paths often required greater courage. But sometimes the limits were not well understood leading to unfortunate circumstances. It was a realm that worried my mother, of course, as pushing my skillset further in rock climbing always involved greater risk, until the risk was later tamed by practice.

At least, that is what I confidently told myself (and my mother) back then; reflecting now on some wild rides on the vertical, it seems luck and good fortune were greater factors than I would have cared to admit. Or maybe it was the belief in ‘nine lives’ and the guardian angels hovering overhead.

Isabelle Paine Middendorf (1930-2016)

Speaking of my mother, even though she was terrified when I told her stories of my climbing adventures, she was always supportive of my path, even though she often did not want to hear the details. She passed into heaven on December 1, 2016 from heart failure. Today as I post these thoughts, May 14, is her birthday, she would have been 94 today. She is always in my and my family’s thoughts and we miss her lots.

Paul Pritchard's TEDx Talk on the Dignity of Risk

Paul Pritchard presented a TEDx talk here in Hobart last Saturday, on the ‘Dignity of Risk’. It was a great presentation, in all senses of the word. It cumulated Paul’s continuous path of recovery from a severe rock climbing accident on the Totem Pole in Tasmania in 1998. Although Paul’s talk was focused was providing more opportunities and acceptance for people with disabilities to take chosen risks, his message also provides inspiration to overcome day-to-day challenges and to include the perception of others in defining expectations. It was really fun to see Paul nail his talk, as I know he had been working hard on it, and it was powerfully paced, authentic, and moving. Seeing Paul’s performance in the crowded Odeon theatre felt just like the old days of watching a graceful climber onsight dance their way up a 5.12+, only this time on stage and sharing an idea.

Link to his website here:

https://www.paulpritchard.com.au

Paul’s TEDx talk will be available online by the end of June.

While researching the referenced uses of the famous Whymper hook, I realized what a versatile piece of equipment it probably was during the dawn of technical rock climbing utilizing engineered tools in the late 19th century. The double-pronged hook always had a short piece of cord attached and was carried by experts like Georg Winkler to climb ever-steeper cliffs, with the downclimb potentially assisted by an occasional cord hanging from a metal claw set on a flat edge (see Volume 1, Mechanical Advantage: Tools for the Wild Vertical on Archive.org).

Golden Hook Award

So with all the awards proliferating our sport of climbing, I looked around and discovered a lot of “golden” awards, like the Golden Piton award from Climbing Magazine, or the golden ice axes from Piolet d’Or. So I set up the Golden Hook™™ award with the national Australian Mountaineering and Climbing Club (amcc.app), and five awards have been distributed five so far.

Hooks were the first real ‘clean’ climbing tool, of course, and were largely replaced by the more secured pitons developed as the tools and materials for rock climbing advanced. The first pitons were also called ‘hooks’, various designs that were nailed into cracks for security. The last references in the literature of the so-called ‘Whymper hooks’ predate WWI, supplanted by an effective hammer, piton, and carabiner system, and well-designed clean-climbing gear wouldn’t resurface until the 1960s. Modern hooks for aid climbing, made from stronger steel, would also advance in the 1960s.

Theron Moses, of Moses Enterprises, known for quality hardware that combines old-school techniques with modern technologies, and I re-designed the Whymper hook from the only known sketch of the tool published by Whymper in his autobiography, Scrambles Amongst the Alps in the years 1860-69 (illustration above).

The award is a double-pronged hook modeled after the only existing diagram of the tool, published by Whymper (illustration above). Even though these were being built on a lark, we wanted to ensure that they would be strong, and probably much stronger than what people were relying on in the 1800s, with modern steels and heat treatments. Theron whipped out a nice batch after I sent him a simple sketch.

For this unique international climbing award, I haven’t had time to announce all the winners, so here they are so far. These are informal awards, given randomly, and note the sharing of inspiration and fun, as well as the original criteria noted below. The first two were to those who have been sharing cool progress of tools and techniques on Instagram.

#1: Genoveva aka Genofoto solo aid climber.
”I climb alone (99%) for FUN & FREEDOM mostly on small crags.”

#2: Scott Peterson, adventure climber, for inspiring toughness bigwalling in Yosemite.

The next three Golden Hook awards were given for one of the most amazing Karakoram expeditions ever, the 1990 Japan Trango expedition (draft story here).

Appendix

Original Golden Hook Criteria (submitted to the AAC) 

Grants and Awards will be based on three criteria:

1. Visionary bold bigwall lines.

2. Minimum impact--low resource impact and minimal abandoned materiel.

3. Style--committing and efficient ground-up weather-timed team ascents.

   ---

p.s. Did I mention? D4 Designs, headquartered in Tasmania, also sponsors the antipodal Java awards:

;)

• Minamiura’s Solo of Trango, 1990

• Trango 1988a—Geology of the region 

• Trango 1988b—Kurtyka-Loretan

• Trango 1988 sidebar—meeting Erhard Loretan 

• Trango 1987a: —The ‘Yugoslav Route’

• What’s in a name?—Trango—history of Trango Towers naming and mapping

• Trango Towers chronology of climbs (rough draft)

• Trango Château (Castle) —this post

Author’s note: It’s with sadness sometimes as I research the origins of a specific region, it becomes apparent there is no record of the original myths and legends of features that would have certainly been named and recognized. There is no first-hand record of the Baltoro as there was little written form of the language by the Baltis and others who traveled through and over the Karakoram. The early European explorers, more intent on mapping the valleys and peaks, often missed the landmarks in-between. Having lived with the Hopi in the wilderness for weeks, I was always amazed at how a story indelibly marked the landscape in my mind forever. The names are only for reference to the story; it is the story that marks the place. As a pathway over the Karakoram, the lower Baltoro must have been well-storied. Sad to reflect how the ethereal indigenous stories of the first majestic northern features upon entering the Baltoro, recorded by early European mapmakers as the Three Castles (or Three Cathedrals depending on who you ask), are lost to time and can only be imagined.

Trango Château

As one climbs the mouth of the Baltoro Glacier and travels along its length, on the left, northern side, very distinct towers of rock come into view, lower in elevation than the higher peaks all around, but stunning in their sheerness and scale. These towers are the remaining granite spires at the junction of the Baltoro’s side glaciers, which have been grinding down the Baltoro batholith for millions of years (geology here). The chain of rocky spires along the Baltoro extends from Paiju to Lobsang, and from various angles, the headwater towers of the northern tributaries of the Baltoro can be imagined as giant engineered structures, such as a castle or a cathedral. And three that often stood out and were sometimes named as a group by early mapmakers were the Uli Biaho, Trango, and Biale massifs.

Informally named the “Three Castles” or “Three Cathedrals” by early European explorers (perhaps depending on one’s military or religious outlook), the center one became the Castle, while the elegant spire east of the Dunge Glacier became the Cathedral (and Thunmo). Indeed, from directly across the Baltoro, the center peak between the Trango and Dunge Glaciers could most easily be imagined as an imposing castle, while, Thunmo, with its clean steeple feature, aptly could be called a grand cathedral, as Vittorio Sella’s 1909 images captured so well.

The first big rock climbs attempted and climbed in the lower Baltoro were on these headwater cathedrals and castles. In 1974, a Groupe de Haute Montagne team attempted to climb Uli Biaho’s southern buttress (footnote). In 1975 a team from Italy climbed two routes on Thunmo (‘Gran Catedral’), while a team of Yosemite hardmen made bold forays on the summits in the Lobsang Spires. Trango Tower was climbed in 1976, but attempts on the center castle were passed by, as Great Trango Tower became the more compelling objective, climbed in 1977 by an American team. By 1979, Uli Biaho Tower was climbed by its most sheer wall, and the south pillar of Lobsang Spire became the dream bigwall climb with its “cracks and dihedrals leading up through 2000-foot-high blank walls of solid red granite.” (Doug Scott—stories of these climbs in other chapters).

Footnote: Uli Biaho Tower was then identified as “the granite tooth which lies between the Uli Biaho and Trango glaciers and between Payu Peak and Trango Towers. It is given as 6083 meters (19,958 feet) on the map accompanying G.O. Dyhrenfurth’s Baltoro.” The 1974 team consisted of Michel Février, Jean François Porret, Raymond Coène, Pierre Beguin, Dominique Marquis and Jean Fréhel.

First climbs on Trango Château (Castle)

The Trango Château was the last of the castles and cathedrals rising directly above the Baltoro to be climbed. Of the many potential routes to the summit of this formidable mass of stone, Erik Decamp, Robert Wainer, and Patrick Cordier chose a steep route directly up the southern wall, and in 1983 climbed 1200m (50 pitches) of mostly hard rock climbing alpine-style over four days with three bivouacs on natural ledges, weaving their way up to one of the formation’s summits (5200m) which they called Le Château. The Château was referenced as ‘the easternmost of the Trango Towers’, and for a short time was also known as the ‘first Trango Tower’ (but not to be confused with Trango I identified the highest peak deep in the Trango Massif). After the 1983 climb, the French ‘Château’ replaced the English ‘Castle’ in many journals. The highest point had not yet been reached, but the opportunity for long alpine rock routes on the formation became clear, and the name began to stick.

1n 1985, two expeditions from Japan attempted the peak. In June, members of the Hosei University Mountaineering Club, Yoshimitu Takatori, Satosi Sidou and Masaru Aoki, climbed a long route to another sub-summit (5400m) via the southwest buttress. Later in the season, Hiroshi Aota and Toshiyuki Kikuchi made another attempt and climbed forty pitches in two days, but without crampons or ice axes, snow and ice from a September storm resulted in a miserable bivouac and a forced retreat.

In 1987, Reiki and Yukiko Nonaka, Toshikazu Fujita, Takao Sasaki, and Masahiro Ito spent two weeks (August 24-September 8) climbing the huge eastern slab on the east face, then continued on the southeast buttress, to the base of a final 300m headwall guarding its summit. After climbing the final eight vertical bigwall pitches, the summit was reached, noted as “surprisingly flat and wide.” They named their route Seiryo (Star Ridge, 59 pitches). A decade after climbers reached the summit of the two major towers of the Trango Group (Trango and Great Trango), the summit of the third major tower, the Trango Château (5753m), also received a visit by an effective climbing team of five.

Next: continuing with 1987 climbs, more story on the third ascent of Nameless Tower:

Appendix:

Measurements: The measured heights of the Karakoram mountains evolve as time goes on. On modern Karakoram maps, the elevations are often inherited from earlier less precise surveys; there is still uncertainty about the relative heights of many of the glacial carved Trango Tower summits, which are all several hundred meters below their immediate more mountainous neighbors: Masherbrum (7821m), Paiju (6501m), Biale (6841m), and Trango I, Trango II, and Trango Ri higher up on the Trango ridge (footnote).

Footnote: Though lower than the surrounding mountains, the multiple summits of Great Trango and Trango Tower are all very close in elevation, all part of the same block of a young and uniform 2500m granite batholith, glacially carved and continuously eroding (see this post). Regarding surveys, it is easier to triangulate the higher mountains than the lower rocky summits which have limited visibility from various vantage points. Masherbrum (then K1) was the mountain most of interest to the early lower Baltoro surveyors.

Names: Names of the peaks and glaciers also change and evolve—before the European expeditions began measuring and mapping the peaks and valleys of the Karakoram in the 19th century, many landmarks had indigenous namings based on legend and story. What began as a name for a campsite was applied by early mapmakers to a nearby glacier, and then applied to peaks and even entire regions. The Baltoro Glacier’s name seems to derive from the name of a Balti campsite far downstream past Askole, and the original meaning of ‘Baltoro’ appears lost to time. (footnote).

Footnote: Ad Carter in the 1975 American Alpine Journal writes: “There was little agreement on the name Baltoro. The explanation given by Burrard and Hayden* from Tibetan dPal-gTor-po (spreader of abundance) seems unlikely. Other explanations were based on bal (wool), balto (clay used to mix with wool to extract lanolin and dirt) and Balti (the people of the region).” *A sketch of the Geography and Geology of the Himalaya Mountains and Tibet by S.G. Burrard and H.H. Hayden. Delhi: Geodetic Branch, Survey of India, 1933. Fosco Maraini speculates that Balti derives from the Burushaski root, ‘Those of the rocks, of the steep-sided mountains’—other writers since have proposed other evidence and uncertain speculation. Regarding elevations, the 1990 Swiss Foundation for Alpine Research published elevations in the Karakoram seem to be the most accepted, with Trango Tower measured at 6239 meters.

The protocol for the early mapmakers was to use local names when naming features, and perhaps slip in a few eponymous names, such as the Younghusband Glacier named for captain Francis Younghusband (1863-1942), who traversed the length of the Himalayan-Karakoram chain with his Kings Dragoon Guards in 1887. Until the 1930s, names in the Karakoram were pretty fluid, depending on the mapmaker and language, but by 1937, a Karakoram committee within the Royal Geographical Society was established to confirm named features. (footnote).

Footnote: As India (and Pakistan) were still a British colony until 1947, The Royal Geographic Society worked closely with the Survey of India to create official names; some places got special treatment: “The practice of the Survey of India in the past has been that no names should be entered on its maps, of areas for which it considers itself responsible, unless they have been found to be of local or at least indigenous origin. It has admittedly departed from this practice in the case of Mount Everest, but it will be generally agreed that the highest mountain in the world is entitled to special treatment, especially when the result was so euphonious. In the absence of a local or indigenous name, the old practice was to allot a symbol, usually a letter and a number. This practice has however been abandoned on our maps for many years except in the case of K2 which, as probably the second highest mountain, is perhaps also entitled to special treatment. (Kenneth Mason, Karakoram Nomenclature, The Geographic Journal, Feb. 1938). Also of course is the Godwin-Austen Glacier, named for Henry Haversham Godwin-Austen (1834-1923), the first European explorer to the area (1861).

First detailed map of the Baltoro

The alpinist and mapmaker Martin Conway (1856-1937) created the first detailed map of the Baltoro Glacier, using simple and portable surveying instruments (a 3-inch transit theodolite and a small plane-table), and the latest photogrammetry survey techniques. He describes his six-month journey in 1892, climbing and surveying: “Every detail of rock faces, ridges, ice-falls, and the like that time permitted to be sketched in on the spot was recorded. Over a thousand photographs were taken for the purpose of further elaboration of detail in the redrawing at home. As works of art the photographs were not very good; but they were invaluable for topographical purposes. On my return to England I spent nearly four months in drawing out the whole map afresh, on the scale of one inch to a mile, and colouring it as in the published copy.”

1894: Trango’s first name: Uli Biaho

A close-up of Conway’s map reveals his naming of the first major tributary of the Baltoro as the Uli Biaho Glacier. The most prominent feature rising above this glacier is now named Uli Biaho Tower, but the name was later moved south to identify a smaller dead-end glacier to the southwest. As a major tributary of the Baltoro, this valley was a potential passageway to Xinjiang to the north. Conway’s mapping of the glacier's far reaches and upper branches was of strategic interest. One of the aims of the European explorers and mapmakers was to find routes from Askole to the Shaksgam Valley, a strategic border region in southern China (formerly part of Kashmir and still in dispute—in 1937 Eric Shipton famously found a route to the Shaksgam Valley via the Trango Glacier as recorded in his book, Blank on the Map). The only pass known at the time to the Royal Geographic Society that crossed the Karakoram from the Baltoro was the Mustagh Pass, made famous by Younghusband’s crossing from the north, but with its exact location still unclear.

1907: Trahonge Luma

During his search and mapping of Mustagh pass in 1903, August Ferber surveyed the lower Baltoro and in 1907, submitted a new map to The Geographic Journal, labeling Conway’s Uli Biaho glacier as the Trahonge Luma (Trahonge Valley). Although Ferber researched and provided some local sources for naming, for example, “Mustagh (= ice mountain) Pir (= pass), in the heart of the Karakoram (= black gravel)”, there is no hint of the origin of Trahonge, the linguistic root of what was to become Trango. Curiously, the first version of this map (based on photographs with no elevation data) named the glacier ‘Tramgo’, and the Trahonge and Tramgo names co-existed for a few decades. (footnote).

Footnote: The original map was created by Charles Jacot-Guillarmod (1868 - 1925), a Swiss topographical engineer, well known for stunning high alpine cartography of the Swiss Alps using photogrammetry (which does not require a survey, only photographs). Charles Jacot-Guillarmod also created the “Mount Everest and the group of Chomo Lungma” map in 1925. The photographs were collected by Jules Jacot-Guillarmod, Charles’ cousin and mountaineer, during his trekking along the Baltoro Glacier to K2 during the 1902 Eckenstein-Wessely-Guillarmod expedition (often now known as the notorious ‘Crowley K2 expedition’). August Ferber used this map for his 1907 Royal Geographic survey results. In the chronicle of the 1909 Abruzzi expedition, De Filippi notes the discrepancy: “Conway gathered names from the natives for most of these tributary glaciers. Guillarmod made further inquiry, and changed the names about from one glacier to another, adding new ones. Ferber kept these names for the glaciers, but added others for the valleys down which they run. The Workmans, too, rearranged or changed the names given by Conway to the confluents of the Hispar glacier. Probably every voyager to these regions at intervals of a few years could collect data for further changes. It is evidently not alone in the inhabited portions of Baltistan that the names of valleys and rivers change. It is to the interest of the geographer to establish a fixed nomenclature—he cannot be expected to conform with capricious changes. The Duke has adopted in his map the nomenclature of Guillarmod, as being simpler than that of Ferber.” (Karakorm and Western Himalaya 1909, Filippo de Filippi, 1912).

1929: Tramgo to Trango

The Italians were also interested in filling the blanks on the Baltoro maps in the early 20th century. The Duke of Abruzzi, whose primary interest was to climb K2 in 1909, referred to the lower Baltoro peaks as “stony wastes” and referenced the side glaciers as various northern ‘confluents’ without much fuss about the names (though the expedition did produce a detailed map of the Upper Baltoro). In the account of the expedition, Tramgo Glacier is only referenced in a panorama photograph:

In 1929, the Duke of Spoleto followed in Abruzzi’s footsteps and produced a further Baltoro map, this one focused on the complete passage from Askole over Muztagh Pass to the Shaksgam Valley to the east. Although the trip’s geologist and geographer, Ardito Desio, referred to the Trango Glacier as Tramgo with a ‘m’, the Royal Geographic Society published the name as Trango in a preliminary map. Perhaps it was a typo, not acknowledged until 1938 when the name was officially changed to Trango within the Royal Geographic Society.

Footnote: Kenneth Mason, Co-founder of The Himalayan Club in 1928 and the keeper of Karakoram names within the Royal Geographic Society, and who later wrote Abode of Snow: A History of Himalayan Exploration and Mountaineering in 1955, notes of the map in 1938: The heights of various conspicuous summits are given on Spoleto's map (of 1929) between the Trango and Dunge glaciers, but we do not know the height of the most conspicuous summit, the Trango Tower. The spelling Trango is probably better than Spoleto's Tramgo, or the older Survey spelling Trahonge.” —Kenneth Mason, Karakoram Nomenclature, The Geographical Journal, Vol. 91, No. 2 (Feb. 1938). What ‘Trango’ originally meant is still a mystery; Ad Carter records it as deriving from Tramga, the name of an ancient shepherd’s hut near the confluence of the Trango and Baltoro glaciers, which makes sense as the way Guillarmod described it. whereas the Balti cook on one of Greg Child’s expeditions, Rasool, said Trango likely came from the local word Tengos, for a bottle of hair oil, presumably resembling the slender Trango Tower. No one knows, the origin is lost to time. Regarding Tramga/Trango, Fran Middendorf (my sister, fluent in Italian) writes this: “Up in the Dolomites there is a particular dialect (Ladin)and Tramga might have come out of that dialect. Trango has a masculine ending and sounds more appealing to the English ear. All the letters have the same pronunciation basically in both English and Italian -the a is a bit longer- aaa the r has a roll but the n,m, and g are hard sounds like in English.”

Tramgo persists: Regardless of the Royal Geographic Society’s spelling, Italian maps and journals continued to use “Tramgo” even into the 1980s:

1938: Trango Group still nameless:

While the two names for the first major tributary of the Baltoro coexisted, the rocky towers between the Trango Glacier and Dunge Glacier were still grouped and identified as part of the Paiju Group of peaks, and sometimes part of the Lobsang Group. The border tug of war was settled in February 1938, when Kenneth Mason was the first to differentiate the Trango Group in his article Karakoram Nomenclature in The Geographic Journal, setting the name ‘Trango’ in stone, so to speak: “Trango group, east of the Paiju group, includes the mountains east of the main trunk of the Trango glacier and those west of the Dunge glacier (longitude 76º 13'). And now, with their own name, the individual summits began to be surveyed and labeled.

The story of Nameless Tower (1961-1975)

Speaking of names, or lack of them, the well-known story of Nameless Tower can be briefly recounted here. ‘Nameless Tower’ appears as ‘Exhibit One’ of the ‘world’s most spectacular museum of Shape and Form’ in the 1961 book, Karakoram: the Ascent of Gasherbrum IV, by Fosco Maraini. Maraini describes the Towers of Trango that appear in many Karakoram photographs and highlights the “superb shaft rising between the First Cathedral of the Baltoro and the Trango Peaks” (between the Château and Trango Ri). Dubbing the inaccessible peak ‘Nameless’ intrigued the broader climbing community as well as those who had passed through Urdukas on their way to the bigger mountains in the 1950s and imagined its first ascent. Pakistan border conflicts closed the area to climbing from 1961-1974, and when the region finally re-opened to mountaineering, the competition for the sole permit allocated to the Trango group, to climb the fabled ‘Nameless Tower’, was international.* After the first attempt in 1975, the Alpine Journal identified the spire as ‘Trango Tower’, and though many still think of it as ‘Nameless Tower’, Trango Tower has become the more common name.

*In 1975, nineteen mountaineering expeditions from America, Poland, France, Italy, Britain, Switzerland, Austria, and Japan were allocated permits for various objectives. The first permit for the Trango group was secured by Chris Bonnigton, the “maestro of international diplomacy.” —Jim Curran, Trango-The Nameless Tower, 1978 (story of the first attempt in 1975, and the first ascent in 1976). Regarding the 1961-1974 closure, a six-person French team were the first to obtain a Karakoram mountaineering permit for Uli Biaho Tower (then unnamed) in 1974 (unsuccessful).

Further Naming

The earliest summit surveys identified four distinct high points in the Trango Group, which today correspond to Trango Château, Great Trango, Trango Tower, and the Trango Ri’s, the snowy high peaks on the ridge past Trango Tower to the northwest. Further names will be detailed as this research progresses.

Naming Tidbit: The prominent spire at the end of Trango Glacier, now called Shipton Spire, was originally named L‘Ainablak, and that name was shifted to coin the more concealed spires to the south of it. From the 1999 AAJ: [Directed by Greg Child, Bernard Domenech (France) contacted the AAJ in the autumn of 1998 with a note on the naming of Shipton Spire. He wrote, “[In the 1936 expedition report], Ardito Desio gave the mountain [the name of Hainablak] because his porters, [who were from] the Baltic region, named it this way. [They]... remember that the remarkable wall opposite Brangsa, the last bivouac before the traverse [into China], always used to be called Hainablak....”] A letter to the AAJ 1999 from Ghulam Parvi clarifies “The shape of Shipton Spire looks like a hard and smooth surface. When there is rain or the nearby water and snow give light, the reflection of the peak looks like a mirror. The local Braldu valley people call Shipton Spire “(H)aina Brakk” (pronouced ‘aa- ee-na blakk’).” A neighboring tower, Cat’s Ears, is another recent name.

Next: Climbs on The First Baltoro Cathedral, known by many names (First ascent of Le Château, 1987).

Appendix:

Trango Tower History series (in order as written)

Trango Towers chronology of climbs

Minamiura’s Solo of Trango, 1990

Trango 1988a—Geology of the region

Trango 1988b—Kurtyka-Loretan

Trango 1988 sidebar—meeting Erhard Loretan

Trango 1987a: —The Slovene Route (1987)

What’s in a name?—Trango—history of the mapping and naming of Trango Towers

Trango 1987c: Le Trango Château (Castle)

Trango 1987b: —West Pillar of Trango Tower, parapente descent

Great Trango Tower first ascent (1977)

State of the Art Climbng Tools, 1976

Print Versions of Mechanical Advantage: Tools for the Wild Vertical here!

Index to Mechanical Advantage Series (2021-2023)

The development of big wall tools and techniques by John Middendorf

Volume 1:

Foreword APR 3, 2022

Tools and Climbing Styles Mechanical Advantage (introduction). OCT 5, 2021

early days:

In the Beginning: Subtle Means and Engines

Pre-1492 climbing tools MAY 10, 2021

18th Century Mountaineering MAY 17, 2021

American Trail Builders, 1800's MAY 19, 2021

The rise of iron for ascent JUN 22, 2021

Rope Technology in the 19th century JUN 27, 2021

Early pitons:

Climbing Pitons Early Evolution--part 1a--Origin of the term "piton", and Marmolada JUL 26, 2021

Climbing Pitons Early Evolution--part 1b--Alpine ways and artificial aids. JUL 28, 2021

Climbing Pitons Early Evolution--part 1c--Mauerhaken AUG 2, 2021

Mizzi Langer -- first advertised rock climbing pitons (Mauerhaken) JUL 14, 2021

Climbing Pitons Early Evolution--part 1d--Inline pitons and the rise of steel AUG 4, 2021

Climbing Pitons Early Evolution-part 1e--Fiechtlhaken Design. AUG 20, 2021

Campanile Basso di Brenta SEP 3, 2021

(the above seven articles edited published in the 2022 British Alpine Journal)

Early Techniques and European innovations:

Tita Piaz-Alpinista Acrobatico (Piaz PartA) AUG 24, 2021

Tita Piaz-Speed Climber and Rope Acrobat (Piaz PartB) SEP 12, 2021

Tita Piaz-Guide and Rigging Expert (Piaz PartC) SEP 17, 2021

Tita Piaz, PartD--Big Wall Climber JAN 5, 2022

(the above four articles edited published in the 2022 American Alpine Journal)

Climbing Tools and Techniques—1908 to 1939 (Europe, PartA) Myths and Legends FEB 11, 2022

Representation of Early Women Alpinists (notesV2) DEC 2, 2021

Climbing Tools and Techniques—1908 to 1939-Aid Climbing Mastery (Europe, PartB) FEB 20, 2022

First carabiners for climbing-summary. AUG 9, 2022

1930s Climbing Tools (Europe, PartC) MAR 19, 2022

1930s climbing histories of the pre-WWI era. DEC 5, 2021 (as Appendix)

(+Oliver Perry Smith)

ARCHIVE.org Volume 1 (compiled material above in PDF)

Buy the books here

Volume 2:

Early North American Innovations:

Climbing Tools and Techniques—early North American Developments to 1910 APR 23, 2022

Trains and Kain (Canada climbing to 1916, part 1) MAY 14, 2022

Trains and Kain (part 2) JUN 5, 2022

British Empire pitons 1920s+, notes on Japan SEPT 14, 2022

USA Adoption of pitons, 1920s - 1939 (part A) Ellingwood and Lavender (Nov, 2022)

couple new pages on Australia to 1930s.

Games Climbers Play (Dec, 2022)

Envisioning of pitons USA and Miriam O’Brien (Dec 21, 2022)

(the edited article above published in the Alpine Journal 2023)

Fallen heroes (and the climbing/politics/war/bias interface) AUG 12, 2022 (Opinion)

Early engineered rock climbing in the USA (Richard Leonard, 1934) USA part C

Zion in the 1930s (March 29, 2023)

Mystery Mountain part 1

Mystery Mountain part 2

Seque pages after Mount Waddington (40s)

Shiprock and ‘first bolts’ (1939)

Big wall bivouacs, part 1

Big Wall Bivys, part2a

Packs 1920s to 1930s

Ice Tool Developments

Volume 2 finale (U.S. Army gear, nylon ropes, and aluminum carabiners)

ARCHIVE.org Volume 2 (above material compiled)

Buy the books here

Volume 3 (to come)—the modern era

Volume 3 will being with Yosemite in the late 1940s, and the great 1950s climbs in the Alps, when lots of new tools come online.

1950s to early 60s gear —Aluminum/nylon Era

1950s Gear Notes V2 (May 18, 2023)

A5 hammer production forge process (sidebar)AUG 22, 2022

State of the Art Climbing Gear, 1964 AUG 15, 2022

• 1950s global climbs and early big walls

• Clean Revolution— nylon/aluminum/chromo era—→ Clean!

• Bolts and fixed ropes. Style and lines.

• Big Wall and Expediton Equipment evolution

OTHER ARTICLES RESEARCH & HISTORY NOTES

on Skunkworks... musings of the old days by John Middendorf JUN 6, 2022

Birdbeaks JUN 9, 2022

Monkey paw story JUL 1, 2021

D4 Delta2p Evolution (2020 John Middendorf portaledge design) AUG 2, 2021

D4 vs A5 Frame Engineering Analysis SEP 8, 2021

Big wall edges

Scared Silly

1994 Book Notes

Tribute to Ammon McNeely (2023)

Tribute to Glen Denny (2023)

AMCC Golden Hook Awards

Overcoming challenges and the Dignity of Risk

Environmental musings

On why Tasmania’s native forests call for direct action (2023)

Prologue to Tasmania Treesit history research (subsequent article published in Wild Magazine)

Partial bibliography:

in the 1980s…

Trango Tower 1987

After over a decade lull of anyone standing on its summit despite many tries, including three separate attempts in 1986, in 1987 two spectacular new lines were climbed to the summit of Trango Tower.

The most fearsome rock walls on Earth

The 1960-1970s bigwall era, when many big remote ‘Yosemite-style’ bigwalls were first climbed around the world, many were the first-ever ascent of technical high peaks and towers. The ten-day ascent of the east wall of Uli Biaho in 1979 set the standard for the decade that followed, when a new phase of bigwalls up even harder and more dangerous faces began, such as the futuristic Norwegian Buttress on Great Trango in 1984, which set a new high bar of elegant bigwall ‘style’: a small team of extremely competent climbers, with minimal equipment and rope, committing for days and weeks of technical vertical and overhanging ascent, and with no easy means of escape (see earlier chapters).

Fixed ropes

Among the fearsome giant walls of rock first climbed in the 1980s as distinct and more challenging ways to reach a summit, some required first establishing fixed ropes up a significant portion of the wall, often largely due to the nature and conditions of the envisioned line. The measure of the final “push” became the story; bigwall expedition reports often begin in the format: “After traveling and establishing basecamp, for the following ‘xx’ weeks we fixed ropes up to ‘xxx’ meters up the wall, and after returning to basecamp, continued for an ‘x’ day push to the summit.” Such an introduction, with various ‘x’ values, often led to the more exciting tales of the challenges above the safety lines encountered during the final summit ‘push’.

With its concentration of large unclimbed walls involving extremely technical climbing, and with improved access when a bridge over a dangerous river was built and the town of El Chaltén founded to secure Argentine Patagonian territory, the nearby Chaltén massif in Patagonia became a central proving ground. And unlike the remote mountains where teams live isolated on a lonely remote glacier and can drive each other crazy, the annual congregation of global climbers in the area was growing, as was the camaraderie that made the daily grind of approaching and attempting mountains more sustainable over the typical months of continuous high winds and inclement weather. In 1985, Cerro Torre had only been climbed nine times, but by the end of the decade, many more would find their way to its summit, including by a new route up its 1200m steep east wall.

Ever since the controversies revolving around Cesare Maestri and his team’s climb to the rim of Cerro Torre in 1970, where a gas-powered drill enabled long bolt ladders over blank sections to create a direct line sometimes independent of natural features, there was no glory in just summiting a bigwall—excessive bolting would surely wreak the wrath of the fellow climbers, and the camaraderie would end. Climbing the most obvious features up these unclimbed giant overhanging bigwalls, with a minimum of bolts, became the bigwall style accepted by the wider community, even if these lines of weakness were the wall’s most dangerous. Among the small subset of climbers of the 1980s whose main focus was bigwall climbing, who would step up to the attempt the biggest unclimbed faces in Patagonia?

Hell’s Direct (Peklenska Directtissima), Cerro Torre, January 1986

Hell’s Direct is the first climb up the east wall of Cerro Torre in Argentina, climbed in the Patagonian summer of 1986 by a nine-person team from Yugoslavia organized by Stane Klemenc with climber/cameraman Matjaž Fistravec and Dr. Borut Belehar. One only has to sit below the east wall of Cerro Torre for a few hours to witness terrifying tonnage of falling ice and rock. On the east wall, the most obvious feature is a large corner that arches up to the wall’s midpoint. Directly above the corner are ice towers that constantly cleave ice and rock that fall hundreds of meters and funnel into the corner. The only possible strategy to climb this line was to spend as little time in the corner as possible, and then establish fixed ropes on safer sections of the wall for a subsequent push upwards. With alternating teams of two, Silvo Karo, Janez Jeglič, Franček Knez, Pavle Kozjek, Peter Podgornik, and Slavco Svetičič fixed ropes in dangerous conditions.

Klemenc reflects on the first week, “On the following day the invasion of Cerro Torre began. Eight of us carried food and supplies to the bivouac. December 22 was beautiful. Knez and Karo climbed 145 meters of the couloir, luckily surviving a half-day of bombing by ice chunks. Again it stormed for five days. Podgornik and Kozjek were waiting at the bivouac. Every morning they had to dig themselves out. More and more snow and ice coated the face day by day. Although December 27 dawned beautiful, they couldn’t start climbing until eleven A.M. because continuous avalanches thundered down the couloir. The fixed ropes were frozen, in places a foot, into the ice. It took them four-and-a-half hours just to get to the top of the ropes. They managed to climb another two rope-lengths of 60° to 80° ice. The day after, they climbed three more difficult pitches. While the lead climbers worked upwards, Jeglič and Svetičič started up the wall. After 16 hours of hard work, they had fixed the 500 meters of rope on the right side of the couloir down the slabs. No longer would we be exposed to the continual danger in the couloir. Climbing the fixed line would be much faster since the rope would not be frozen in day after day.” (American Alpine Journal 1987).

After a month’s effort establishing 800m of fixed rope up the wall, Janez and Silvo set out from basecamp for the final new climbing to the ice towers, with Knez and the Fistravec following close behind with camera and bivouac gear. Finally, Kozjek and Podgornik joined the team after ascending the fixed ropes and led the final three pitches of Maestri’s bolt ladder to the summit. With another storm looking likely, the team descended quickly, abandoning their bivouac gear and fixed ropes.

This synergistic effort, with alternating teams leapfrogging and strategically making upward progress, then embarking on a commiting final push to the summit, was a successful strategy on the world’s most imposing and dangerous rock wall ever climbed at the time. After their safe return to basecamp, two weeks of storms frustrated their attempts to retrieve the equipment left on the wall. Stane finishes his report in the American Alpine Journal, “After we had struggled back up in bottomless snow, strong winds drifted everything over as quickly as we dug. We couldn’t save the equipment.”

Psycho Vertical, Torre Egger, December 1986

Later that same year, Franček Knez, Silvo Karo, and Janez Jeglič returned to Patagonia and climbed a new route on Cerro Torre’s neighbor summit, Torre Egger. The trio were a dream team for this objective, proficient and efficient in all types of vertical terrain—strenuous free, technical aid, and mixed steep ice and snow climbing, as well as rigging vertical ropes, not a simple task in the Patagonia winds (some of their professional work back home involved technical vertical industrial rigging work). Amidst constant falling ice and rock in the initial section between Cerro Torre and Torre Egger, there were few safe spots to stay overnight, so again they strategized with fixed ropes, eventually establishing 550m of line over 18 days, followed by a final 18-hour technical and committing push from the base to the summit, creating a direct 950m vertical and overhanging climb to the summit of Torre Egger.

The Road to Trango

By 1987, Franček Knez had climbed the hardest mountains and walls of the world, including testpiece routes in Alps, Peru, Yosemite, and Patagonia, as well as considerable high-altitude experience, and while his mentees Silvo Karo and Janez Jeglič teamed up for the ascent of the 1200m south wall of Cerro Torre later that year, Franček joined an expedition to the Trango Towers in Pakistan. The second ascent of Trango Towers, unclimbed since the first ascent in 1976, was becoming a coveted prize, and in 1987, a Swiss-French team was also planning an expedition to the area.

The Slovene team comprised of seven people, with a primary four-person climbing team of Franček Knez, Smijan Smodiš, Bojan Šrot, and Slavko Cankar as leader. Dušan Glažar, Slovenska Bistrica, and doctor Zvezdan Pirtošek were also part of the expedition, which began with a long drive from Slovenia to Pakistan (“great adventure and much cheaper than plane” said Bojan). The same tactics that proved successful in Patagonia were employed for this high-altitude challenge. The team picked a stunning line on the ridge that divides the south and east walls of Trango Tower, and from the Dunge glacier, fixed 900m of rope over six climbing days, to the point where “only a day separated us from the summit” (Bojan Srot, 1987). On their summit bid day, Smiljan fell ill, and on June 15, the “well-oiled machine” team of Franček, Bojan, and Slavko ascended the fixed lines where they camped on natural ledges, the next morning continued on the technical terrain above and by 2pm were on the summit.

It was the second ascent of Trango Tower, over a decade since the first. Bojan reflected, “In that moment, I experience all the meaning and nonsense of alpinism at the same time. How much time and money have we sacrificed for the fact that we are now standing here on the mountain! I feel no particular joy; I know it will come after me. I am standing on the top of a beautiful mountain, but I do not dare to say that I have reached any goal, because the goal is something that comes at the very end. Once you reach it, it's game over. But my match is far from over. Now I know that the summit is only here so that once and for all our struggle and suffering is over, that we can return to normal life — and that we can look around and see where we will go tomorrow. We will shift our goal to the future and prolong the race, which is one of the meanings of our lives. And I ask myself: is alpinism really nothing more than an exhibition of the individual, intended for his self-affirmation?” (Planinski Vestnik, Dec. 1987).

Original: V tistem trenutku doživim ves smisel in nesmisel alpinizma hkrati. Koliko časa in denarja smo žrtvovali za to, da stojimo zdaj tu gori! Ne čutim nobenega poseb­ nega veselja; vem, da bo to prišlo za mano. Stojim na vrhu čudovite gore, am­ pak ne upam si reči, da sem dosegel ne­ kakšen cilj, ker cilj je nekaj, kar pride čisto na koncu. Ko ga dosežeš, je tekme konec. Moje tekme pa še zdaleč ni konec. Zdaj vem, da je vrh tu samo zato, da je enkrat že konec našega garanja in trplje­ nja, da se vrnemo v normalno življenje — in da se razgledamo naokoli, kam bomo šli jutri. Prestavili bomo naš cilj v nego­ tovo prihodnost in podaljšali tekmo, ki je eden od smislov našega življenja. In vprasam se: ali res ni alpinizem nic drugega kot ekshibicija posameznika, na-menjena njegovem samopotrjevanju?

The team descended in a gathering storm and soon after moved basecamp to attempt the 8051m summit of Broad Peak. The ‘Yugoslav Route on Nameless Tower’ was relatively unreported in the rest of the world, with only brief details in the American Alpine Journal, and almost no mention in the major European journals (perhaps superseded by the French-Swiss route, a more widely published climb for that year), but it immediately became legend in the bigwall climbing world, as no longer were the horrors of the clefts and offwidths of the original British route imagined as best means to climb Trango. The newly established line was clearly a more elegant and cleaner route, visible even in distant photographs, with rumors of few offwidth cracks (which often tend to be full of ice) and with most of the cracks on the route hand-size or smaller, perfect for most climber’s growing gear-racks of small camming devices. Despite little published information about the climb, once the line was seen, it was a clear ride to the top via natural features, and like in other areas in the 1980s, word-of-mouth was the honored way to transmit bigwall beta. Originally coined the “Via degli Jugoslavi”, and until the 1990s known as the ‘Yugoslav Route’, the Slovene Route (1987) is now one of the most popular routes in the Trango Towers (footnote).

Footnote: Regarding the naming of the “Yugoslav Route”—in 1991, after a public referendum supporting independence from Yugoslavia and a Ten-Day War, Slovenia became a sovereign nation, and these routes are now known as the Slovene routes. On naming, Mire Steinbuch writes, “As far as I know, not one name of the Yugoslav Route has been changed into another one although climbed by Slovenian alpinists be it by themselves be it in mixed teams of other Yugoslav nationalities. Back then were different times when Slovenian alpinists sometimes invited climbers from other republics into expedition teams as an excuse for asking for money in Belgrade such as the 1979 Everest expedition on the West Ridge which was climbed by Slovenians, although there were also three members from other republics. It bears the name the Yugoslav Route aka West Ridge Direct. So, I think it is not disrespectful to call Franek Knez's route the Yugoslav Route. After all, it was Francek and his team that named it so.” Later adding that both names coexist, though the Slovene route is preferred.

postscript:

In the 1980s, routes that involved fixing rope left behind on the summit bid were not without controversy, and the use of fixed ropes on the walls of Patagonia, a common practice on the Himalayan giants, was shunned by many in the Patagonian climbing community. Some were outraged by the abandoned ropes on Hell’s Direct, but on Psycho Vertical, the team went back up the next day into the danger zone to clean the route of their ropes, an act that takes special courage after the objective is achieved. (footnote).

Footnote: Some writers barely recognized the Slovene ascents: in Mountaineering in Patagonia (1993), Alan Kearney completely ignores the dangerous “Diedro del Diablo”, a 900m line on the east wall of Fitzroy climbed by Franček Knez, Silvo Karo, and Janez Jeglič in 1983, and only lists the east wall of Cerro Torre and the Slovene route on Torre Egger in small print in an appendix. Today, these climbs and climbers are widely recognized as some of the most significant of the era, though styles that involve fixed ropes evolved, and by the 1990s abandoning ropes fixed on a bigwall after an ascent was less common (as were extensive fixed rope ascents in general).

Rolando Garibotti notes of the 1980s in Patagonia, "In early 1981 Englishmen Phil Burke and Tom Proctor completed some of the hardest climbing ever achieved in the area during an impressive attempt to climb the east and north face of Cerro Torre, reaching a point 20 meters shy of the Ragni route. like Bragg, Donini and Wilson, and like Campbell-Kelly and Wyvill who had tried the line before them, they climbed capsule style, relying on some fixed ropes but committing to the wall for the bulk of the ascent. This style was a clear step forward, but the message fell on deaf ears and for the ensuing decade most major new routes were climbed exclusively using fixed ropes, breaking the challenge presented by the height of the rock faces and peaks into more manageable pieces.” (Patagonia Vertical, 2012), and today notes that the Slovene routes “are still some of the hardest in the area, and there have been no climbers around in the last twenty years with the skills and experience to repeat climbs such as their South Face route. They are state-of-the-art, even if their use of fixed lines takes a little shine off. The ropes on the east and south face (of Cerro Torre) have not been removed, but likely little remains of them. But to be sure, abandoned fixed lines are a big nuance when climbing up. Of course, we should contextualize them being left in the historic time, when few climbers went there, and there was no thought given to future repeats. Unfortunately, some teams still leave ropes today.”

It should also be noted that hanging bivouac shelters that could withstand severe weather were very rare in the 1980s, and many of the biggest walls of the era such as the east wall of Fitzroy (1200m) by MiguelAngel Gallego & José Luis Gallego in 1984, and the west wall of Mount Thor (1100m) in Baffin Island by an American Team in 1985 also fixed sections of the route as a strategic style for multi-day bigwalls, but the degree to which extra rope was used was often questioned.

(The technology used for the ascents mentioned above, and the climbing styles facilitated by the technology, will be covered in this series…)

NEXT: Trango 1987 (part b)

—the third ascent of Trango via the 1987 Gran Diedre Desplomado on the west pillar by Swiss-French team.

—1987 Part c will cover the team from Japan summited the towering formation that rises above the Baltoro glacier (p.5753), first attempted by a French team in 1983, known as Trango Château or Trango Castle.

Photos from Paul Pritchard and Adam Wainwright’s ascent of the Slovene Route on Trango Tower in 1995:

Wojciech ‘Voytek’ Kurtyka

Voytek Kurtyka needs no introduction as one of the greatest of all Himalayan and Karakoram climbers. In 1984, he reflects, “My whole energy has been absorbed by just three mountains: Gasherbrum IV, Trango Tower and K2. Seeking an appropriate partner for those very difficult and risky climbs,  I teamed up first with the Austrian, Robert Schauer, and later with two Swiss: Erhard Loretan and Jean Troillet.”

First climbed in 1985, Voytek’s legendary ultra-bold & ultra-light 14-day ascent of the 2500m Shining Wall on Gasherbrum IV with Robert Schauer is still unrepeated despite many attempts of strong climbing teams from all over the world. It is also one of the wildest survival stories of mountaineering.

In 1985 Voytek also hatched plans to climb the second ascent of Trango Tower, unclimbed since the original British ascent in 1976, via a new route. Many considered the peak “climbed” and thus problem solved, but as Trango had not yet been ascended from the Dunge glacier, Voytek envisioned the east wall as a separate challenge. At the K2 basecamp in 1985, Voytek met a team of Japanese climbers “who shared the same Samurai ethos” (Voytek email correspondence 2024), and the following year teamed up with Noboru Yamada, Kenji Yoshida, and Yasuhei Saito for the first attempt of the east wall of Trango Tower. (footnote)

Footnote: Much could also be said about longstanding Japan-Poland relations during this time of international political openings. Sadly, Anpei Saito died in Annapurna in 1987, and Novoru Yamada died in 1989 on Denali. Regarding new route attempts on Trango, also of note is the Bolton Expedition of 1984 on a new line to the left of the original Britsh route (climbed by a Spanish team in 1989). Michel Piola was also investigating a new line on the south wall of Trango from the Trango Glacier in 1986. The lull in Trango activity after the original 1976 British ascent also has to do with Pakistan Ministry of Tourism’s permitting of peaks (at times refusing applications from some countries). Greg Child reflects on Trango aspirations, “My trip in 1983 with Doug Scott was mainly to big peaks way up the Baltoro, but the first thing we did was Lobsang Spire. Most of the guys regarded (the lower elevation summits) as a foible - Broad peak, K2 - were the reason to be there. But Lobsang was a perfect little wall (to climb on the way to the big peaks). I was thinking about Trango, it just took me longer to get to it.”  

The Japan-Poland Trango Expedition’s arrival at Dunge basecamp was followed by two weeks of efficient teamwork to establish a high camp on the face of Trango Tower, including two impressive days when Voytek fixed ropes on the first 200m to reach the large snow ledge that cuts across the east wall. By June 21, the team had established a well-stocked advanced camp, poised with 150kg of provisions and equipment for the final 800m push on the vertical rock to the summit. The first pitches above the snowledge went slowly, but on their third day, Voytek “tackled a very fine pitch and just as I was scanning the excellent and promising rock above, the astounding call for retreat came from below.” Despite being initially confused about the ensuing retreat (“furious,” he originally noted), Voytek writes upon returning to basecamp, “We slowly came to understand each other. The tension between us vanished. I came back to the plains with two loves greater than before: Trango and the Japanese. Defeats are good.”

In 1988 Voytek was back for another try at the same line on the right edge of the east wall of Trango Tower, this time with Erhard Loretan from Switzerland, with whom he had previously teamed up on K2. Both were primarily focused on new 8000m routes climbed in ultra-lightweight alpine style but were also vertical rock masters on climbs requiring sizable racks of equipment (footnote). Voytek’s experience, in particular, on hard multi-day vertical walls, involving a bold combination of free, aid, and mixed climbing, was vast. The main bigwall training grounds for climbers from Poland were the Tatras, the European Alps, and the Troll Wall, and in each of these areas, Voytek had climbed the hardest routes.

Footnote: Voytek in particular was more inclined to use more equipment in pursuit of a climb. Bernadette McDonald records specific tensions of different ideas of minimalist equipage on Cho Oyu in 1990: One such explosion erupted over a discussion about pitons. Erhard wanted to take just two up the mountain. Voytek pushed for six. “Okay, you take everything,” Erhard yelled and threw the equipment down. Voytek retorted, “Erhard, you lost a partner on a face for just that reason.” They settled on six. (Freedom Climbers, Bernadette McDonald, 2011).

Tatra Mountains

As new climbing tools developed in the 1970s and 1980s, bigwall aid climbing tactics evolved, and multi-day 900m routes like the Pacific Ocean Wall and the Sea of Dreams on El Capitan were considered the epitome of the sport in terms of tenuous and terrifying aid climbing. Yet the level of climbing difficulty in the Tatras in the 1970s, albeit on shorter walls, required equally tenuous and terrifying gymnastic movement using a combination of free, mixed, and aid with racks of pitons and chocks (footnote).

Footnote: One of the secret weapons exclusive to eastern European climbers was decades of evolution of the “beak” piton, not developed in the ‘West’ until 1988 (see this post). Voytek writes, “In general the tradition of birdbeaks use in Poland is quite monumental. The birdbeaks here were always considered the best pitons in history and in the world. I myself was a passionate user of them and teasing American climbers I couldn't understand how you could survive all your crazy aid climbs without birdbeaks. The only explanation was that you must have been geniuses. Sometimes I suppose the history of aid climbing should be divided into two eras: before and after birdbeaks.“

Troll Wall

In terms of training for extreme bigwall routes in the Karakoram, the Troll Wall in Norway is one of the great international bigwall testpieces. Voytek and his team's first winter ascent of the wall via the French Directissima in 1974 was a forerunner of decades of mind-blowing winter ascents worldwide by climbers from Poland which continues to this day. Like many things in the modern world, it is hard to imagine the suffering involved with the relatively primitive equipment of that era, living in slings for thirteen days in winter on the biggest bigwall in Europe, which even in summer can be a miserable wet and cold experience.

Before their ascent of Trango, the pair had also climbed the testpiece bigwalls in the French and Swiss Alps, such as the Robbins-Hemming Direct on Petit Dru, the south wall of the Aiguille du Fou, and other steep rock walls requiring hanging bivouacs on the wall (nowadays climbed in a few hours by the best alpinists), as well as challenging new routes like those on the Eiger and Grandes Jorasses. And of course, both climbers were among the most accomplished on the world’s biggest and most remote mountains. In other words, expert in all disciplines of climbing, and at the top of the game in each one.

By the 1980s, tools and expedition equipment had further evolved, and with the wider availability of camming devices of all sizes increased by an order of magnitude the potential speed of climbing technical vertical terrain, as well as making smaller two-person teams possible. (footnote).

Footnote: Up to this moment in time, bigwall teams on massive remote vertical walls had generally been teams of four people or more, then thought to be more efficient for extended toiling on a bigwall, especially if climbed in a “push” (as opposed to fixing ropes up the whole wall). A four-person team was the standard, so a team of two could always be climbing; the others continuously hauling the heavy kit required for extended weeks and sometimes months living on a vertical wall.

The Kurtyka-Loretan Route, Trango Tower, June 24 to July 14, 1988.

It would be impossible to tell the story of the Kurtyka-Loretan better than Voytek Kurtyka himself, and below is his write-up in the American Alpine Journal (click for larger image). He concludes his trip report:

“The fresh memory of the days spent on the Nameless Tower prompts me to compare this technically-extreme, big-wall ascent with two-man ascents on 8000-meter peaks. There are those who identify the forward phase of the sport with the 8000ers, a very false conviction to my way of thinking. The Trango climb called for much more versatile technical and physical faculties. The tactics on the Trango Tower were much more intricate since the wall section, though lower, was much longer and required much more gear. Even more surprising, the Trango climb demanded, at least from me, much harder physical effort than any of the 8000ers. We two carried 120 kilograms of food and equipment and each of us jumared 3000 meters.”

The route established two camps on the wall, using 600m of rope to climb the wall in three sections (sometimes called “capsule style”), and the success of the two-person team opened new realms of remote and technical bigwall climbing, involving the highest standards of free, aid, and mixed climbing. The route was reported as the “East Face of Trango’s Nameless Tower” but immediately became known as the Kurtyka-Loretan and helped inspire a steady stream of new Karakoram bigwall routes in the following years.

Elsewhere in the Trango Towers area, 1988

The increasing activity in the area led to significant ascents and attempts in 1988, all deserving of their own story (American Alpine Journal reports compiled by H. Adams Carter below):

Trango Towers (Trango Chateau), Yves Astier, Club Alpin Français.

Our expedition was composed of Abdel Amar, Mauro Mabboni, Pierre Montiglio, Olivier Soulié and me. On May 19 and 20, Montiglio, Soulié and I made the first of two routes on the south face of the Trango Château or the First Tower, the main summit of which is 5844 meters high. The weather was bad. On May 27 and 28, Montiglio, Abdel Amar and I made a second route on the face to the right of the first. This time we got to the 5300-meter (17,389-foot) presummit. Again we climbed in a snowstorm. We believe the main summit is still unclimbed.

Uli Biaho Tower, South Face, and Solo on the Great Trango Tower, Maurizio Giordani, Club Alpino Italiano:

Our group consisted of Rosanna Manfrini, Maurizio Venzo, Kurt Walde and me as leader. On June 4, we placed Base Camp at 4300 meters on the side of the Trango Glacier. For two weeks it stormed with abundant snowfall. On June 17, all four of us moved supplies to a small camp at 5800 meters at the base of the immense south wall of the Uli Biaho Tower. On the 18th, we attacked the face and climbed a very difficult 100 meters before descending for the night. On June 19, we returned, spending three days ascending the red granite, which was vertical, very compact and encrusted with ice. We limited aid climbing as much as possible. All four of us reached the summit (6290 meters, 20,637 feet) late on June 21. All night and on the next day, we descended rappelling and got to Base Camp in the evening. Rosanna Manfrini is the first woman to have made such a difficult climb of a 6000-meter peak. The vertical rise is 800 meters and the difficulty from 5.10 to 5.11 and A3. On June 25, I left Base Camp alone, crossed the Trango Glacier and approached the Great Trango Tower. Without any protection gear, I attacked the north face by a route I had studied from the Uli Biaho Tower. In a little less than nine hours, I climbed the 2000 meters to the summit (6280 meters, 20,604 feet). This was the first solo ascent and the fourth following Norwegian, English and American ascents.

Great Trango Tower Attempt, Eric B. Sandbo, Alpine Club of Canada.

On May 27, Doug Dean and I left Base Camp directly across the Baltoro Glacier from the Trango group and hiked to the base of the gully below the west side of the Nameless Tower, hoping to repeat the Selters-Woolums north-face route on the Great Trango Tower. The next morning we ascended to camp in the shelter of a rock close below the base of the Nameless Tower. On the 29th, we followed a snow ramp out to the right side of the gully. We camped and rested a day at about 17,500 feet. On the 31st, Dean waited out a series of snow squalls and left alone at dawn for the summit. He climbed steep, rotten snow onto the upper glacier, saw another storm coming and cached his pack. By the time he had ascended the headwall and cut through the cornice, he was in the thick of the storm. He was on a double-corniced ridge about 200 feet west of the summit. He traversed to a point 25 feet directly below the summit. Rather than risk the corniced summit alone, he returned to camp, where we weathered the storm until the following dawn. We descended to the junction of the Trango and Baltoro Glaciers in a few hours, but poor visibility kept us from crossing that day. We rejoined our friends at Payu on the evening of June 2. Other members were Michael Woodworth, Ed Gunkel, Bill Noble and Tim Rashko.

Nameless Tower of Trango Attempt, Masaharu Gando, Japan.

Hisao Onami, Izuru Okada, Yasushi Sato, Masahiro Ishiguro and I reached Base Camp at 4150 meters on the Dunge Glacier on July 15. After ferrying loads to the base of the wall, on July 27 we began to attempt what probably was the Yugoslav route climbed in 1987. We found fixed rope, but it was almost useless. On July 28 to 30 we climbed seven pitches and fixed ropes to the lower pedestal. On the 31st we set up Advance Base at 5600 meters on the pedestal. Bad weather stopped us for three days. From August 5 to 8 we climbed 14 pitches. On the 8th Okada, Ishiguro and I bivouacked at 6050 meters, 200 meters below the summit, but on the morning of August 9, the weather was bad and so we had to retreat to Base Camp.

Next: Trango 1988 Part C—first free ascent by Kurt Albert and Wolfgang Güllich, 10-person expedition led by Hartmut Münchenbach (September 1988)

I only met Erhard Loretan once, during a Sunday brunch in Rawalpindi, Pakistan in June 1992. He was returning to Switzerland, after his second attempt at a new route on K2. Our team was heading into the mountains, and while delayed by paperwork in the dusty city, Xaver Bongard and I had snuck into the Hotel Intercontinental, dressed in our best, and somehow had talked our way to a table at the lavish Intercontinental Sunday brunch, famous among starving mountaineers. Our digs were a dive across town where we subsisted on local food—mostly chapatis and dal—so the hotel’s expansive western-style buffet was a treat. (footnote)

Footnote: For our permitted 6000m peak, our budget was about $2000 per person, a lot of money in those days to spend on a climbing trip, but climbers going for the highest peaks were generally part of large international teams with large expense budgets (the permit alone exceeded our whole trip cost), so booking the best hotels in Rawlpindi and Skardu with capacity for a large team was the norm.

Erhard Loretan was of course an international legend in the 1980s—not only was he ticking off audacious new alpine routes on the highest peaks in the most minimalist style, such as the north wall of Everest in a single 43-hour alpine push with Jean Troillet in 1986, but he was also one of the best rock climbers too. And unlike many of the top expedition climbers, who were either state-funded, or fully salaried professional climbers (‘sponsored’, though still rare in those days), Erhard was a top-level guide and financed by friends and fans (he later wrote, “For me it is freedom. That’s why I don’t look for sponsors, I like to wear the underwear of my choice!”). The international rivalries and the race to climb first ascents or first winter ascents of all the 8000m peaks was in high gear (at the time, only Reinhold Messner and Jerzy Kukuczka had climbed all 14 8000m peaks—Loretan would become the third in 1995). Loretan’s lightweight expeditions were both time and cost efficient, and not a season went by when some new eye-opening realm of what was possible in the mountains was exposed by Erhard and his partners.

Erhard and Xaver were friends from the same town of Fribourg in Switzerland, so Erhard came over to our table while he was waiting for his ride to the airport. He had just returned from a lightweight alpine attempt on the fearsome west wall of K2 with Voytek Kurtyka (footnote). I was stunned at his matter-of-fact humility in how he described climbing to 6400m, and even with their fast alpine climbing style, decided that the avalanche danger and windslab conditions were too marginal to continue even in the coldest hours of night, so called for a retreat (he once said, “We are always looking for things to do—even if we estimate the chance of success at 10%, its enough to make it worth a try.”). I realised that his persistent and performance based approach was the key to his prolific record, and made a note to myself not to take my own failures so seriously.

Footnote: (this face of K2 was not climbed until 2007 in a “prolonged siege of two and a half months”—see Russians successfully siege K2’s hardest line, by Lindsay Griffin).

It was in this awe that I chatted with Erhard, though most of the conversation was with Xaver as they caught up speaking French—there was a lot of expedition gossip that year (I gathered the main ideas, but Xaver caught me up with the details later). And of course I was ultra-curious to hear Erhard’s thoughts of his 1988 Trango ascent, as we were heading there and seeking any tips to help make our efforts more streamlined. He recommended the Dunge basecamp and gave us some tips on the approach gulleys from that side. When asked specifically about his new route on the east wall of Trango with Voytek Kurtyka, he replied simply “Très bien” with a wry smile, void of any irony, pretty much in the same vein as Yosemite’s “not too bad” might describe a big wall specialist’s week of epic toil and terror on a hard El Cap nailing route. It amazed me how Erhard and Voytek’s teamwork and alpine approach to the mountains had crossed over so efficiently in the specialised realm of bigwall climbing. Despite the recognition of Xaver and my extensive experience on big walls, there was also the clear hint that the Karakoram was never to be underestimated. Kind of a “if you know, you know” answer to a “if you have to ask…” question.

I knew….kind of.

(end of sidebar)

Postscript—Vacation in Slippers

In Night Naked, a posthumous biography of Erhard Loretan published in 2013 by Jean Ammann from interviews, journals, and writings, Erhard’s story “My Vacation in Slippers on Trango Tower” appears. It is a poetic tale of meeting with Voytek in Kathmandu, hearing of his 1986 attempt on the “granite curtains” of Trango Tower, and becoming “seduced by the beauty of his project.” Erhard notes that “climbing as a pair would make our style of ascent more efficient” (no one had yet attempted a wall of this stature with only a team of two), and relates the strategy and isolation of their two weeks climbing the route above their initial fixed ropes, averaging two pitches a day: “We had decided to alternate days on lead. That allowed the second to dress warmly and to be bundled up in a down jacket as he kept track of the leader’s progress. The rope that moves through the belayer’s hand reveals everything about the leader’s climbing. Sometimes sudden slack in the line tells the belayer that the leader has just taken flight and that in a few split seconds, catching the fall will truly be in his hands. That day it was Voytek’s turn to be ‘on the pointy end’. He took a thrity-five-foot fall in the morning and another fall at the end of the day. His two attempts to escape gravity left him with a bashed elbow and thumb. that pair of incidents would affect him for the rest of the ascen. They reminded us of the need to climb as safely as possible. The massif was so remote and the face so committing that the smallest incident would take on catastrophic proportions. We weren’t on the Eiger or the Matterhorn; we weren’t messing around on hotel balconies.“

He concludes his story of climbing “a superb line on a superb mountain” with a comparison: “I loved this first ascent of the east face of Trango Tower because it didn’t have the stressful aspect of an 8000er. Of course, the technical difficulty was far greater than on my Himalayan summits, but this time the altitude was hospitable and merciful. It was nothing like the death zone, which cannot be ventured into with impunity. This was a relaxed, chilled-out expedition—a vacation that I could have spent almost without taking off my climbing slippers.”

By the way…

Kurtyka Loretan Route, 1988

(to be continued —next: Trango 1988 part b)

It was becoming clear that Nameless Tower, with its searing 1000m crack lines on all sides, was a futuristic first-ascent arena for the most accomplished global bigwall climbers. 1988 witnessed the first two-person team succeed on a new light and fast ascent of Trango Tower, as well as the first free climb of the tower by a German team; there were also significant geologic discoveries. 1988 also saw a boom of exemplary attempts and ascents elsewhere on the Baltoro batholith (footnote).

Footnote: Up to this time, bigwall teams on these massive remote vertical walls had generally been teams of four people or more, then thought to be more efficient for this type of toiling wall, especially if climbed in alpine bigwall style aka a “push”, so a team of two could always be climbing, while others continuously hauling the heavy kit required for extended weeks and sometimes months living on a vertical wall.

But first, a little geology:

The story of the Trango Towers begins 50 million years ago with the India-Asia geologic plate collision, with the Himalayas rising on the thickening crust on the subducting Indian plate, and the Karakoram rising above the Asian plate. As the two continental plates crushed together, eventually creating the youngest and highest mountains on the planet, the high pressures and temperatures at the base of the crust melted the crust and formed granite. Granite is less dense than the “country” rocks (the surrounding unmelted metamorphic and sedimentary rock), so the buoyant plutons intruded upwards towards the Earth’s surface, forming a gigantic geologic feature known as a granite batholith, a relatively homogeneous contiguous igneous mass lying deep underground. Meanwhile, to the south and north the continental crustal folding of the pre-collision rock continued, forming the giants of the Karakoram: Nanga Parbat, Broad Peak, K2, and the Gasherbrums. (footnote)

Footnote: Mike Searle clarifies: Nanga Parbat is made of incredibly young migmatites on Indian plate. The Gasherbrums are made of limestones mainly north of the Baltoro batholith on the Asian plate. Broad Peak is similar but has a major diorite intrusion ( the vertical black/white line seen on Gasherbrum IV) - older than the Baltoro granites. K2 is metamorphic rock intruded by small white leucogranite dikes similar to the Baltoro granite.   Other peaks along the main Baltoro batholith are the Latoks, Ogre, Masherbrum, Uli Biaho, Shipton, Paiyu spires, K7 and Saser Kangri.

Around 20 million years ago the Baltoro batholith was still 25 kilometers underground and began to cool, a process that took about eight million years, during which the batholith remained relatively intact amidst the surrounding chaotic continental folding and faulting. When the batholith finally reached the surface (or rather, the surface finally reached it), further eons of weathering and glacial carving of the young granite shaped the long span of tall vertical cliffs we see today, from Latok and the Ogre in the northwest, Trango Towers and Masherbrum roughly in the center, to K7 and the Charakusa spires in the southeast, comprising the most spectacular vertical granite faces anywhere on Earth.

The geology of the Himalaya and the Karakoram had been of great interest to scientists since the 19th century, but in the 1980s there were still many unknowns, as most geologists had access only to the view of peaks considered “inaccessible” (footnote).

Footnote: Some of the 19th century scientific and mapping expeditions are covered in Mechanical Advantage: Tools for the Wild Vertical, Volume 1 (John Middendorf, 2022). Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/MechanicalAdvantageVol1

Starting the late 1970s, geologist and alpinist Mike Searle, now at Oxford University in UK, began a series of annual expeditions sampling rocks from the high peaks in the region, in order to determine the rock’s chemical composition, as well as the age using radiometric U-Pb dating techniques. Mike spent five summers in the 1980s “trekking and geologizing in the mountains of Ladakh, Zanskar, Kulu, and Kashmir” and had “a pretty good idea of the general structure of the Indian plate side of the collision”, but there were still many unanswered questions about the three-dimensional structure of the Asian plate. In 1985 Mike began a series of expeditions to the central Karakoram range, recruiting some of Britain’s best climbers and alpinists to geologically map the Baltoro batholith and its surrounding mountains.

On many of these trips, Mike would transport hundreds of kilograms of rock samples down mountains. Sean Smith remembers, “Beyond Mike’s encyclopedic knowledge of Karakoram geology, is his ability to convince you that an extra chunk of granite in your pack won’t be that bad, as you're only taking it downhill!” In 1988, he climbed to over 6000m on Biale with Nick Groves, Mark Miller, Simon Yates, and Sean Smith, “managing to collect a suite of granite samples from the summit ridge down to the Baltoro Glacier,” which involved traversing a dangerous ridge and ten rappels. Eventually, in 1999, his research and fieldwork resulted in the geologic map below, showing the Baltoro batholith in orange, with Latok and the Ogre in the upper left, and K7 in the lower right. The Trango Towers are roughly in the middle and are the tallest exposed part of the batholith, with “2500 m high cliffs of Baltoro leucogranite exposed in the east face of Great Trango (6452 m) and Nameless (6650 m) Spires” (Searle, 2010).

In addition to groundbreaking geologic discoveries, Mike Searle also captured for the first time inspiring views of the Trango Towers from the east, originally published as Baltoro: The Wild Side in Mountain 135 (1990).

Photos copyright Mike Searle, used with permission:

The photos of peaks within the Baltoro batholith that Mike has published have inspired many climbers. Below are a few from one of his scientific papers. SOURCE: Searle, M.P., Parrish, R.R., Thow, A.V., Noble, S.R., Phillips, R.J. and Waters, D.J. (2010) Anatomy, age and evolution of a collisional mountain belt: the Baltoro Granite batholith and Karakoram Metamorphic complex. Journal of the Geological Society, London, vol 167, p. 183-202.

The next part (Trango 1988 part b) will be about the 1988 bigwall breakthroughs in-depth and in context.

In the meantime, below are two 1988 trip reports published in the American Alpine Journal.

The East Face of Trango’s Nameless Tower July 1988

Wojciech Kurtyka, Klub Wysokogórski Kraków, Poland

THE EAST FACE OF THE NAMELESS TOWER of the Trango Towers rises for more than 1000 meters. From June 24 to July 14 Swiss Erhard Loretan and I worked out a new route on that virgin face. This was the first two-man ascent of what may be the most beautiful rock spire in the world.

The 29-pitch line runs up excellent, crystaline, golden granite in a region of unsurpassed beauty. The route rises in the center of the face up a distinctive line of big dihedrals topped by rock roofs and occasionally by huge snow mushrooms that cling precariously to the wall. The upper part ascends a seemingly compact, smooth, golden shield where we were lucky enough to find excellent cracks which we could connect together by three pendulum traverses. Most of the pitches required aid climbing, done almost exclusively with nuts or Friends. It is worth mentioning that the rock is very attractive and promises the opportunity for a totally free ascent in the future. The aid-climbing difficulties at times reached A3. Free climbing at such a high altitude is more difficult to assess. Therefore, I would simply grade it as of UIAA Grade VI.

We spent a total of 14 action days on the climb, split into three sections. Eight were exclusively climbing days. Three were spent both climbing and hauling loads. Another three were used retreating and load carrying. It would be unwise to expect too long a stretch of fine weather in the Karakoram. Therefore, we had to resort to a semi-alpine style. While sleeping on the wall in one or the other of the only possible bivouac places, we progressed day after day, fixing rope and abseiling for the night to the bivouac site. Thus we did not lose the benefit of our hard work when the inevitable breakdown of the weather forced us back to Base Camp.

We set up Base Camp on the Dunge Glacier at 4000 meters on June 20. On June 24, after a night approach with huge, 35-kilogram packs, we reached the base of the tower at 5200 meters. For the next two days, we fixed 300 meters of rope on the initial rock spur and up the snow band. Then on June 26, we returned to Base Camp.

We planned the next trip as the final one, provided the weather would allow it. Of course, it did not. On July 2, with loads of only 25 kilograms but still heavy enough nearly to sabotage us on the fixed ropes, we again reached the snow band, where we arranged our first bivouac site. During the next three days we climbed the big dihedrals. On July 5, we got to the base of the pyramid in a soaking snowstorm. That night, the weather grew even worse. The wall got plastered with wet snow and our bivouac equipment was running water. On the morning of July 6, we had no choice but to retreat, but we had fixed another 300 meters of rope above the snow band.

The third and final try started on July 9. On that day, we ascended the 1200 meters of the approach gully, jümared 600 meters and to end the day climbed one more pitch. To our great joy, this cleared the greatest unknown on the route. On the top of the pyramid we discovered a small rock ledge, detached from the wall. Although it sloped somewhat downward, it was good enough to use for our second bivouac site. Above the pyramid we found the “fantastic crack,” the “double crack,” then the “hidden dihedral” and the “wet slab,” and finally the “Mushroom Chimney.” The latter was choked with big snow mushrooms, but it emerged on the summit ridge. After two ice pitches and an unexpected 25-meter-high rock step, we reached the summit at three P.M. on July 13. On the last rock step, we joined a previous route and found old pitons, probably left by one of the successful 1987 teams. That night we abseiled to the bivouac site.

In the night another week of heavy snowstorms began. Still, we managed, after removing three fixed ropes below, to reach the base of the tower in the afternoon hours.

The fresh memory of the days spent on the Nameless Tower prompts me to compare this technically-extreme, big-wall ascent with two-man ascents on 8000-meter peaks. There are those who identify the forward phase of the sport with the 8000ers, a very false conviction to my way of thinking. The Trango climb called for much more versatile technical and physical faculties. The tactics on the Trango Tower were much more intricate since the wall section, though lower, was much longer and required much more gear. Even more surprising, the Trango climb demanded, at least from me, much harder physical effort than any of the 8000ers. We two carried 120 kilograms of food and equipment and each of us jümared 3000 meters. We worried about rope wear on the knife-sharp crystaline granite. We took occasional falls as our finger tips suffered in this heavy work.

Nameless Tower, Trango Towers. September 1988

Hartmut Münchenbach, Deutscher Alpenverein

Our expedition was composed of East German Berndt Arnold and West Germans Kurt Albert, Wolfgang Güllich, Wolfgang Kraus, Thomas Lipinski, Martin Leinauer, Dr. Jörg Schneider, Martin Schwiersch, Jörg Wilz and me as leader. Late summer and fall are ideal for the south and west sides of the Trango Towers. We had nearly perfect weather with a few snow showers and only two days of bad weather. These snowfalls made for bad conditions on the northeast buttress of the Great Trango Tower, since the sun no longer struck it at this season. Our climb there failed because of heavy icing. On southern faces the conditions were ideal with warm, dry rock because snowfields had melted. We divided into two groups. Kraus, Lipinski, Schneider and Wilz headed for the Nameless Tower. They chose a combined route. They followed the 1986 Kurtyka route to the snow band and then the 1987 Yugoslav route. They got to the summit on September 3. Albert, Arnold, Güllich, Leinauer and I attempted the Norwegian route on the northeast buttress of the Great Trango Tower. We failed at the beginning of the headwall, 500 meters from the summit because of bad conditions. This must be one of the most difficult Karakoram routes. In 14 days of climbing, we completed 25 pitches, partly free and partly with aid (VII, A3 to A4). After giving up there, we turned to the Nameless Tower. On September 3, we camped on the snow band. After a bivouac on the face, on September 5, Arnold, Leinauer and Schwiersch stepped onto the top, followed an hour later by Albert, Güllich and me. We latter three made the first free ascent of the Nameless Tower (26 pitches, 5.11 to 5.12).

Next: Trango 1988 part b

Recently I travelled to Tokyo, to meet fellow bigwall climbers from Japan. Naoe Sakashita has set up a very cozy mountaineering space in Ochanomizu called The Tribe, managed by Masanori Hoshina, with exhibit space and room for about 50 people for presentations. The exhibit I went to see and to present focused on the 1990 Japanese Trango Towers expedition, one of the most wild episodes in the history of mountaineering. I met and laughed with Takeyasu Minamiura, who had always been a mythical character since 1990 when out of-the-blue he soloed a new route on Trango Tower, an aesthetic and difficult line that many had eyed, with failed attempts by some of the best bigwall climbers in the world.

At the time, remote bigwall climbing was kicking into a new gear from the pioneering period of the 1980s, and huge breakthroughs in remote alpine style bigwalls were being accomplished with new lightweight kit and smaller teams, using tools and techniques developed and refined primarily in Yosemite over the previous several decades. Minamiura’s story has been published in several periodicals but sometimes lacking the minute but important detail for the full imagining by other bigwall climbers, who knew how desperate it can feel on a remote bigwall in the best of conditions. What was it really like, alone and trapped high up on the most remote massive rock spire in the world, and whose only certain means of descent was to jump off a less than vertical 4000’ cliff with a ragged reserve parachute? The first thing Minamiura told me about the experience is that it was a team event, as he survived the solo ascent only with the help of his expedition members, Masanori Hoshina and Satoshi Kimoto, who made a fast ascent of the original British route on Trango Tower, which hadn’t been climbed since 1976, sometimes dangerously depending on shredded and weathered 14-year-old fixed ropes in interest of speed.

The sport of paragliding was developing at the time, and the initial idea was that a lightweight cliff-launch-able wing was destined to become the standard bigwall descent vehicle. Michel Fauquet had done just that, flying back to basecamp after completing a new route on the west buttress of Trango Tower in 1987, with an early paraglider design. In the mid 1980s, paragliders had a small number of cells (6-9), were shaped like a skydiving parachute, and had a very low glide ratio. In the late 1980s, paraglider design evolved for performance and speed, and the later generation wings were not suitable for low-wind-speed launches (until more recently).

The 1990s were also a time of transition: two remote bigwall styles were in play. One was to bring thousands of metres of rope as was still being done on the highest mountains of the world, then installing the fixed rope bit-by-bit on the wall, gaining a few ropes of altitude at a time, and returning to lower camps to sleep on the more level terrain, eventually setting up for a final good-weather push to the summit after ascending fixed rope most of the way up. These ropes often get left behind once the summit is attained. The other style has become to be known “alpine bigwall style”, which involves using a minimum of rope, leaving no lifeline below, and spending multiple nights hanging on the wall in portable weatherproof hanging tents called portaledges. Alpine bigwall climbing is a much more committing style, considered more “pure” than a “siege” with fixed ropes, and the style that the Japanese had been developing and mastering on long climbs all over the world (they, too, were influenced by the ground-up, no-fixed-rope style highlighted by Royal Robbins in Yosemite in the 1960s, and many climbers from Japan were climbing hard routes on the walls of Yosemite in the 1980s). For both the repeat ascent of the Norwegian Buttress on Great Trango Tower by Masanori Hoshina, Satoshi Kimoto, Takaaki Sasakura, and Masahiro Kosaka, and the solo ascent on Trango Tower by Takeyasu Minamiura, the ascents were climbed in state-of-the-art committing alpine bigwall style, including high-altitude 5.12 free climbing.

I only met with Minamiura for a few hours, but it was super fun, still with the mountain twinkle in his eyes when telling a funny bigwall story or showing the path of his latest 100km+ wild cross-country paraglider flight. Below is the 1990 Trango story written by Minamiura, in his own words:

1. My motivation for the Trango expedition

In the late 80th, there has already been a great progress in free climbing in Japan. Then rappel bolting was accepted among enthusiastic climbers. This style was initially used only to push the extreme limit of free climbing, but soon become used for easier climbs and instantly spread every Japanese crag. I was expecting that other climbers share my feeling about climbing (pushing the limit and the pursuit for adventure), but most of them did not. I felt that the important climbing spirit is being lost and decided to stop free climbing and return to wild and great adventures.

2. Why did I plan to solo and to paraglide.

I naturally chose to climb Nameless Tower that was one of my dream climb since the early days of my climbing carrier. I could not find a partner who has equal amount of experiences in every aspects of climbing as I did. A few possible candidates seemed not to have enough luck. I used to climb with partners, but in a few occasions I soloed long routes in Japan. Cleaning, placing bolts, and working on routes alone in a new crag during weekdays were also my favorite. I think I liked to create something by myself. Soloing is not good for difficult free climbing, but is the best way to enjoy all pitches by myself. To appreciate every aspects of Nameless, l decided to climb solo.

I was also obsessed with the fun of flying in the air by a paraglide that was at the peak of popularity that time. Paragliding has the equal or even more potential as free climbing that appeared to going into dead ends, and gave me the sense of freedom, openness and thrill. Paragliding would also shorten the time of decent (Of course I brought a parachute for throwing the gears down).

3. Gears and hauling

Full EI Cap rack, Circle copper heads, a few ice pitons, five ropes, two paragliders (one for reserve), a harness for paraglide, variometer, video camera, batteries, tape players, music tapes, films, transceiver. Although I believe my plan was a reasonable one given my experience, I must admit that the amount of my gear was crazy. I hauled 150 kg to ABC placed at the beginning of courier, and 100kg at the start of the climb. I think I should have hired porters at least to ABC. Hauling in the lower wall was very difficult. I ended up in changing the haul line from my own route to Kurtyka-Loretan. Hauling became smoother only after 1lth pitch.

4. Style of the climb

I aimed at one-push capsule style with five ropes but in fact I was forced to retreat once from pitch 11 due to bad weather and to the difficulty in hauling that slowed down the ascent. During the retreat I stayed at the base camp to wait for a good whether and for the return of my friends from the Great Trango. Two weeks later, I returned to the wall for the final attempt.

5. Climbing to the top

We placed the base camp at the base of Dunge glacier on June 23. I reached the summit of Nameless Tower on September 9. Total climbing time was 40 days, among which I bivouacked 21 nights on the wall and 17 days were spent for lead climbing. I reached the top of the lower wall on July 26 after fixing ropes for four days. I tried to haul the gears through my original line for two days (26, 27) without success. After changing the haul line to Kurtyka-Loretan route, I finally pull the haul bags to the top of the lower wall on August 7. From August 8 to 13, I climbed six pitches on the main wall before I was forced to retreat due to bad weather. On August 27 I returned to the climb and climbed additional 16 pitches to reach summit on September 9. Five days during the final push were storm. There was no ledge in my route. The climbing was as if going up a huge chimney. It was really cool to do bold moves in such a great place. I fell four times; one was at the expansion flake in the lower wall. Watching Masherbrum, the mountain that I summited before by Alpine style, was a great encouragement to me. I was very lonely during storms and nights. Falling ice after storms often made holes in my flysheet. During storm, snow that accumulated between the wall and portaledge pushed me out. The route above the pitch 18 was covered with verglass and I had to change my footwear from rubber sole to plastic boots.

6. The paragliding accident and the rescue (September9-18)

September 9, I rappelled for 20 meters to return to the shoulder from which I planed to take off. The cloud was increasing, showing a sign of deteriorating weather. I knew that once it storms, there would be no chance for take off for a few days. Only two additional meals were left and the sunset was getting closer. The wind that was blowing strong during the day become gradually weaker, and got stronger once again. Unfortunately, the wing occasionally blew from behind. I patiently waited for a chance to catch against wind. Finally the wind become stronger and I released myself from the belay, raised the paraglider and took off for a dive into 2000m of space. Immediately the tension of the paraglide was lost from the right side and I was falling upside down. I knew was caught by the tail wind. During the fall I tried to convince myself that I am in bad dream. But at the next moment a strong shock struck me at the back and reminded me the reality. I was hanging in the space. I could not breath well due to the pain and could not even look up to check how my paraglide caught the fall. Ironically the variometer showed only a loss of 45 meter. Fortunately my transceiver was working and I call my friends to describe my situation while panting. I thought I should keep my pride, so instead of asking for "help" , I told them that I had an accident and need a helicopter. My ice ax protected my back from breaking. Some films were broken and the headlamp was smashed. Eyeglasses were lost. Soon darkness came in and I had to wait for the Morning while hanging in harness.

September 10, I looked up in the Morning to find that a tiny flake held my paraglider. I found a small ledge and carefully traversed 5 meters of third class to move myself to the ledge where I ended up staying for six days. I sat on the ledge that was a feet and four inches wide and covered my body with the reserve parachute. There was no way to belay myself, only the void was below me. I waited for helicopter. If helicopter can come, it should be able to lower my friends Masanori Hoshina and Tetsu Kimoto to the shoulder where I took off. I hoped that they should be able to pull me up to the shoulder.

September 11, "Helicopter can not maintain the hovering position at 6000 meter " ; I was told that it was impossible to rescue me with a helicopter. I was desperate, but immediately regained morale. I could die at any time, all I needed was to lean myself a little bit forward. I decided to wait for two of my friends to come rescue me as long as possible. In case they could not come, I had a choice to base jump with the reserve parachute which I was using to protect myself from cold. But I knew that the chance of success was nil, and saved this for the last resort.

September 12, the helicopter dropped food and first aid kit, but I could not catch any of them. A pack of mango juice crushed in front of me, leaving the smell and a few drops. It made me laugh rather than to be disappointed. Sunshine wormed me up until three PM and I could get some sleep. I awoke all night, massaging each foot while waiting for sunrise. My foot became numb with even a short nap. I tried to protect my foot from frostbite because I didn’t want to give up my rock climbing skill even if I survive. When I could not stand for coldness and hanger, I called Takaaki Sasakura at the base camp. We mostly talked about foods we wanted to eat after returning to Japan. My desire for food did not stem from hanger, but rather from an escape from the reality. Thirsty become stronger day by day, but my body refused eat ice.

September 15, helicopter came again for the first time since 12, but the dropped food disappeared the same way as the last time. When I was disappointed, good news arrived. They told me a can of cheese was caught at the flake that was holding the paraglider. To get the cheese, I had to climb 5 meter up, and once I moved there, probably I cannot return to this ledge again. Now that I was exhausted and it was difficult even to stand at the ledge. I have chosen to take the risk and decided to move to the upper flake. I immediately found the cheese and ate food for the first time in six days. It was clear now that the place was good for dropping foods: the helicopter came again in the afternoon to drop a few more canned foods. When I have filled my stomach, I found the rescue party 20 meters away at the same height. Hoshina and Kimoto reached there in only three days of climb through the original route by risking dangerous pitches.

September 16, met the rescue party, bivouacked at the same place. September 17 rappelled down the Yugoslav route to the top of the lower wall. September 18 Returned to the ground.

Takeyasu Minamiura

Pictures from the exhibition:

Trango 1990 Solo Ascent

Great Trango 1990 ascent

Timeline of the 1990 Trango Towers Expedition (translated roughly by Google):

Letter from Takaaki (2005):

Dear John Middendorf

Thank you for getting back to me.

We (masanori Hoshina,satoshi Kimoto,masahiro Kosaka and me) made NORWEGIAN route on NE-piller of Great TRANGO In 1990 summer. It took 27days after GOING-UP from DUNGE Gl with "capsule style". After that climb,our friend takeyasu MINAMIURA attempted new route on the NE-face of the NAMELESS by himself. He made It and jump-off from tne top with palagrider but failed. Paragrider was hook rock ,about 80m below the top of the tower. He yelled "falling !! " by woky-talkey(radio). Fisrt we tried to contact paistan-army and ask them heli-resucue But they could not. Because too high alltitude very thin air. So they saied " If you wanna help him,you have to climb up by yourself" We, I mean masanori HOSHINA,satoshi KIMOTO and me,made tactics about rescue. That was HOSHINA and KIMOTO climb the BRITISH route and I backing-up them. Why BRITISH route? We thought that this route was sound line because first assent route of this Towr in 1976 by JO BROWN as we remember . HOSHINA and KIMOTO move to from DUNGE GL. To TRANGO Gl. By helicoptor. I hiked up to advanced base camp at DUNGE Gl. Took gear and carry to TRANGO Gl. By foot all the night. And then I catched up them next evening at near by bottom of NAMELESS. I gave the gear to them. They took 2days and half to reach place at MINAMIURA. Then they rappel to the bottom. Nine days all together , complete to rescue.

Anyway after TRANGO in 1991 ,MINAMIURA ,HOSHINA and me went to YOSEMITE and made NOSE and SHIELD . MINAMIURA and HOSHINA made SOUTH-SEAS to PO-WALL, HOSHINA made LOST In AMERICA with his friend same year. I went to there again and have done COSMOS with my friend In1994. I used "A5" porta-ledge ,rope-bucket and Dasy-chains all climb In yoemite. That were great!

With best wishes ----------------------------------------- Takaaki sasakura

For more information on Trango Tower ascents, see:

It was so nice to also meet: Ishiguro the Tiger, Nonako Reiju, Masakatsu Horie, Yuya Nakayama, and many others! And of course to present with Naoe Sakashita.

In the mid-1990s, I compiled all the climbing information on the Trango Towers I could gather for the American Alpine Journal, but it was incomplete. My fellow Great Trango climber, Masanori Hoshina recently provided me with his researched list of Trango Towers climbs and attempts, which significantly add to the story, and I have been collecting a few notes over the years since I was there.

Some of the attempts in the range are the greatest epics of climbing, and the tales of the big wall breakthroughs in each decade include a cast of the world’s most globally prolific climbers—first with the ascent of Nameless Tower in 1976 by Martin Boysen, Mo Anthoine, Joe Brown and Malcolm Howells, who proved that remote high altitude bigwalls were possible, soon followed by American teams including Dennis Hennek, Galen Rowell, John Roskelley, Kim Schmitz Bill Forrest, and Ron Kauk, who pushed the limits further on new bigwall routes in the area. In the 1980s it was Hans Christian Doseth, Franček Knez, Greg Child, Randy Leavitt, Michel Piola, Michel Fauquet (who descended by paraglider in 1987), Voytek Kurtyka, Erhard Loretan, Wolfgang Güllich, Kurt Albert, Bernd Arnold, Miguel Gallego, to name a few—all well-known climbing names, many with spectacular bigwall lines all over the world, as well as other great climbing achievements.

And in the 1990s Catherine Destivelle, Jeff Lowe, Takeyasu Minamiura, Masanori Hoshina, Satoshi Kimoto, Mark Wilford, Rob Slater, Todd Skinner, Young Chu, Jim Beyer, Jared Ogden, Brad Jarrett, Warren Hollinger, Wally Barker, Mark Synnott, Alex Lowe, Robert Caspersen, Paul Pritchard, Celia Bull, and Adam Wainwright—all tested their mettle in the Trangos with talented teams, as well as Xaver Bongard and myself when we teamed up for our 1992 route, The Grand Voyage on Great Trango Tower. And through these years there were many other notable ascents of summits on the same Karakoram ridge between the Trango and Dungee Glaciers, variously named Trango Monk, Little Trango, Trango Castle, Chateau, and Trango Pulpit, as well as the nearby Uli Biaho, Shipton Spire, and the Flame—all sites of international climbing efforts comprising of teams from Norway, Switzerland, France, Spain, Italy, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Germany, Poland, Japan, Korea, Canada, Britain and America—a very international climbing arena for the world’s best bigwall climbers.

In the 1990s, it was challenging to compile complete info from so many sources, but now it might be possible to gather more complete data on the climbing history of the range.

1990s Info

Back in the 1990s, information on international climbs was often only briefly told in English language journals, like the following report in the 1989 AAJ:

Or Greg Child’s chilling reports in the American Alpine Journal:

Sometimes we would come across bigwall info in European climbing magazines, often drooling over beautiful route topos crafted by Michel Piola.

Occasionally it was possible to find a copy of a rare international journal to glean some insight:

By tradition, the first reports were sent to the American Alpine Journal when requested by Ad Carter:

Early research

Below is the information I published in 1992, after my own trip there:

In 2000, I published in the American Alpine Journal an update (link here), below are the original notes (click to enlarge):

UPDATED INFO:

Thanks to MASANORI HOSHINA for compiling the first generation of this list—this post aims to be the most complete compilation of Trango climbs, but currently includes errors and missing ascents; spelling of names need checking as they have often been translated from many languages, please email deuce4@bigwalls.net with welcome edits and corrections, and I will update online here:

Chronicle of Trango Towers area climbs

1974

1974 P 19,958, Lower Baltoro Glacier. An expedition of the Groupe de Haute Montagne attempted to climb the granite tooth which lies between the Uli Biaho and Trango glaciers and between Payu Peak and and Trango Towers. It is given as 6083 meters (19,958 feet) on the map accompanying G.O. Dyhrenfurth’s Baltoro. We tried the south buttress. In the final assault we were stopped on July 16 by very bad weather after a second bivouac 130 feet from the top. We had fixed ropes in the access couloirs but climbed the buttress without any, alpine-style. Much of the route required direct aid. The team consisted of Michel Février, Jean François Porret, Raymond Coène, Pierre Beguin, Dominique Marquis and me.—Jean Fréhel, Groupe de Haute Montagne (AAJ 1975)

1975

1975 Nameless Tower British team (Mo Anthoine, Bill Barker, Martin Boysen, Joe Brown, Ian MacNaught Davis and Dave Potts) Defeated with 150m to the summit. Martin Boysen's knee got caught in the upper wall crack (Boysen Crack) and he spent 3 hours to escape. AAJ REPORT: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12197653203 AJ Report

1975 Lobsang Spire and the U.S. team, including Dennis Hennek, Mike Covington, and Don Lauria summited the West Peak.AAJ: Lopsang Peak. Like most expeditions this year in the Baltoro Glacier area, we ran into problems. The sudden opening of the region brought a flood of expeditions, overtaxing the limited facilities. The porters took full advantage of the seller’s market. We therefore had troubles with the government, the local Balti people, our liaison officer and the poor weather. We passed the more exciting objectives as we moved up the Baltoro, namely the Uli Biaho Spire and the Trango group. The granitic formations deteriorated as we advanced but we made the best of what we had. The film crew caught up to us in Rawalpindi and they accompanied several members of the expedition to the summit of Karphogang (19,560 feet), a snow dome just west of the Mustagh La. On June 19 Yvon Chouinard, Dr. Joel Malta, George Lowe and Doug Tompkins reached the top. On June 18 Don Lauria, Mike Covington and I climbed Lopsang Peak (20,423 feet) via its southern couloir. Shortly after these climbs, four members left for Skardu. Lowe, Lauria and I made three attempts on P 18,700, located on the southeastern spur of Mount Biange. We reached 18,000 feet on the west arête before retreating in a storm. All the climbing was done alpine-style, which accounts for our lack of accomplishments.—Dennis Hennek

1975: Baltoro Cathedral aka Cascadia (Gran Catedral). The Belledo section of the Italian Alpine Club climbed two routes on the Baltoro Cathedral, the southwest ridge with camps and the southeast face alpine-style. Members were Giulio Fiocchi, leader, Dr. Alberto Sironi, Giuseppe Lafranconi, Ernesto and Sergio Panzeri, Gianluigi Lanfranchi, Carlo Duchini, Amabile Valsecchi, Daniele Chiappa, Pierino Maccarinelli, Benvenuto Laritti, Giacomo Stefani and Armando Colombari. They had hoped to climb the Trango Towers but the Pakistani government instead gave them permission for the Baltoro Cathedral or Thunmo (19,246 feet). From camp at Liliwa, they cut diagonally across the Baltoro Glacier to Base Camp at 12,800 feet at the confluence of the Dunghe Glacier with the Baltoro. After three days of reconnaissance they decided on the routes. On June 23 the siege of the southwest ridge began. They had UIAA V to V+ difficulties to climb the 2500 feet on often rotten granite to Camp I. To there they fixed 3300 feet of rope. Bad weather then delayed operations. On July 3 E. Panzeri, Lafranconi, Lanfranchi and Valsecchi returned to Camp I but Panzeri fell sick and was replaced by Laritti. Despite snow, cold, fatigue and insufficient food, they pressed on. The next section presented difficult mixed climbing, particularly around 16,000 feet. They had next two rope-lengths of overhanging rock, then dangerous loose snow and nearly vertical ice. Finally from Camp IV they reached the summit at 2:30 P.M. on July 10. The attack on the 5000-foot-high southeast face began on July 3. Chiappa, Maccarinelli, Stafani, Duchini and S. Panzeri climbed 1650 feet up a gully in the east face and traversed right on a shoulder. They climbed another 1650 feet the next day to the foot of the final buttress. To there they had had UIAA III to V difficulties. Bad weather drove them back to Base Camp. Two days later, July 6, they were back at their high point. Chiappa and Maccarinelli climbed two rope-lengths where they could not place a single piton. They bivouacked at 16,400 feet. On the 7th Stefani and S. Panzeri took the lead, climbing overhanging cracks on aid and then ice, and finally more difficult and rotten cracks before returning to the bivouac. On the 8th Chiappa, Duchini and Maccarinelli left first and above the former high point climbed rotten, snow-covered flakes. Panzeri and Stefani followed. Chiappa led a vertical dihedral to get to the top of the face followed by the rest. (UIAA V, V+, A2, A3). Easier mixed climbing took them to the top. They used 500 feet of fixed rope and 150 feet of metal ladder. A deep depression separates this high point from the summit of Thunmo.(AAJ 1976)

1976—Nameless Tower

**1976 Nameless Tower southwest face. British team (5 climbers including Joe Brown) First ascent by Martin Boysen and Mo Anthoine, followed the next day by Joe Brown and Malcolm Howells. AJ Report

1977—Great Trango Tower

First Ascent of Great Trango Tower

1979—Uli Biaho

**1979. Uli Biaho Tower U.S. team (John Roskelley, Kim Schmitz, Ron Kauk, and Bill Forrest) East Face (VII 5.8 A4) 10 days one-push-Yosemite style using portaledges. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12198040500

1983

1983 Trango Tower Attempts. We were Ray Button, Geoff Gabites, Ian Jowett and I as leader. Our objective was the Nameless Trango Tower by the British route. We had two camps: Boulder Camp at 16,500 feet, established the day after reaching Base Camp in early July, and Snowpatch Camp at 18,000 feet, set up a couple of days later. A 15-day storm forced us to retreat. We began on the wall again on July 20 but heavily iced conditions made the going too slow and so, after a few rope-lengths, we changed our objective to the unclimbed west face of the Great Trango Tower. On the first day we climbed to bivouac at 18,000 feet. The next day we climbed quickly to 20,000 feet but were stopped by a dangerous windslab 650 feet from the top. GRAEME DINGLE, New Zealand Alpine Club (AAJ)

Trango Towers, South Face of the Château attempt (Also Lobsang, 1983)

1984-Great Trango Tower Norwegian Pillar

**1984. Great Trango Norwegian team (Hans Christian Doseth  Finn Daelhi, with Stein Aasheim, Dag Kolsrud who descended ).  Ascent of the Northeast Pillar with an elevation gain of 1500m (VII 5.10+ A4). Doseth and Daehli make the first ascent of east summit,but died while rappelling. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12198531802 AJ: noted as, “the promising new generation of steep big wall climbs which are slowly materializing.” (Paul Nunn)

1984 Nameless Tower British team (Bolton Expedition: David Lampaard, Ian Lonsdale, Andrew Atkinson, Stuart Holmes, and Alan Scott) Attempted a new route to the left of the first British ascent in 1976, but lost due to bad weather at 6100 m. Completed by a Spanish team in 1989. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12198429604 Also in 1985</> AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12198531801

**1984 Great Trango: The U.S. team (Scott Wollums and Andy Selters) (After attempt on Uli Biaho) climb a new route on NW ridge Great Trango in 4 days in alpine style from Trango Glacier. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12198532001

1984: American Expedition Underway in Karakoram The 1984 American Braldu River-Biafo Spires Karakoram Expedition is now underway in northwestern Pakistan. The group is attempting two feats never before accomplished-to successfully run the 60-mile Braldu River and climb the awesome Biafo Spires. The highly qualified team is being led by Dr.Andrew Embick and is being sponsored by National Geographic Magazine. The members include George Lowe, John Markel, Bob McDougal, Ron Peers, Graham Thompson, Rob Milne, Galen Rowell, Jim Bridwell, Roman Dial, George Schunk, Rob Lesser, Bo Shelby and Kathy Blau. From the heart of the Karakoram Range flows the giant Baltoro Glacier, draining the flanks of 28,250-foot K2 and the greatest concentration of high peaks in the world. From the Baltoro's icy terminus at 11,224 feet, flows the Braldu River. After 25 miles, the Braldu's volume is doubled by a torrent of melt water from the Biafo, another of the major Karakoram glaciers. The Biafo's rubble-covered snout juts almost into the river a few miles upstream from the village of Askole, the highest human habitation in this arid, remote val-ley. Downstream, the river, icy cold and brown with glacial silt, continues to drop at more than 60 feet per mile, and then enters the narrow Chokpo-Chongo Gorge. The tortured water of the Braldu, constricted by rock walls and obstructed by bould-ers, 60 miles from the Baltoro's snout, finally joins the gentler Shigar, which flows another 60 miles to join the mighty Indus at Skardu. The Braldu, because of its speed, altitude, length, flow, and temperature, presents one of the most formidable technical whitewater challenges in the world and has never been successfully run. The only serious kayaking attempt was made by a strong British team in 1978. The leader, Dr. Mike Jones, was killed when he attempted to rescue a team member in trouble, and the attempt was abandoned. (Summit, MayJune 1984)

1985

1985 Trango Towers, Château attempts

1986

1986 Nameless Tower Attempt (Kurtyka)

*1986 U.S.A. team (Greg Child, Randy Leavitt, Tom Hargis) After finishing Gasherbrum IV, the team moved to Nameless later in the season, and attempted (same?) new route on the southeast face of Nameless. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12198728302

1986 Great Trango Italian contingent (Annaldo Pintel and 5 others) Climbed from slightly left of the Norwegian route on the Northeast Pillar and climbed the upper rock face to 5760m, but turned back. Suffered from a dust avalanche and frozen cracks from the middle snow field. <?>

1986 Germans Helmut Münchenbach, Christoph Krah and Peter Popal attempted a 5900-meter tower adjacent to the Great Trango Tower. They failed 300 meters from the top. Italians including Renzo Vettori, Oscar Piazza and Arnaldo Pinter tried to repeat the Nor­wegian route on the Great Trango Tower. All were beaten back by bad weather. (1987 AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12198728102)

1987

1987a: Slovene Route (1987)

1987b: West Pillar Trango Tower

Trango Towers, Château (1987)

1988

1988a: Geologic Discoveries

1988b: Kurtyka-Loretan on Trango Tower

1988c: Erhard Loretan

1988 Nameless Tower. Japanese team (5 climbers including Masaharu Gandou) They attempted to open a new route between the Kurtyka-Loretan and Yugoslav Route on the East Face, but stalled due to bad weather after climbing 7 points to the top of the base, and retraced their steps on the Yugoslav Route, losing 150m before the summit. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12198925003

**1988 Nameless Tower German expediton: East German Bernd Arnold and West Germans Kurt Albert, Wolfgang Güllich, Wolfgang Kraus, Thomas Lipinski, Martin Leinauer, Dr. Jörg Schneider, Martin Schwiersch, Jörg Wilz. Kraus, Lipinski, Schneider and Wilz climbed Nameless via initial pitches of Kurtyka-Loretan then traversed to the Yugoslav Route to summit. Arnold, Leinauer, and Schwiersch repeated the route after their attempt on Great Trango, and were followed by Kurt Albert, Wolfgang Gullich and Hartmut Münchenbach who made the first free ascent of Nameless Tower (26 pitches, 5.12). AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12198925004

*1988 Great Trango Norwegian Buttress attempt: Münchenbach,Albert, Arnold, Güllich, Leinauer climbed 25 pitches of the Norwegian Pillar to the snowledge in 14 days, but then retreated due to bad conditions, later writing, “This must be one of the most difficult Karakoram routes”. During the attempts, one of the climbers fell 25 meters into a crevasse and broke his arm, requiring 14 hours to rescue him.<?>

1988 Great Trango. Canadian team (Eric Sambo and Doug Dean) Dean attempted a solo ascent of the Northwest Face of the U.S. Route from Bivouac at 5330m, but was blocked by a dangerous snow cover just below the summit and had to descend. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12198925201

*1988 Great Trango. Italian team (Maurizio Giordani, Maurizio Venzo, and Kurt Walde) After climbing the Uli Biaho Tower, Giordani soloed the Northwest Face America Route in 9 hours from the start, followed by a third ascent two days later by Maurizio Venzo and Kurt Walde.AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12198925202

1988 Uli Biaho. French team (guided by Yves Astier) Uli Biaho Tower Two routes on the south face of the East Tower. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12198925202

AJ on 1988 (Paul Nunn): W Kurtyka and E Loretan made the first ascent of the E face of the Trango Tower (wrongly called 'nameless' ever since Galen Rowell). Two attempts on this very steep wall were stopped after their initial beginning on 24 June. Eventually they succeeded on 13 July, after eight days of effective climbing. The route is 29 rope-lengths, 1100m ED plus, with six A3 pitches and much other artificial climbing, though mostly using nuts and friends. They fixed 600m of rope, but completed another of the Tower's great test-pieces. Later in the summer 10 German climbers led by Hartmut Miinchenbach followed their route for 220m, then traversed to the south on the big snow-ledge to the Yugoslav route and finished up that. On 3 September Wolfgang Kraus, Jorg Wilz, Thomas Lipinski and Jorg Schneider reached the top. On 6 September Kurt Albert, Bernt Arnold, Wolfgang Giillich, Martin Leinauer, Hartmut Miinchenbach and Martin Schwiersch succeeded. Giillich and Albert made a free ascent, grading the route UIAA VIII or VIII+. Subsequently Arnold sustained pelvic and rib fractures after falling into a crevasse and had to be helicoptered out, an unfortunate culmination of a rare trip for the East German sandstone ace. Nearby on Vii Biaho (6290m) an Italian party did a new route on the S pillar, and made the second ascent of this steep tower. Rosana Manfrini, Maurizio Giordani and Kurt Wald completed the climb in five days between 17 and 21 June, grading the climb VII A3. Two routes were also done on El Castillo (5 844m). These climb a face to a lower summit (5 300m) with sections of 6B, and were done between 19 and 28 May. The main summit remains virgin. After the Vii Biaho route Giordani soloed the Great Tower of Trango from the north side in nine hours, a 2000m route repeated by his friends afterwards.

1989

*1989 Nameless Tower. Greg Child and Mark Wilford attempt a new line to the right of Kurtyka-Loretan on the northeast face in alpine style, but lost at 5850m (5.10 A4) after being trapped in a storm for seven days in a portaledge which eventually failed due to frozen ice.

**1989 Nameless Tower. Spanish team (Miguel Ángel Gallego Chiri Ros, Jose Luis Clavel, Jose Seigeur) new route between west buttress and southwest. From the final snow field to the summit, they joined the 1987 Swiss-French route (AJ: close to the unfininished Dai Lampard 1984 attempt) from the line where the British team had lost at 6100m in 1984. It took 19 bivouacs for a total of 36 pitches using fixed ropes. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199028501

**1989 Nameless Tower. German team (Wolfgang Güllich, Kurt Albert, Milan Sykora, Christoph Stiegler) First ascent of Eternal Flame (35p 5.12c A2), including 11 pitches 5.11 and two of 5.12 in Rotpunkt style, the hardest rock route yet done in the Himalaya or the Karakoram, according to Albert. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199028700

1989 Great Trango <?>　 Jim Brennan and Greg Foweraker tried the Northeast Face but lost, then climbed the Nameless Hugo route 9P and gave up. Pat McNerthney and Greg Collum attempted the Southwest Buttress on the Southwest Peak but gave up after a few pitches because it was too huge. Matt Kearns and Dan Cauthorn attempted the first ascent of the Southwest Buttress after climbing a sub-6000m peak on the Uli Biaho side, but gave up due to heavy snow after a storm. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199028502

«?Austrian-American team climbed the Kurtyka-Loretan?»

1989 Uli Biaho east face attempt (Stefan Stuflesser), AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199028803

1989 Uli Biaho SE face attempt, using the same approach gully as Roskelley’s party in 1978. Nick Craddock, Paul Rogers, Murray Judge, Guy Cotter. Craddock, Rogers. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199127301

1989 Uli Biaho south buttress (June 1989) Nick Craddock, Paul Rogers, Guy Cotter New Zealand via south buttress 1988 Italian route (5.10, A3, four-day ascent, two-day descent). “Rock boots never came out of the pack” due to heavy snow.

1989 Thunmo climb covered here: Trango Towers, Château

1990

1990: Takeyasu Minamiura: Solo of "Steppenwolf" on Trango Tower

**1990 Great Trango. 　 Japan Team. Masanori Hoshina, Satoshi Kimoto, Takaaki Sasakura, and Masahiro Kosaka made the second ascent of the Norwegian route (VII 5.12 A4), including a var on the northeast pillar and lower rock face, after 25 days, but could not climb the summit of the northeast peak due to lack of time. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199127201

1990 Trango Tower. A Swiss expedition led by Philippe Scherrer succeeded. A Spanish group climbing on Trango Great Tower and Uli Biaho is reported to have failed.(AJ).

**1990 Nameless Tower. USA-France (Jeff Lowe and Catherine Destivelle including TV crew) The team attempted to free climb the Kurtyka-Loretan route, but due to ice on the route, they switched to the Yugoslav route for the second free ascent. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199127002

1990 Great Trango Tower Attempt. Under the leadership of Antonio Perezgrueso of Spanish Television, Fernando Cobo, Jon Lazcano, Guillermo Banales and Máximo Murcia attempted a line on the southwest buttress of the Great Trango Tower. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199127202. (The full SW ridge climbed by Josh Wharton and Kelly Cordes in 2004)

“Cragging in the Karakoram”: AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199103300

1991

1991 Great Trango Tower Norwegian Buttress (Japan variant to rim): Miguel Berasaluce, Adolfo Madinabeitia and Antonio Miranda. Desnivel, N° 68, December, 1991. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199224701

1992—The Grand Voyage & Run for Cover

**1992 Great Trango. 　 Swiss-American team (Xaver Bongard and John Middendorf) Climbed the overhanging east face with an independent line, then joined the Norway route for 3½P above the snowledge, and then onto an independent line on the north side of the top pillar, spending 15 days climbing "Grand Voyage" (VII 5.10 A4+ WI3) to complete the second ascent of the northeast peak from the east side. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199326000

**1992 Nameless Tower. American team (Greg Child and Mark Wilford) First ascent of "Run For Cover" (VI 5.11 A3+) to the right of the Slovenian route. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199303500

*1992 Nameless Tower Spanish Attempts. José Chaverri, Lorenzo Ortiz and Santiago Palacios fixed 750 meters of rope on the lower part of the Kurtyka-Loretan route for seven days. On July 7, they made their final attempt, which ended ten meters below the summit because of perpendicular unconsolidated snow. Chaverri then joined Basques Kike de Pablos and Jon Lazkano on the Slovene Route, where they had already fixed half the route. On July 19, Chaverri and de Pablos were overtaken by nightfall when they were not far from the summit, but they gave up and rappelled off in the dark. (AAJ)

1992 Cho Dukkyu, Cho Chonghwan, So Hoyoung, and Korean-American Chu Young repeat Yugoslav route. (AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199325803). Also: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199425501

*1992 Great Trango. Australian team climb and BASE jump from below east summit (story tk). Glenn writes, “In 1992 Vlad Moroz, Geoff Gabites, Nic Feteris and I climbed much of Andy Selters 1984 route (as marked with green line above) except that we traversed left (east) to the E/NE summit above the col. Lindsay Griffin calls this the NW Ridge route. After we went to the summit, Nic and I traversed and probed the edge of the serac line to the NW until we found a ledge to jump off. That was the scariest part of the expedition. We had a look at the top of the Norwegian route but it was not vertical enough to jump at the top. When we tried to look further down the N pillar, we found dodgy nests of pitons that someone (?Norwegians) must have repelled off but didn’t fancy our chances on these. (Later) some Flemish mountain guides repeated our climb and jump and then climbed and jumped Nameless. Great athletes. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199326300

*1992 First Shipton Spire attempt (Gregory Collum, Andy Selters, Chuck Boyd, Mark Bebie). AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199326601 Andy writes: In 1992, I met the BASE jumpers, they came up to our Shipton basecamp with Greg Child because Greg knew I had done the route (to the summit of Great Trango in 1984). I reassured them that our route was very reasonable and if they had a nose for terrain they could find it. If there is a reasonable amount of new snow or early in the season avalanche danger would be a concern, and I heard of at least one subsequent team struggled with that. Crevasse hazard was modest to minimal. I have no doubt that Scott and I stumbled into the easiest and safest route on the peak. The best published thing on our climb was my article in Mountain Magazine.

1993

1994

1994 Nameless Tower Korean team (4 members including Wang Kisu/Ki Soo Hwang) They entered the Trango Glacier to open a new route on the south face, but gave up after two climbers were injured by falling rocks on the glacier.Korean-Americans Cho Kukkya, Cho Chonghwan, So Hoyoung, Chu Young, Slovene route. (1992?)

1994 Great Trango. 　 Japanese team (Keio Univ. / Tomoyuki Watanabe and 5 others) After returning to the BC, they found that their passports had been stolen and had to report the theft, which delayed their climbing activities. After climbing 6 pitches on the lower face (right of Norwegian Pillar) to 5300m gave up. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199528903

*1994 Trango Pulpit. Australian team (Stefan Eberhard, Julie Styles). The two completed "Trango Dreaming" (VI 5.10a A3+) a new 600m big wall up the lower face. After fixing the initial pitches, the rest of the route went capsule style using five ropes. In eight days in August they climbed 13 pitches, the first nine free and the rest on aid. Bolts were placed at each belay (Trango Dreaming VI Australian 19 A3+).

1995

**1995 Nameless Tower. First ascent of the north face of Nameless Tower by U.S. Team (Eric Brand, Willie Benegas, Jared Ogden, Kevin Starr) Book of Shadows (5.10b A4 WI4 1150m). AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199609500 and http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199629401

From Alpinist11: "The players for the first route on the north face, in 1995, were Argentine-born Willy Benegas and Americans Eric Brand, Jared Ogden and Kevin Starr. They took the great corner, which they named the Book of Shadows. With an approach gully raked by slush avalanches and aerial bombardment, and pitches characterized by A4 aid and often loose and verglassed rock, it ranks as one of the more objectively hazardous and technically difficult routes on Trango. Given the perpetual cold of the north face, it's also as masochistic an undertaking as anything done on the Tower. The team used six ropes on their capsule-style climb, camped in portaledges, and made the summit on August 4 after a final eighteen-day push."

**1995 Nameless Tower. U.S. team (Todd Skinner, Mike Lilygren, Jeff Bechtel, and Bobby Model) First team-free ascent of "Carboy Direct" (5.13a), variation of the Kurtyka-Loretan route. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199629701. Michael Westmacott Alpine Club Valedictory Address, 1995: “Many of us recently heard Paul Pritchard talking about his alpine-style ascent of the Slovene route on Trango Tower, while there was an American team on a neighbouring route, painstakingly bolting or otherwise equipping it, sometimes from above, with the object of climbing it from the ground later on. They spent sixty days in this activity - an extraordinary thing to do, in my opinion, and remarkably boring to any but the participants. But perhaps we should not be too scathing. After all, we spent over fifty days getting up and down the yak route on Everest.”

**1995 Nameless Tower NW face. Spanish Basque team (Mikel Zabalza, Fermín Izco, Antonio Aquerreta) First ascent of "Insumisioa" 5.11 A3+ 915m) on the North Face. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199629402

**1995 Nameless Tower. Paul Pritchard and Adam Wainwright climbed the Slovene Route. Having initially climbed to the shoulder from the Dungee Glacier (Andy Cave and Wainwright) before retreating in a storm, then later using Cowboy Direct fixed ropes back to the shoulder and climbing in a further three days from the shoulder to the top and back. On the same day they topped out (13th Aug) was the day of the storm that killed Alison Hargreaves and the rest of the team on K2. Celia Bull, Kate Phillips and Donna Claridge attempted the Slovene. From the Dungee glacier, Noel Craine and Paul Pritchard went up the gulley that leads directly to the north face later retreating from storm, and Crane fell down a crevasse and broke a couple of ribs.

More attempts and reports: AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199629403 and http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199629601 and http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199629602 (AJ: http://www.alpinejournal.org.uk/Contents/Contents_1996_files/AJ%201996%20285-292%20MEF%20Reports.pdf#search=%22trango%22

1996

*1996 Shipton Spire, East Face. Charles Boyd, Greg Child, Greg Collum, Greg Foweraker: 36 pitches, 5.11-A4 to “about 30 or 40 feet below the top”. Full alpine wall rack including ledges. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199732005 Naming: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199938902

1996 Nameless Tower: Tatsu Shinohara, Toshi Kikuchi and Takeshi Nagano repeat Yugoslav route. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199732004

1997

**1997 Nameless Tower. U.S. team (John Rzeczycki, Brad Jarrett, Warren Hollinger, and Wally Barker) First ascent of Wall Fiction (5.10 A4 WI3), the right line of the Book of Shadows on the North Face. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199832301

1997 Great Trango. A four-member Korean team climbed a 12-pitch variation to the Norwegian Buttress route, which they then followed to the East Summit, including Youn-Jung Shin, the first female to summit Great Trango; Choi Seung-Chul also became the first to paraglide from one of Great Trango’s summits. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199832201 and http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12200033403

*1997 Shipton Spire, Ship of Fools. Mark Synnott and Jared Ogden established a new route on the east face of Shipton Spire (5852m) called Ship of Fools (VII 5.11 A2+ WI6), spending 20 nights on the wall and summitting on August 6. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199802100

1997 Nameless Tower, Yugoslav Route: Stenstrom and Nilsson. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199832202

*1997 Hainablak. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199832102

1998

*1998 Shipton Spire. Free as Can Be. Inshallah (VII 5.12 A1, 4,300 feet) on the southeast face of Shipton Spire (a.k.a. Hainablak Central Tower, 19,700 feet), July 13-27, Steph Davis, Kennan Harvey, Seth Shaw. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199908000

Overlooked Jewels: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12199909000

1999

*1999 Nameless Tower Spanish Route (Ascensionists, Gabriel Besson, Claude-Alain Gaillan, David Maret, Frederic Roux) First ascent of the new route "Moonlight" Claire de Lune (VI 5.10d A3, 1230m) on the left of the 1989 Spanish route.

**1999 Great Trango. Quokka live broadcast w/U.S. team (Alex Lowe, Mark Synnott, and Jared Ogden) First ascent of a new route, Parallel Worlds (VII 5.11 A4), on the Northwest Face from the Trango Glacier in 28 days. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12200010000 and http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12200033501

**1999 Great Trango. The Russian Way (VII 5.11 A4, 2675m) on the “prow” of the northwest face of Great Trango Tower, July 15-August 10, 1999, Alexander Odintsov, Ivan Samoilenko, Igor Potankin, Yuri Koshelenko. Yuri writes: “Apparently our team made the first ascent of Trango West. I have great respect for the guys from the TNF team, but they didn’t reach the top for a couple of pitches then. They started from the platforms light and did not take crampons. Alex then fell on the thin ice below the top, and after that the guys went down to the platform and then went down along the ascent way. We took the Bibler tent with us and traversed the entire Trango Western ridge and descended the snow-ice slope. I subsequently climbed the section where Alex fell, there really was about 20 meters of very bad ice, on an inclined slab of 60/70 degrees, there was no belay there. By the way, on Trango I used the frame of a platform made of titanium, which Ivan Samoilenko once made with you for the A5.”

AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12200010800 and http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12200033502

**1999 Trango Pulpit: Michalem Drasšar, Tomáš Rinn, Pavlem Weisser, Ivo Wondráček and the sole Slovak, Jaro Dutka, fixed 700 meters of rope on the Pulpit’s Southeast Ridge, climbed to the summit of the Pulpit, then traversed to the 1977 route and onto the Main Summit in a 53-pitch effort they called More Czech, Less Slovak. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12200033600

**1999 Trango Pulpit: Norwegian Trango Pulpit Direct (VII A4 5.11, ca. 2200m) on the northeast and north faces of the Trango Pulpit (6050m), June 28-August 4, 1999 (plus two days of fixing), Robert Caspersen, Gunnar Karlsen, Per Ludvig Skjerven, Einar Wold. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12200009100 and http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12200033801

Video here: documentary on climbing the Pulpit Direct on Trango Towers.

*1999 Great Trango. Lost Butterfly. German team of Thomas Tivadar, Gavor Berecz and Oskar Nadasdi arrived with the intention of establishing a new route up the NW face from the Trango Glacier, only to find the obvious lines occupied. They climbed 35 independent pitches to the left of Parallel Worlds before joining that route. Some 39 days and 44 pitches into it, however, they were forced to retreat short of the summit after a storm had imprisoned them in their portaledges for three days. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12200033503

2000’s (incomplete)

2000: For Better or for Worse (VII 5.12a WI3, 3,500') on Hainabrakk East Tower (ca. 19,024'), June 25-July 27, Heather Baer, Roxanna Brock, Brian McCray, and Steve Schneider. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12200102300

2000: Jonathan Copp, Mike Pennings Ascents: Freebird (VI 5.11d A1, 3,500') on Cat’s Ears Spire (ca. 18,800'), July 15-17, first ascent of the peak; Tague it to the Top (VI 5.11 C2, 3,700') on the east face of Hainabrakk East Tower (ca. 19,024'), July 26-28, new route, and second ascent of the peak; Inshallah (VII 5.12 A1, 4,300') on Shipton Spire (a.k.a. Hainabrakk Central Tower, 19,700'), August 4-6, second ascent of the route. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12200101400

2001 (Lindsay Griffin, AJ): Four parties visited the Trango group aiming to climb high standard rock routes on the famous granite walls. Trango Tower (6245m) was attempted by two expeditions. Waldemar Niclevicz's Brazilian team repeated the 'standard' Slovenian Route on the SE Face. Japanese climbers led by Shogo Kada intended to scale a new route on the E Face, but only reached 51OOm. Two very different expeditions attempted Great Trango (6286m). Twid Turner led a UK. team hoping to climb a new route on the 1400m E Face to the left ofthe Norwegian Pillar above the Dunge glacier. However poor weather forced them to retreat from a high point of 5700m. Glenn Singleman led an Australian team intending to film a base jump from close to the summit of Great Trango. Two members of the group reached the summit via the NW Ridge route on 13 June before progress was stopped by a storm and the climbers retreated to base camp. The whole team then travelled to Australia before returning to Pakistan to mount a second summit bid. On 2 September six members of the group reached the summit but conditions were not thought to be ideal and plans to jump from the top were abandoned.

*2002: The Flame AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12200310600 and http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12200336001

*2004: Southwest ridge of Great Trango Tower to (south)west summit, Azeem Ridge (7,400’ vertical, 54 pitches, 5.11R/X A2 M6). Kelly Cordes and Josh Wharton. July 24-28, 2004. (Kelly also reports: 2005 Slovakian team: new route to the right of Azeem Ridge route, joining their route close to summit). AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12200501400 Alpine Journal.

*2004: Trango Monk (5.10 A2), Tomaz Jakofčič and Miha Valič.

2005 Pulpit:  Yann Mimet, Jean-Yves Fredriksen, Martial Dumas, Sam Beaugey. Azazel 22/06/05 to 10/07/05 AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12200636200

September 8th, 2006
Karakoram, Nameless Trango Tower
(6239 m): Eternal Flame, 7a, A2, M5, 1200 m,
24-hour round trip (first one-day ascent),
Andrej Grmovšek and Silvo Karo

2007: Great Trango Tower, northwest face, completion of Ukrainian route (2003) and new variation to Azeem Ridge, AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/12200833400

*2008 The Great Trango Norwegian team first full repeat of the 1984 Norwegian Buttress. A four-man Norwegian team— the second complete ascent of the Norwegian Buttress (VII 5.10+ A4) on Great Trango Tower in Pakistan. Rolf Bae, Bjarte Bø, Sigurd Felde, and Stein Ivar Gravdal climbed the 4,500-foot northeast pillar of Great Trango and then continued to the 20,443-foot eastern summit. The ascent required 27 days, followed by three days to descend. 

2009 Nameless Tower 　 German team (Alex Huber and Thomas Huber brothers) Succeeded in freeing all pitches of the Eternal Flame. After free climbing to avoid the pendulum traverse, they waited several days in bad weather. Waiting for better weather, they resumed climbing, free climbing all 24 pitches up to the hardest grade, 5.13a, in 4 days and summited. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/13201212942

2011 Nameless Tower Russian team (Viktor Volodin, Dmitry Golovchenko, Sergey Nilov, Alexander Yurkin) First ascent of "No Fear" (6b+, A3) on the Northwest Face in 10 days. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/13201212935

2011 Marina Kopteva, Anna Yasinskay and Galina Chibitok (Ukraine/Russia) established "Parallel world" (2580m, VI+, A1/7b, 6B), a new route up the NW Face of Great Trango Tower, Karakorum, Pakistan. 22 July to 29 August 2011 AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/13201212936

*2013. Great Trango. Polish team (Marcin Tomaszewski and Marek Raganowicz) Pioneered BUSHIDO (46-pitch A4 VII+) on the Northwest Face. 19 days of climbing and 2 days of descent. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/13201212833

2013 Uli Biaho south pillar: Matteo Della Bordella and Luca Schiera, and Swiss Silvan Schupbach (Italy) AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/13201212835

2013 Uli Biaho east face alpine style new route (after Slovene route in 1.5 days): Eugeny Bashkirtsov and Denis Veretenin AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/13201212836

2017 Great Trango. 　 Russian team (Yegor Suzdaltsev, Ivan Temelev, Anton Kashevnik). Pioneered "Inshallah" on the Southwest Face. AAJ: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/13201214705 Also: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/13201214707

2022 Nameless Tower Catalan team (Edu Marin, his brother Alex, and his father Francisco) Second free ascent of Eternal Flame. Edu Marin stayed on portaledge and successfully led the entire pitch free with one push.

2022 Nameless Tower. Austrian team (Babsi Zangerl and Jacopo Larcher) They free climbed the Eternal Flame in 6 days, each with no fall and one push.

2000s Alpine Journal Reports (year of publication)

2000 2001 2002 2002b 2003 2004 2005 2006 2006b 2007 2008 2009 2009b 2010 2011 2012 2012b 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023

2000s AAJ reports (year of publication)

2000 2001 2001b 2001c 2002 2003 2004 2004b 2004c 2004d 2005 2005b 2005c 2005d 2005e 2006 2006b 2006c 2006d 2006e 2007 2007b 2007c 2007d 2007e 2007f 2007g 2007h 2007i 2008 2008b 2008c 2008d 2008e 2009 2009b 2010 2011 2012 2013 2013b 2014 2015 2015b 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2023b

Note: I have gathered additional information and will further scour the journals so I will update soon, but please email deuce4@bigwalls.net with welcome edits and corrections in the meantime.

ADDITIONAL SOURCES

Jakob Schweighofer Photos:

(used with permission, copyright Jakob Schweighofer)

In the antipodes, organised protesters took the tree-hugging idea further, and in 1978, a group of conservation activists built small platforms in Totara trees within the ecologically diverse Pureora Forest on the North Island of New Zealand, as part of a structured campaign organised by the Native Forest Action Council (NFAC).  Totara trees can be 4m in diameter and grow up to 35m tall and provide perfect notches for constructing tree house platforms high in their canopy. With protestors on the ground also preventing access to the base of the trees, logging was fully halted, leading to public awareness and political action, and the rainforest gained legal rights as Pureora Forest Park.

In Australia, an era of organised logging blockades began in the Nightcap range of northern New South Wales in 1979, with established hammock camps high up in the canopy as the last line of defence. Despite protestors warning loggers that people were in the forest and in the trees, tree-felling continued, and in the path of advancing machines, massive trees dropped amongst the protestors led to some near-misses. Stymied, the group retreated and some resorted to stealthier activity, sawing felled logs into unusable pieces, and "spiked trees with nails to deter cutting and identified them with spray paint" (Green Fire, Ian Cohen, 1996). Nan Nicholson referred to such tactics as "the most questionable act, and that which lost us most public support, actually saved the day." Destructive practices such as tree-spiking and cabling trees polarised the environmental community, yet brought awareness that continued logging of the area would likely lead to dire consequences, and a logging moratorium was declared.1

Australia and the United States have shared heritage in progressive environmental policies, but in the 1980s, so-called "extreme activism" traveled different paths. Both countries established their national park systems in the 1870s, and over the following century, both countries continued to legislate increasing protection for the natural environment.  Whereas the USA passed the Wilderness Act in 1964 to protect large tracts of undeveloped land, Australia welcomed the global recognition that UNESCO's 1972 World Heritage Convention provided to preserve natural sites from ongoing degradation, among other modern environmental policies.

But with a global energy crisis in full swing in the 1970s, the political appetite for further environmental conservation legislation was on the wane, and the rapid conversion of unprotected wilderness to “productive land” accelerated with the development of ever-mightier industrial machines, like the globally exported Caterpillar D10 tractor introduced in 1977. The effective tactics of the previous era by major environmental groups swayed the tide of preservation with simple public exposure and argument, such as the Sierra Club's full-page challenge in the New York Times in 1966 to protest more Grand Canyon dams, "Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?" But in the 1970s, these kinds of campaigns were less effective in generating the public and political will for sensible land management. And as the extraction industries pushed into ever-more remote and rugged wilderness, concerned activists developed new strategies to shine a public light on the ongoing devastation of majestic and irreplaceable wild ecosystems.

In the southwest USA, Edward Abbey famously inspired activists to employ means of sabotage of wilderness-destroying machinery to slow progress, such as the shearing of bulldozer hydraulic lines, dumping sand in oil and fuel tanks, and other means of temporarily and permanently disabling industrial equipment. The practice became known as "monkeywrenching" or “nightwork”, and the general rule was that violence was not to be directed at people, but machinery and infrastructure were fair game. The use of explosives was mostly fantasized, such as the only way to bring down the hated dam that flooded Glen Canyon, as the potential harm to humans could not be eliminated.  Human vs. machine monkeywrenching was popularised by some American environmental groups, such as Earth First! and other groups actioning even more violent tactics, and would continue for decades in America's environmental battles. In the 1990s, actual 'eco-terrorism' was rare, but real in the United States, polarising ecologists in their level of acceptance, and ultimately ineffective in the broader environmental agenda of preservation.2

For environmental activists in Australia, the transition to non-destructive and non-violent protest methods was swifter and earlier, and by the early 1980s, "conservation organisations disassociated themselves from the political futility and ethical emptiness of violent protest" (L.J. Christensen, The Re-Enchanted forest, Murdoch University, Australia, 2005). 3

Amongst the groups peacefully protesting and risking arrest for the Australian wilds, ecotage tactics were purposely abandoned and alternate strategies of non-violent direct action (NVDA) were pursued, as long as there were mechanisms in place that ensured that protestors’ lives were not recklessly endangered, as they had been in the 1979 Terania protest. Campaigns were organised with police liaisons, compulsory NVDA training, and organised control of protesting sites and media exposure. The three-month blockade that began on December 14, 1982, and interrupted the relentless damming of Tasmania’s treasured wild and scenic rivers was a cumulation of a seven-year strategy that began with the establishment of the Tasmanian Wilderness Society and ended with a new World Heritage Site and protection of the Franklin River, a unique wild-river ecosystem. 

Unlike in the USA where a ‘radical environmentalist’ connoted a stealthy outlaw disabling machinery in the dark of the night, in Tasmania, it referred to those who could create a community in rainforest conditions. As Ian Cohen writes, "At best the radicals were a powerful extreme wing of the environmental movement, prepared to undertake tasks and survive for long periods in conditions which saw moderates head home after a few weeks." During the Franklin Blockade, there were over 1200 arrests of people impeding access to key sites, often in fierce west coast Tasmania conditions.4

After the Franklin River blockade, the next target for the Tasmanian NVDA activists was to stall the ongoing conversion of native wet and dry eucalypt forests into woodchip plantations, especially in the threatened forests within the proposed extensions to the World Heritage area. TO BE CONTINUED.

—The history of Tasmanian NVDA Aerial Activism is the next article in this series, submitted to Wild Magazine and due for their winter publication.

FOOTNOTES

4

The Nightcap Action Group joined the Franklin blockade and were primarily in the deepest upriver regions of the campaign.  Jill McColloch recalls the timing of their upriver blockade (prior to the finish of the Uni term) as critical to the campaign, as “without them, we wouldn’t have been able to start as soon as we did.” In his book, Green Fire, Ian Cohen describes the 'love hearts' action, where crepe-paper chains of hearts were stealthily wrapped around guarded industrial equipment on Valentine's Day in 1983, signalling the message of potential ability of ecotage ("Our message was clear. 'You fear us and accuse of of eco-terrorism.  We could sabotage.  We have the ability but choose not to."). Of the police reaction to Franklin, Cohen writes, "For many of them it was an 'other worldly experience'.  They had never encountered the nonviolent philosophy and accompanying forest strategies.  The normally quiet backwaters of Tasmania reverberated with peaceful yet confronting communication."   The subsequent Daintree blockades in Queensland are also examples of alternate strategies of cat and mouse protesting, with treesits as a core blockading tactic. 

modern tactics:

Links for Mechanical Advantage: Tools for the Wild Vertical

AMAZON.com

Volume 1 (mostly European developments) : https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CGZ2S58J

Volume 2 (mostly USA and global tools): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CH26LTFM/

BLURB.com

Mechanical Advantage, Volume 1 ($25) Best color version: Volume 1: $42

Mechanical Advantage. Volume 2 ($30) Best color version: Volume 2: $58

Recently, in my home state of Tasmania, I have been working on systems for a small two-person team to quickly move through the forest and set up a multi-day camp in the canopy of a tall native forest. The portaledges for bigwall rock climbers that I have been making have been helpful, compared with the heavy wood and steel bed-frame technology previously employed for aerial activism, as the weatherproof system reduces the setup time by hours, not to mention being compact and relatively light for transport into remote wildernesses.

Here are some photos of the complete kit for a lightweight team of two to set up an aerial camp for several days in a tall Eucalypt or giant Myrtle (In Tasmania, the Possum/Wallaby Team—the possum is the person in the tree, and the wallaby safeguards the local environment with communication with basecamp).

“How do you get the ropes up there?”

A classic question for rock climbers, for tree climbers the answer is a bit simpler. To get the initial line up the tree, we use a pneumatic beanbag thrower, aiming for a high branch. We’ve made custom aluminum tube versions, tested to over 200psi (2x safe pressure), and can easily shoot a line, even by beginners, over a branch 40m+ into the canopy. Once the light line is hooped over the branch, it is used to secure a strong static rope fixed to the branch.

Once up in the tree, it is possible to maneuver higher into the canopy, using advanced tree climber techniques and tools, but I prefer being at the bottom of the canopy—peering down at the diverse and open ecosystem below is especially magic from the canopy’s lower edge: the thick canopy above providing additional shelter and an optimal spot will have a natural opening in a cardinal direction, so it’s possible to gain glimpses of distant rainforest that stretches to the horizon (footnote).

Footnote: Though sometimes in view are open smouldering, wounds where logging has taken place, and where the fire resistant natural rainforest is being replaced with a patchwork of dryer timber (if the goal were to cause wide-scale destruction of one of the largest temperate rainforest that has survived centuries without a major bushfire, creating a grid of tinderboxes within the rainforest would be an effective method).

Paul Pritchard and I have been working out ways to set up camps in our favourite trees. We recently worked out a way for Paul to more efficiently ascend fixed ropes, a skill he once mastered on the giant remote rock walls of the world, but now is learning new systems optimized for his alternate abilities that are ever more versatile to help him accomplish his growing list of climbing goals (he recently began leading new routes again, with his first ‘trad’ FA since his accident on his home cliffs in Tasmania, though he is also refining his pure rope ascending skills, the technique he used to climb the Totem Pole in 2016).

Around 2017 I started working with my friend and activist Erik Hayward, first to make weatherproof coverings for his bed-frame and plywood tree-sits. Erik never fails to arrive at my workshop without a housewarming gift—a choice dumpster dive find, or most recently, a huge stump for my anvil, a remnant of an ancient tree that had been left to burn in a recently devastated coupe. Sometimes he offers a fresh wallaby roadkill (the live babies removed and already in the hands of a wildlife carer), and with expert preparation, is the only meat he eats. I met Erik on my first visit to the Tarkine/takayna—I was on a mission to check out the rock climbing in Tasmania’s west, seeking to find the route to Conical Rocks, a remote collection of granite boulders, reminiscent of Joshua Tree but in a coastal environment and exposed to the massive surf of the Roaring 40’s that perpetually pounds Tasmania’s west coast.

On my way, as I was driving along a windy road threading through patches of rainforest and long stretches of logged forest, a hand-painted sign appeared along a side road: “Welcome, come up for a tea and see the forest.” So I did, and first met Erik, and also Lisa Searle, another committed Tasmanian activist who lives in threatened forests whenever she is not doctoring in dangerous regions around the world with Médecins Sans Frontières. Erik and Lisa were blockading a logging road into the roadless Sumac area of the Tarkine, directly protecting the giant trees on the proposed route. A much larger group of activists had recently been disbanded by police on charges of trespass, and now Erik and Lisa were re-establishing the blockade with mostly tip-shop materials not yet confiscated. I was amazed at the high degree of engineering in their rigging, not only of several high tree camps that had been established but also of other architectonic structures such as a 10m tripod blocking the road. Within a few minutes walk from the road into the rainforest along a trail Erik and Lisa had marked, the transformation was sudden, and in the many wild places of the world I have experienced, the intensity of the wave of grandeur amidst takayna’s giant trees matched that of times such as my first visit to the California redwoods, or the first sight of massive foothills of the Karakoram—nature on another scale of beauty and awe.

I learned that these lands are Crown Land public forests, with a top-level state mandate to “securely protect conservation values.” A considerable amount of wilderness in Tasmania has been protected, but sadly huge areas of some of the most unique forests in the world, perhaps the best gems of Tasmania’s wild landscapes, are designated “Timber Production Zones.” Not only that, but the Tasmanian government mandates an unsustainable quota of sawlog to be removed from the forests every year, so subsidized companies like Sustainable Timber Tasmania have no choice but to bulldoze into ever more remote native forests for a quota they rarely attain, at a significant financial loss to the state. Most of the native forests end up as woodchip, as naturally hollowed centuries-old trees shatter when felled, so bizarrely, Tasmania, once known for Australia’s finest craft wood, has become primarily a low-value woodchip exporter.

takayna

The most beautiful thing about the area now known as takayna/Tarkine is that, unlike the southern rainforests in Tasmania, where going off trail often requires serious bush bashing (Tasmanians are world champions in this regard), in the takayna, northwest Tasmania’s vast temperate rainforest, the understory is open and easily walkable, and as you wander through it, you will likely be struck with wonder as you approach the realm of an imposing living giant. Sometimes the trees are within a ‘coupe’ and slated for destruction, listed in the annually updated three-year wood production plan, which in aggregate and when extrapolated into future decades, chronicle a grim future for this natural global rainforest treasure.

Bob Brown, who needs no introduction as a champion for the wilds, originally coined the term Tarkine for this region, which has now become the more accurate ‘takayna’ (not capitalised as per Aboriginal nomenclature), bringing wider awareness of this region, and the feisty Bob Brown Foundation coordinates multi-tiered campaigns to protect this region (along with many other threatened areas in the southern hemisphere) with legislative change, public awareness, and direct action. Bob still, after decades of challenging encounters and serving in the highest levels of government, is often the first to get arrested by refusing to move out of the way of bulldozers in unique but threatened areas, and inspires others to do the same in defense of the wilds (footnote).

Footnote: For many, the BBF-sponsored annual Canopy Campout (tree camping), Bioblitz (citizen’s science), Art for takayna, takayna Trail, and peaceful and permitted forest training camps are memorable introductions to unique areas with no risk of trespass in Tasmania’s public lands.

Paul Pritchard and I have both visited the takayna/Tarkine many times thanks to Bob—it is a long drive from Hobart, sometimes seven to eight hours, even though the island of Tasmania spans only a couple hundred miles at its widest point—there is still a lot of remote wilderness here. On forest trips, we’re drawn to different trees—sometimes I prefer the more slender ancient myrtles up to about 50m tall, Paul at times has opted for higher camps 70m off the ground in a giant stocky eucalypt. Sometimes there are multiple potential camps in a patch of tall trees, where a group of aerial tree sitters become a community, even though each tree-dweller has incredible solitude in their own giant.

History

Tasmania has a long history of hard-fought ‘battles’ for preservation; many are chronicled in Greg Buckman’s Tasmanian Wilderness Battles (2008), though most of these historical struggles are hardly battles in the traditional sense, as the ‘world’s best practice’ of non-violent direct action (NVDA) have been refined over the decades, often with amiable relations with the authorities. The strictly peaceful methods employed in Tasmania have made a difference, slowing—but certainly not stopping—the march of industry, even in cases where legal mandates of environmental and species protection are clear.

Buckman’s book highlights a pattern going back to the 1950s: the march of progress destroying wild places often reaches a limit, when a broad public outcry necessitates action—often an “agreement” is established, which calms both environmental and industrial stakeholders, but then the march resumes, sometimes with complete abandonment of the environmental side of the agreement. For example, in 2013, the public uproar over the accelerating conversion of massive swaths of native forest into woodchips resulted in a ‘Forest Peace Deal’, which provided foresters with two hundred million dollars (AUD) in taxpayer funds to exit native forestry on Crown Lands, in exchange for nearly a million acres of mostly native forest to put into ‘reserves.’ The public was calmed, and while many believed the reserve status meant reserved from logging, industry advocates clearly saw it as ‘reserves’ of vertical logs, and the following year, the ambiguity was legislatively clarified when the region was redesignated with no hint of reservation as ‘Future Potential Production Forest Land’. Historically, agreements negotiated by citizens and elected environmentalists have slowed the death of the forests by a thousand cuts—but only when the strongest legal boundaries are established, such as World Heritage, does the global voice for protection prevail. Meanwhile, the industry-friendly Regional Forest Agreement (RFA) blueprints the extinction of more species by de facto exempting forestry from external regulation of federal statutes like the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC) of 1999.

One of the issues in the takayna is remoteness, far from the current tourist circuit primarily due to its still-primitive wildness, with access only being possible more recently from industrial-scale mining and forestry roading. The old maps provide insight.

Newer maps are confusing—I lived in Tasmania for nearly a decade before I realized there was an incredible rainforest in the northwest, the largest temperate rainforest in Australia. Once my family and I had traveled for days to see Queensland’s incredible tropical rainforests, a huge tourist draw for the state, while ignorant of our very own native rainforest close to home—the maps on my wall often highlight World Heritage areas in green, but little else to indicate where vast forests reside in Tasmania.

Geoff Law, one of the main Tasmanian architects of World Heritage Areas, provided me with a more realistic boundary map of regions of the highest conservation value lands in Tasmania. Geoff is confident that The Bob Brown Foundation’s “titanic battle for takayna/Tarkine will ultimately be rewarded by World Heritage status. It's a question of how much can be saved in the interim.”

Current legal protections for Tasmania’s natural landscapes and habitat for endangered species are weak—having been involved with legal wranglings with various US land managers on preservation issues—the Bureau of Land Management in Utah, the National Park Service in Yosemite and Joshua Tree, and the Forest Service in the northwest—the top-level American legislation such as the Wilderness, Endangered Species, Environmental Protection Acts provide various means to legally challenge clear violations of public policy. In Australia, where there is not even a requirement for land managers to inventory natural areas such as mandated at least once a decade by the USA’s 1964 Wilderness Act, and here it seems a bigger challenge to oppose clear breaches of international and national laws. For example, if an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) is required (with its high bar to trigger), no alternatives need to be presented, but worse yet, the environmental assessment is often cursorily performed by the proponents themselves (talk about foxes in the henhouse) and fails to identify the significant risks to flora and fauna, or offers only ineffective remedial measures.

Local academics seem to have bought into the idea that “forestry best practice” involves the continuing destruction of ancient natural ecosystems, providing exceptionally effective greenwashing, but anyone witnessing firsthand the impact of clearfelling native forests will see the stated impacts do not disclose the real loss to Tasmania’s greatest resources (footnote). I like to bring my kids up to see these places before they are gone, and was able to visit the remote and unique Rapid River area of takayna before it was logged, and then again after, and it is truly hard not to shed a tear when you think of all the habitat destroyed in the wasteland of shredded stumps and ferns. In one of the massive clearfell coupes a few years ago, my 6-year-old daughter asked me, “The animals—where are they going to go?” I had no answer.

Footnote: Though only a minority of Tasmanians have visited takayna, most feel it is important to improve the protection of Tasmania’s natural landscapes for which the state is well known, providing the lion’s share of tourism revenue, but thanks to greenwash such as native forest timber companies using ‘sustainable’ in their branding, many are unaware of the scale and speed of the actual forest destruction.

Extinctions ongoing

Australia leads the world in the rate of mammal extinctions, and we have seen many examples of citizen science clearly refuting the claims of the “self-regulating” forest industry. Recently Rob Blakers, a landscape and wildlife photographer, stood his ground in an area of the forest now designated as SH050B—AGR (footnote) in the forests of the Eastern Tiers. Working with the Bob Brown Foundation, Rob documented an exceptionally important breeding and feeding site of the critically endangered swift parrot, a species with an estimated 750 remaining birds, destined to be extinct in ten years if habitat continues to dwindle at the current rate.  Although the self-regulated management approach published by Sustainable Timber Tasmania claims to “reduce threats to Swift Parrot breeding success”, and “to engage with species experts to improve conservation”, Rob (as one of the most knowledgeable experts), realized they were doing neither as they began logging the area, and after multiple attempts to contact Sustainable Timber Tasmania with no response, he and others blockaded and stopped the machinery for a day. He was arrested for trespassing on public lands, a court date was set, and logging resumed the next day. The Federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek has foreshadowed new environmental laws requiring regional forestry agreements to meet national environment standards, but how and when that legislation will operate is currently uncertain. 

Footnote: AGR stands for Advanced Growth Retention, a partial harvesting method that converts native forest to a quasi plantation, with old trees isolated or removed and evenly spaced young trees retained in a habitat detrimental to swift parrot breeding. Rob clarifies of the aftermath of the logging of SH050B, an area known to be a Swift Parrot Important Breeding Area (SPIBA): "Virtually all of the large trees here have been felled. The few older trees that remain are isolated and exposed to windthrow." The AGR style of logging was formerly known as “Overstory Removal” prior to Forestry Tasmania’s ‘sustainable’ rebranding.

The Tree Projects, led by Dr. Jennifer Sanger, a forest ecologist, and Steve Pearce, filmmaker & photographer of tall trees, is another organization doing careful citizen’s science in areas that lack independently regulated studies, often discovering and measuring trees with incredible volume and height that should trigger the protection of these ancient trees, yet repeatedly, these special trees are felled without consequence, justified by endless loopholes in Australia’s environmental protection acts.

Direct Action

Widescale peaceful protest on many levels has been ongoing, but little has been done legislatively to change the status quo, so many see direct action as currently the only way to slow the final destruction of many of these areas. An imminent decision from the Environmental Minister looms over a proposal to dump 25 million cubic meters of toxic, acid-leaching mine tailings into a 140-hectare valley of 500-year-old myrtle and tall eucalypt forest in the Pieman area of takayna. This area of Crown Land has already seen countless trespass arrests of direct activists over the past several years preventing illegal and environmentally destructive work, along with ongoing legal challenges that have been delaying the proposed destruction of yet another unique Tasmanian ecosystem. Many are ready to directly act and help blockade the incursion into this wild landscape if the minister decides to allow the mining company to commence work here.

At some point, like so many brave activists who have already shown the way, reason demands that Tasmanian denizens who believe in its ecological future to stand in the way of senseless destruction taking place. For climbers like Paul and myself, it makes the most sense to climb and camp in the canopy—after all, the trees might be bulldozed the next day, and sitting in the way of its destruction seems a small price to pay for preserving its long life, even if just for a moment. And it is just truly beautiful camping in the canopy. Like the imaginative play of a traditional treehouse, it’s a place of adventure, solitude, a sometimes an act of solo rebellion (who hasn’t, if they were lucky enough as a kid to a treehouse nearby, find it the best place to “get away from it all”?). Bags are getting packed and ready for the expedition.

Appendix

Tasmanian Times Observations in 2021 (John Middendorf)

Forbes article on aerial protesting (Ari Schneider)

Portaledge protesting article (Joy Martin)

Activist Portaledge developments article in Gripped (David Smart)

Thanks to Scott Jordan, Rob Blakers, Steve Pearce, and Geoff Law for help with this article.

Volume 1: (mostly) European Tools and Techniques to the 1930s

Volume 2: (mostly) North American Climbing Tools and Techniques to the 1950s

Volume 3 will cover global developments of climbing tools and techniques, beginning in the 1940s and 1950s.

Developments during WW2 (brief overview)

As war expanded in Europe, in December 1940 the American Alpine Club established the Defence Committee, with the goal of “supplying the Army with information concerning equipment to be used in mountainous regions.” The initial crew was chaired by Walter Wood and included Richard Leonard, Kenneth Henderson, Charles Houston, and Bestor Robinson. With military funding and inventive climbers, mountaineering and survival equipment advanced considerably in the period between 1940-1944, leading to improved outdoor gear made for arctic conditions, ski gear, and other camping equipment.

Pitons

A selection of pitons, including some of the first angle pitons (with ring) were developed for the army with the help of The Mountaineers’ Exchange in San Francisco (footnote) and manufactured by the Ames Baldwin and Wyoming Co., in Parkersburg, West Virginia. During trainings in 1943-1944, thousands of army pitons were hammered into the cliffs of nearby Seneca Rocks. As a typical pack carried by mountain troops could weigh over 35kg, designers strove to make additional climbing equipment as light and functional as possible.

Footnote: not much is known about the Mountaineer’s Exchange in San Francisco, cited in the Quartermaster Equipment for Special Forces, by Thomas M. Pitkin, Office of the Quartermaster General, 1944.

Carabiners

Bill House became head of the Army’s Quartermaster General Mountain Unit, responsible for determining mountaineering equipment specifications. In 1941 he began working with the Aluminum Company of America to develop new light and strong carabiners (then still called ‘snap-links’ or karabiners—Pierre Allain in France had been developing aluminum carabiners prior to the war, but it wasn’t until the later 1940s that aluminum carabiners became commercially available). House had begun with the standard toothed gate (‘hook and seat’) design, but by 1943 the Army carabiners had evolved to a pinned gate design, which became the standard for most aluminum carabiners for the next four decades.

Nylon Ropes

Richard Leonard, meanwhile, as the leading expert in rope dynamics, became executive officer of the Quartermaster General's Special Forces equipment unit, and working with the Plymouth Cordage Company in Massachusetts developed and standardized the first 7/16” diameter, 120’ long, 3-ply nylon climbing ropes (weight: 6.5lbs, strength: 3400 lbs). Leonard worked with the engineer Arnold Wexler (1918-1997), working at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington D.C., who developed a comprehensive theoretical analysis of the forces involved in climbing falls with the new, high-elongation nylon ropes (thus, low-impact), and tested his theories with ‘Oscar’, his 68kg. dummy, at Carderock near Washington D.C. Nylon ropes improved handling and did not absorb as much water in wet conditions as did the natural fiber ropes (though many still preferred the natural fiber ropes because they were low stretch—those who were not doing much falling, in other words, perhaps using the rope more like a lasso or as a way to hoist your second up).

Bill House describes Leonard’s work on ropes in 1946 ‘Special War Number’ American Alpine Journal, “The almost incredible performance of some of the synthetic fibers suggested an investigation there. Under the able direction of Richard Leonard work was undertaken in cooperation with the Plymouth Cordage Company, and tests were made of many different types, consistencies and lays of nylon rope. With no exceptions the final choice of medium lay bright nylon was found to be superior to the highest grades of Manila. Chief and foremost was its great resistance to shock. It was found to absorb over three times the shock loading as the same weight of Manila. As an example, the best grades of Manila could be stretched only to approximately 13% of their length before breakage, whereas the nylon rope would stretch over 39%. Use of this rope in army rock climbing schools, where it received very heavy use, justified the confidence placed in it, and at the present time only high price should keep all mountaineers from using it.”

Plymouth was to later commercialize, using gold dye, the famous Goldline climbing ropes with improved strength (4850lbs. for 7/16” diameter), which became the standard American climbing rope for the next three decades. British Ropes Limited created the Viking nylon ropes in the UK, and a number of European brands also began manufacturing a variety of nylon ropes. The 3-ply, medium lay carried over from the manila design, remained the standard until the increased availability of reliable kernmantle ropes in the 1960s.

Post War

In Volume 3, we’ll examine more nuances of the evolution of climbing tools and technology, that parallel the well-known climbs which pushed new boundaries and amazed everyone, including often the participants themselves. As North America prospered, Europe rose like a phoenix from the ashes of war, a global network of mountaineering organizations bloomed, and so did the climbing standards in the periods to follow, along with the rapid evolution of the stronger, lighter, and more versatile climbing tools made possible with advancing technologies. The notion of what was considered possible on the wild vertical became a global phenomenon, and we will zero in on the highly specialized kit required for the biggest rock challenges.

Other topics

We’ll also try to decipher various definitions of climbing itself as it evolved in different regions. For example, consider these two mentions of climbing styles in the same journal in the same year:

Balance Climbing: “Since layback piton-pounding proved too difficult, Soler drove in six pitons for direct aid, skillfully edging on top of the one he had just placed in order to drive the next one. This maneuver whereby each piton was used first as a handhold, then as a foothold, without a rope sling, was a beautiful example of balance climbing. The 23rd piton, placed in a horizontal side crack in the left-hand overhanging column, permitted a short traverse and rétablissement (footnote) to its sloping, splintered top-the first belay point on the climb. After the other climbers had "prusiked" up to this platform, three more pitons were used before the party reached the big ledge at the N. end, from which an easy scramble led to the summit. During the 9½-hour climb, 26 pitons (24 of them angle pitons) had been used. The first pitch of what is now officially known as the Soler Route was belayed through pitons from the bottom during a 240-ft. lead!” (A.C. Lembeck, A New Route on Devils Tower, Wyoming, 1952 AAJ)

footnote: rétablissement is a French word for reestablishing, here a named maneuver.

Climbing Free: “So we started out. The extremely difficult part begins with a long piton traverse to the left, some 100 meters above the base. Emilio climbed most of that pitch free-hanging by pitons and little holds, not using the rope for pull at all. He put in very few karabiners, thus making it necessary for me to climb free, too. I found my way to a piton that he had used for a belay. As I removed the karabiner, I lost my grip on the piton, my only hold, and fell. For what seemed an endless time, I became a terrifying pendulum, swinging in space. Emilio held me with the help of some pitons. When I finally stopped moving, I found myself several feet away from the rock. It took much effort and time to swing back to the rock, anchor myself, and work my way back. This incident ended the attempt and the season. (Hans Kraus, Summer in the Dolomites, 1952 AAJ).

Innovation origins by small shop producers

We will also look at the home shop innovation of the 1950s USA and also consider the engineering and sources of steel for some earlier European pitons as well as the famous chrome vanadium used for Salathe’s original Lost Arrows, and the chrome-molybdenum piton era of the mid-1950s.

Two mysteries outstanding:

Early complete bigwall ‘kit’, 1947:

As always thanks for reading, and comments are especially appreciated, as I hope to have a few more for my blurbs on the back of Volume 2, which should be finished shortly!

Volume 1: (mostly) European Tools and Techniques to the 1930s

Volume 2: (mostly) North American Climbing Tools and Techniques to the 1950s

REVIEW (see Volume 1)

Prior to 1906: pitons were used sporadically, usually a spike placed for a hand or foothold in the same realm as the many via ferratas of the period. Also acceptable as a rappel anchor by most mountaineers.

1906-1914: Eastern Alp climbers take piton-protected free climbing to new heights, led by bold and naturally skilled practitioners like Tita Piaz. Engineered climbing really begins, and the design of the most lightweight, functional tools begins.

Post WWI: European piton-protected climbing really takes off with spectacular new rock routes, and about a decade later, a similar boom erupts in North America.

Regarding steel pitons: In the later 1920s, American climbing and piton production began a steady evolution, piggybacking on new developments in the USA steel industry, leading to the high alloy steel pitons of the 1950s which in turn led to opening the doors of Yosemite’s big walls, and to visionary big wall climbing elsewhere on the planet. The well-known as the “Golden Age” of Yosemite climbing, noted by historian climber Steve Roper as the quarter-century between 1947-1971, when many huge technical big wall routes in Yosemite were first climbed, was an accumulation of many new tools and techniques merging at the time. There are many great online collections of mostly post-WWII pitons and other mainstream equipment of this period, but the exact chronology of hardware needs refinement. In the age prior to the widespread use of clean climbing protection, piton craft was an essential art for hard rock climbs; this post is an attempt to add further detail in the chronology between the 1940s and 1960s—also see this post covering the major brands of climbing gear available in 1964.

The 1950s

In Europe in the 1950s, climbing had become a mainstream sport, and heroes appeared regularly on the covers of national magazines. The legends of climbers needing to forge their own pitons prior to a first ascent had long passed, and there were a number of manufacturers competing for market share by offering wider availability of relatively inexpensive, mild steel pitons of varied designs. Pitons were mostly the “vertical” and “horizontal” designs developed in the 1910s, now with dozens of design variants and thicknesses, though the largest pitons on offer were suitable for only about the size of a fingertip—anything bigger was thought climbable without protection, though wood wedges (“coins de bois”) were sometimes used for larger cracks if aid was required. And of course, bolts were becoming more common (bolting technology will be covered in a separate post).

Though most European mountaineering equipment in the 1950s was mass-produced as mature products, in the 1950s USA, a blacksmith-driven period of innovation was about to begin.

In the 1950s in North America, most pitons used for climbing were made in Europe, where the fullest range of size and price options were available. There are a number of references of climbers buying equipment from Sporthaus Schuster in Munich, including the ASMü pitons (produced by August Schuster) used by the Stettners on Longs Peak in 1927 (story next post). Some of the highest quality pitons came from Switzerland, though these were only available in the USA from specialty retailers such as Abercrombie & Fitch, who were selling pitons made by Hupfauf. Fritsch and CCB also produced quality pitons in Switzerland. The Swiss pitons appear to be made from higher grade steel than the typical mass-produced mild steel pitons from the major post-WW2 brands: Cassin, Simond, and Charlet Moser, and Stubai, but further metallurgical analysis would be needed to confirm this. Throughout Europe, there were still a number of smaller manufacturers creating custom pitons for climbers, all using various grades of mild steel, but store-bought pitons were plentiful and relatively cheap, so they became the mainstay of a climber’s ‘rack’ of gear.

Review of Steel

Most pitons made in Europe, well into the 1960s, were made from mild steels. Engineers and climbers have all sorts of confusing names for steels with various amounts of carbon, such as low-carbon/low tensile steel, 10/10 steel, ST37 (Europe), ‘sweet homogeneous iron’ (Bonatti), etc. (“soft iron” is a long-standing misnomer, as the pitons are steel, not iron). Mild steels (SAE 1000 series) are relatively soft and malleable with a maximum hardness of around Brinell 120, so not suitable for super-thin pitons (as they will buckle) or for angle pitons (as will tend to flatten out when getting hammered into a crack). But for the mainstream mass-produced “horizontal” and “vertical” piton designs optimized for the limestone cracks of the Alps, mild steel is strong and robust enough for a few placements, and was suitable for a low-cost piton.

High-strength steels used for pitons also have a number of names, Chromium-Vanadium (CrV), Chromium-Molybendum (ChroMo, Chromoly, etc.), as well as many other alloyed steels. Alloys steels like these can be hardened to Brinell 300 and still be tough (RC41/42 makes for a nice knifeblade piton hardness).

For the purposes of steel climbing pitons, perhaps it is easiest just to refer to the original steels used for climbing pitons as “Mild Steel”, and higher strength piton steels as “Alloy Steel”, with alloys such as chromium, vanadium, molybdenum, etc. in just the right trace amounts enable the steel to be stronger and harder by optimising grain structure with heat treatments, which fine-tune the hardness and toughness—the measure of bend before breaking/ductility—of the steel, which are inversely related for a given type of steel. More on 20th century global steel evolution here.

There might be other types of steel used in the evolution of pitons, perhaps we can call them “Medium-Strength Alloy Steels” to differentiate from the more common high-strength alloy steels available today—steels with a higher degree of hardenability than mild steels with good toughness properties and with some alloying elements, a developing science in the 1930s-1940s. I believe most climbers of this time could intuitively differentiate when pounding different types of steel pitons on their racks from various sources, though knowledge of the types of steel was often not shared between manufacturers and nations. USA steel producers became the world’s largest in 1901, and for the next five decades were global leaders in high-strength steel research, driven by the automobile and aircraft industry. (See also Simcoe). It appears that some of the early USA pitons were made from higher quality steel than was commonly used for pitons in Europe at the time. It is not unthinkable that a blacksmith’s simplest source for high-grade alloy steels was from abandoned industrial parts like the crankshaft of an old Ford (it is still a point of pride among backyard blacksmiths to repurpose metal parts and tools). After WW2 in USA, many new alloy steels with a wide range of properties became more common and were used for small batches of pitons and other parts by the occasional crafty blacksmith among the climbing community.

Chuck Wilts is acknowledged as the definitive source of awareness of 4130 steel as a piton material. He also clarified, from the material science engineering perspective, how the heat treatment process was the most critical design feature of making pitons. Chromoly steel (4130) in the 1950s was becoming one of the more common high-strength steel alloys, with very versatile heat treat hardenability for a variety of steel tools. See this post on the A5 Hammer production for a more detailed example of creating a forged 4130 steel part in the 1980s.

By the 1950s, small-scale heat treat shops were a growing industry. In the 1940s, John Salathe probably heat-treated his famous Lost Arrow pitons in his shop. Heat treatment involves quenching the piton in oil or water from a high temperature to lock in the martensitic grain structure and results in a very hard and brittle piece of steel. Then the part needs to be tempered in an oven at a very specific temperature and for a very specific time (the developing science w/ 20th-century steel production and use).

Steel Reference Information, 1953

Steel catalogs like the 1953 Kaiser Steel General Catalog were (and still are, in fact) valuable references for a blacksmith in terms of workability and production of steel parts from billets, plates, sheets, and other semi-finished steel products used as raw material for new tools.

Chromoly Steel

Lots of names: Chrome-Molybdenum, ChroMo, Chromolly, Chrome-moly, take your pick. These 41xx series of steels (4130, 4140, and 4340 are common grades for high-strength pitons and hammers). Today, these alloys are some of the most common high-strength alloys found from most suppliers, but in the 1950s and early 1960s, the major producers did not list a wide range of sizes in these alloys in their catalogs (interesting history of 4130 tubing here). So the original material for a range of medium- and high-strength alloy pitons prior to the 1950s would probably involve a wide range of alloys. But when Chuck Wilts published his research in the Sierra Club Bulletin, 4130 was recognized as the ideal material for climbing pitons, and suppliers found.

Rough Material Chronology

So with that in mind, here is the rough idea of steel piton material evolution:

• 1900-1960s Europe—mostly mild steel pitons. Some of the early Swiss pitons (1930s+) might have been made from higher quality European steel than commonly used mild steel for most pitons at the time.

• 1920s-1940 USA made pitons: mostly mild steel, though some pitons made in smaller quantities might have been made from medium-strength alloy steels (Dwight Lavender and Bill House pitons TK).

• 1943: US Army mild steel ring angle (probably 1020), vertical and horizontal pitons. Tens of thousands of these were made for anticipated mountain warfare, and unused stock flooded the market in 1946.

  

• ~1946: John Salathe uses high-strength Chromium-Vanadium (CrV) alloy steel to make pitons for his climbs in Yosemite. CrV can be hardened precisely with heat treatment, quench, and tempering to get the optimal balance of toughness, hardness, and strength.

  

  

• 1946-1954: in the USA, Bob Owens (Kachinas), Bob Bruning (Holubar), and Norton Smithe possibly also made pitons with a medium- or high-strength alloy steel in this period.

• 1954: Chuck Wilts shares information on his 4130 Chromoly thin pitons in the Sierra Club Bulletin (and in “Belaying the Leader, an Omnibus on Climbing Safety”, 1956) and soon a number of makers begin making Chromoly pitons, which then becomes the standard for all high strength steel pitons, craftsfolk include Richard Long, Jerry Gallwas, George Rea, Bill Feuerer, and Yvon Chouinard.

1950s USA-an age of piton innovation.

Typical climber’s“Rack”: In the early 1950s, most American piton climbers would have had a few army Gov’t surplus pitons, a selection of “soft-iron” (mild steel) pitons brought over or shipped from Europe, and perhaps a few high-quality hand-made steel pitons from a USA designer and maker. Carabiners would have been a mix of steel and some aluminum. Racks of gear were heavy, and limited in the range of sizes (~3mm to 10mm widths). The time was ripe for another gear evolution.

Designing new gear for the new big wall challenges on the granite and sandstone mountains of the North America led to a productive period of equipment innovation in the USA, with arguably four ‘centers’: California, Colorado, Washington, and the East Coast. This story will be told in two parts, 1920-1940, and 1940-1960s. This page as reference material below, and will be updated with further research and as others contribute. Many thanks to Marty Karabin (MK) and Ashby Robertson (AR), whose images are noted below. Other sources TK.

Information from those who were there:

Writing online has been a great process. My initial research is often enhanced by contributions from historians around the world, and I am able to update pages with new, relevant evidence in the ongoing story of tool and technique evolution in climbing.

Richard Long, Jerry Gallwas, and Jim Erikson have recently responded with experience and more details of materials and processes, and along with historical American steel manufacturing records, a clearer picture emerges of early USA steel pitons.

Richard Long Recollections 8/29/2022

(See Longware hardware collections in prior post). Of interest to tinkerers!

RL: Longware was initially formed by Larry Lackey and me. After his injury on the Higher Spire, Larry gave up climbing and went on to be a successful “precious metals" hard rock geologist.

Q: Do you recall your material suppliers, and what stock material you were ordering (billets, sheets, etc.). 

We purchased 41-30 steel and later 7075 aluminum alloy from, I believe, Bethlehem steel in Oakland CA. 

Q: Did you do your own heat treating?

Heat treatment was done commercially.  I would wait until I had several hundred pounds of finished material and send in one big batch. After the initial high-temperature treatment, the metal was held for an additional 24 (?) hours at 450 degrees. I had items treated with a phosphate coat as anti-rust and suitable for painting.

Could you tell me a bit more about how you designed/made your angles and your knifeblades? 

One of my friends was Dr. Wilkens, MD from LA.  and had also read Wilt’s article.  He had enough money to hire a machine shop to make a dye punch to Wilts’s specifications. It would punch through 0.093 inch  41-30.    I figured out a way to grind the blanks to the proper size. Ideally, they should have been pounded to that size.  After several years he lost interest and asked me if I wanted the dies. Dr. Wilkens went on to write several mountain medicine books.

Bethlehem steel used an arc plasma cutter to form the shape for my horizontal pitons. They were cut out of 1/4 or 3/8 inch  41-30 or 86-30 flat sheet metal stock, Then I hired  Klockar Forge in San Francisco to drop hammer forge the blade.  I punched the eye at home with my personal punch.

All my equipment was made by hand.  It was cheap, but worked.  

Richard adds: “I really didn’t pay much about who and what was going on or being done. Of Interest, Harding and I would go to the Bay area local practice climbs.  I would show him my heavy angle iron attempts and he would show me his latest “stovelegs”.  However, when Chuck Wilts knife blade article came out, I learned about 41-30 steel and knew this was the answer!   I also knew Chouinard was doing something.  In 1957 or 8,  I was on the Higher Cathedral buttress, the people who heard the sound named them “bong-bongs”.  After the climb,  Chouinard and I showed each other what we had been doing.  His wide angles went to 2” and mine to 3” and some of mine were relieved.  The competition was on.   I believe Chouinard would have won regardless.  He was totally devoted to climbing!  Not afraid to develop something that might work.  I had many interests including a wife, two kids, high school teacher and I was trying to get into Med School.  To this day Chouinard and I have always remained good friends.”

Thanks Richard!

(more pictures from Richard will be added soon)

Jerry Gallwas 

Jerry Gallwas also recognised 4130 as the ideal choice of alloys early on, and was influential in the development of American climbing hardware.

Jerry summarises his contributions below (8/24/2022): 

John, 

Please pardon the delay in my answer to your E-mail on my exploration into the development of pitons in the 1950s.  Sandy and I have been in Scandinavia for the past few weeks, and I have been delinquent in keeping up with E-mail.  This is being written as we wing our way over the North Atlantic.  I summarized my experience in piton craft in my writeup of the First Ascent of the Northwest Face of Half Dome.  I was inspired to go into rock climbing by the Ansel Adams’ photo of Salathe and Nelson on top of the Lost Arrow that was displayed on the front of Best Studio when I visited Yosemite in 1949.  I knew nothing of rock climbing but at the moment I saw the photo I knew I wanted to stand where Salathe was standing and take that photo.  A few years later I did just that when Wayne Merry and I made the 5th ascent of the spire.  The Ansel Adams’ photo led me to the Sierra Club Journal article by Anton Nelson of their experience and thus the information on heat-treated alloy steel as the intelligent alternative to mild steel which was the basis of all commercial hardware at that time.  I lived in San Diego, an aircraft industry city, and so had friends familiar with 4130 Chrome Molly steel and its heat treatment.  Chuck Wilts’ experience reinforced my conviction that 4130 was the right choice.  Over the years I climbed from 1951 through 1957, I made pitons, horizontal, wafer, and angles for my own use and for friends.  Most of the remaining pitons from my climbing days are on display at the Yosemite Climbing Association Museum in Mariposa California.  I still have a handful of unused ones but all the hardware and associated gear is in Ken Yager’s possession including the anvil.  My grades and draft notice came in the same mail in 1962 and so the climbing student moved on to defend the country.  In 1966, I took a 150 fall that ended my climbing years.  

Cheers, Jerry

Q&A with Jerry Gallwas:

Q: In 1952, you were using 4130 steel for making pitons in Coronado.  Do you recall the stock material you were able to buy?  (i.e. round or flat stock, size?).  And regarding heat treatment, in your writings, you reference Henry Mandolf, was he an engineer?  You were forging pitons, I understand--did you use a punch to make the eye, or some other method?

It was bar stock, 0.25” x 1.25” 4130 from a local metal supply store, a big place.  The heat treatment was in a salt bath of a commercial operation.  Henry Mandolf was an engineer and owner of Langley Corporation a supplier of parts to the airframe industry in San Diego.  He had been chief engineer at Consolidated Aircraft in San Diego during WWII and formed Langley Corp. after the war to design spinning reels.  He climbed or skied every weekend and was a mentor to us teenagers who had more energy than judgment.  I forged the pitons by hand on an anvil we had found in an old mine on a backpacking trip, drilled the eyes, and finished off the edges with a grinder then had them heat treated on Henry’s account.  He was a great guy.  He provided the station wagon and gas and we did the driving.

Q: You mention using soft steel for your angle pitons--I am under the impression from talking to Hermann Huber (Salewa), that mild steel didn't really work well for bigger angles, as they would flare out when placed, and that is why they didn't make angles until after they had seen the successful USA chromoly versions.  Maybe you had a medium-grade steel?

I originally made angles from bed stead stock and then wider angle soft steel.  But the real success was to go to ‘U’ shaped stock that gave rigidity to the soft steel.  The could be used in pairs for wide cracks and were very useful in sandstone.  You can see the “U” shaped angles in the attached Half Dome gear display in Ken Yager’s Mariposa Yosemite Climbing Museum photo.

Q: Can you tell me any more about Chuck Wilt's process--was he cutting and milling to make the original knifeblades, or did he also forge some pitons?  Do you know when he might have made his first pitons?

Chuck Wilts describes his Knife Blade piton in detail in the Sierra Club Bulletin of Jun 1954, page 71-77.  He basically used a saw, drill, and grinder for the manufacturing process.  They were very good and we used them a lot.  Henry Mandolf had his model shop manufacture a couple of dozen for us so we were never with out.

Jim Erickson

When I started climbing in the mid-1970s, there were still a few diehards with hammer and pitons on their racks. But clean free climbing was cooler (I nailed a few pitons when I first started to climb, but only learned pitoncraft when I started climbing El Cap nailing routes in the 1980s). To me, the Colorado climber Jim Erickson was one of the most inspiring climbers of my early era, as he was one of the best on-sight free climbers, known for bold downclimbing incredibly difficult sections to avoid any fall or weighting of the rope, as any aid on the route diminished the spirit of any ground-up future ascent; Jim’s style became my ideal for most of my climbing career.

Prior to the clean climbing revolution in the early 1970s in the USA, Jim’s climbing in the 1960s involved pitons; in terms of piton-protected hard free climbs, Jim’s routes were some of the most feared and difficult. It is quite an art to place a good piton in the middle of 5.11 moves (we call this, “pitoncraft”).

Jim provides valuable information about the European pitons in the later 1960s, and more about Colorado manufacturers. The Europeans were also starting to use more hardenable steel, but it’s probable these were still mild steels with a maximum hardness of ~Brinnel 200. Jim reports the Charlet Moser pitons were best for multiple uses prior to Chomoly.

More Chronology 1940s-1950s

TO BE UPDATED WITH MORE EXAMPLES AND DESIGNS: Bob Owens, George Rea, Jerry Gallwas, Bea Vogel, others…