While the mountaineering community has recently been focusing its attention on the high mountains of Pakistan, three top European climbers have achieved an alpinistic masterpiece in the Peruvian Andes.
Alexander Huber (54, the younger of the two Huber brothers) from Germany, Dani Arnold (41) from Switzerland, and Simon Gietl (40) from South Tyrol opened a new route on the 6,094-meter-high Jirishanca. Their line runs 1,030 meters up the challenging East Face and ends at the East Summit at 6,028 meters.
“We found a beautiful and logical line in the best rock. The conditions on the wall itself were ideal, the teamwork was perfect – it was simply a perfect experience,” the trio said. “Even though we didn’t reach the main summit, it was one of the great first ascents for us.”
“Matterhorn of Peru”
Jirishanca – often referred to as the “Matterhorn of Peru” due to its striking shape – is located at the northern end of the Cordillera Huayhuash mountain range, which was once the destination of climbing legends such as Walter Bonatti (in 1961), Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler (in 1969), and Jeff Lowe (in 1985). It was two Austrians who first summited Jirishanca via the East Ridge in 1957: Toni Egger and Siegfried Jungmeier.
The East Face is considered one of the most striking and steepest walls in the Andes, which has only been successfully climbed a few times, for example in 2003 by Italians Stefano DeLuca, Alessandro Piccini, and Paolo Stoppini, and – on a different route – by Frenchmen Aymeric Clouet and Didier Jourdain.
In 2023, Canadians Alik Berg and Quentin Roberts were awarded the Piolet d’Or, the “Oscar of mountaineering”, for their first ascent of the South-Southeast Spur of Jirishanca on the edge of the East Face a year earlier.
No ascent to the main summit due to poor snow conditions
Jirishanca literally translates as “icy hummingbird beak.” And so Huber, Arnold, and Gietl named their new route, which spans 31 pitches across the East Face, “Kolibri” (hummingbird) – “steep, technically demanding climbing on compact limestone, combined with alpine seriousness and classic line selection,” as the trio added. The ascent took them three days: from 13 to 15 July.
The three mountaineers decided not to continue climbing from the East Summit to the Main Summit of Jirishanca “due to very poor snow conditions and high objective risk.” It was a “clear safety-based decision,” Huber, Arnold, and Gietl said.
