Fortunately, it was every bit as good as its reputation. In many ways it reminded me of the Heckmaier route on the north face of the Eiger by being a complex route up the longest part of the wall with lots of historic pitches, although the former is a pure mixed climb whereas the Nose is a pure rock climb.

There are several interesting pendulums on the Nose, which makes for a fairly committing feeling on the route. Especially the King Swing was intimidating and it required complete trust in the ropes and climbing gear.

I’m grateful that I once again got sponsorship from Scanlico who provided me with ropes from Beal and climbing gear from Petzl. In particular I would highly recommend the Apollo rope, which is 11 mm thick and really inspires confidence when rappelling and jumaring on an exposed bigwall route. The new Petzl Ascension jumars are also worth mentioning because they have been significantly improved and are now both light and easy to handle. They slide very well on the rope and it is possible to temporally disengage the teeth when moving the Ascension up a rope that is not weighted, which makes it a lot easier to use than the previous version. Another piece of critical climbing gear on a bigwall is the Grigri, which makes it a lot safer to belay pitches that take a long time to lead because you don’t have to watch the climber as closely as with a normal belay device. If I need to let go of the rope to eat or to send up more gear on the tag line I still need to tie a knot about a meter away from the device just to be completely safe, but the Grigri greatly reduces the stress of belaying because of the automatic blocking mechanism.

After the Nose we did Skull Queen on Washington Column, which was a nice route with mostly aid climbing. It has an easy approach to get to the base of the wall and good rock as with most climbs in Yosemite Valley.

This mountain has been a project for me on four trips to Patagonia, but due to miserable weather and bad climbing conditions it was not until now that it all came together for a successful ascent. We had a fantastic climb despite it being a really cold day. Several teams turned back that day after having climbed the initial couloir, because they were too cold to continue. Luckily we felt good about going all the way to the top and descended the direct way back to the base of the climb in an exhausting 33 hour round-trip. Interestingly, this iconic mountain has not had a Danish ascent until now.

Our new line follows a series of ice runnels to the left of the ‘Supa Dupa Couloir’ established in 2003 by Mike ‘Twid’ Turner, Stu McAleese and Olly Sanders.

Initial snow and ice pitches in the couloir led up to a very steep corner with difficulties of AI5+ and M6+. Jess was the ropegun on these pitches. At sunset we chopped a ledge on a 60 degree ice slope and suffered through a sitting bivy in the cold Alaskan night. We had brought a small tent, but it did not fit our ledge and collapsed on us during the night. Early the next day we arrived at the col, which marks the end of the couloir. From there Ben led several pure rock pitches on the relatively warm south ridge. The first pitch off the col was steep A3. He then climbed the 5.10R crux without gloves and crampons, which was a full 60 meter pitch. We reached the summit ridge that evening, but bivied only a stones through from the actual summit on the east side of the ridge. We once again settled in for a sitting bivy on a chopped ice ledge. After a very uncomfortable night we rappelled down a gap on the west face, which took us to an easy snow ramp that lead directly to the summit. The summit itself consisted of two large granite blocks about five meters high, which from a distance looked unclimbable. Fortunately there was an easy way up on their back side. After a short brew stop, we then faced an arduous descent down the north ridge where our rappel lines got stuck several time, and we had lots of exposed down climbing and also had to rappel off our only two snowstakes. In the last rays of the sun we did one final rappel off a spectre-hook, which was hammered less than 3 cm into an icy crack, but even scarier it was flexing under bodyweight. However, it got us over the bergschrund with one meter of rope to spare and we reached the safety of the flat glacier terrain. We stumbled back into our base camp 70 hours after having left it.

We jokingly named our new route the ‘Hypa Zypa Couloir’ in keeping with the name of the ‘Supa Dupa’. That way the Super and Hyper couloirs of the Kichatnas are located side by side unlike in the Alps. The overall difficulty of our route is American commitment grade VI corresponding to European ‘ED+’ with technical pitches of AI5+, M6+, 5.10R, A3 and a vertical height of 3700 feet (ca. 1100 meters).

For 6 months I have been training hard with this single route in mind, so it was quite disappointing to say the least.

We then headed over to Cogne to have a look at “X-Files” and “Empire Strikes Back”, but after closer inspection they proved to be very loose and had poor options for protection, so instead we climbed the pure ice route Repentance Super (WI6), which gave 5 pitches of nice ice climbing.

However, we were hungry for some physically hard mixed climbing, so we drove across Italy to the Dolomites to have a look at Grotto di Landro, which was supposed to have some of the hardest mixed lines in all of Italy. This cave is really nice, but all of the routes are sandbagged and hard for their grade.