Classic alpinism is alive and well! For me, this is evident in the fact that I can hardly keep up with reporting on all the extraordinary climbs this fall season in Nepal.
Like this one: According to Anna Piunova from the Russian mountaineering portal mountain.ru, Andrey Vasilyev, Sergey Kondrashkin, Natalia Belyankina, Kirill Eyserman, and Vitaly Shipilov reached the summit of the 8,163-meter-high Manaslu in western Nepal yesterday, Wednesday, at around 1 p.m. local time.
The Russian team opened a “new alpine-style route on the immense, uncharted Southwest Face,” Anna wrote on Facebook. Andrey sent her a short message from the highest point: “(We) Made the summit, just got back to the tent. It was brutal. The wind up there was insane.”
Dangerous descent
The team is currently descending. “Everyone is healthy. We are very tired. But strength usually returns during the descent,” expedition leader Vasilyev wrote to mountain.ru today. “We are descending on foot across the plateau to 7,100 meters, then via the Austrian route, about 700 meters of unfamiliar terrain. There are some dangerous spots on the way down.”
In 1972, a Tyrolean expedition led by Wolfgang Nairz opened a new route through the South Face of Manaslu. Reinhold Messner was the only team member to reach the summit at that time. Franz Jäger and Andreas Schick disappeared in a sudden change in weather with extremely poor visibility. Three years later, Spanish mountaineers discovered their bodies.
Bivouac in a sitting position
The five-member Russian team had left base camp on 12 October, crossed an icefall, and entered the Southwest Face at around 6,300 meters on 18 October. A day later, Andrey reported on a night spent bivouacking on the face – sitting in a snow hole they had dug to protect themselves from the wind.
At 7700 meters, the four male climbers and one female climber left the Southwest Face and turned onto the summit ridge on the Manaslu normal route, which is used by commercial expeditions.
First new route on Manaslu since 2006
This fall, commercial operators on Manaslu reported more than 600 successful summits – almost all with bottled oxygen and Sherpa support. Until yesterday, the last first ascent of a route on the eighth highest mountain in the world dated back to 2006.
At that time, Denis Urubko and Sergei Samoilov climbed through the Northeast Face of Manaslu – as did the Russian team now on the Southwest Face, also in alpine style, i.e., without breathing masks, without Sherpas, without fixed ropes, and without fixed high camps. True alpinism.
Update 31 October: The Russian team has returned safely – marked by the hardships of the expedition (see the picture above).
