Three American climbers solve the ‘last big problem in the Himalayas’ – 12/07/2023 – Sport

Three American climbers lay in the dark, sharing a custom-made sleeping bag on a portable platform hanging from a massive cliff high in the Himalayas. They were anchored on the north face of Mount Jannu, one of the largest and steepest rock walls in the world.

The void beneath them was 10,000 feet of thin black air. Above them, within reach, was something most people can only imagine.

“I know we still have a lot to do,” Alan Rousseau told his two fellow climbers. “But I feel like we just did something cool.”

The next day, Rousseau, Matt Cornell and Jackson Marvell — little known outside climbing circles, for now — were on the summit of Jannu. Before them were the white tips of other great mountains, including Everest and Kangchenjunga.

They may not have had the full perspective. This is now coming from other elite climbers, who see the group’s ascent on Jannu’s north face as a monumental achievement.

“In my opinion, it’s the greatest climb of all time — the greatest alpine climb,” said Mark Synnott, a renowned climber and author who was stopped by Jannu’s north face in 2000 and called it “the Himalayan’s last great problem.” .

At 25,295 feet, Jannu—with its remote location and combination of height, steepness, and altitude—is one of the most challenging peaks for climbers. Its north face, especially, has agitated and tormented climbers.

Others had already reached the top of Jannu, but not many. None had done this route following the minimal ethics of an alpine-style ascent: no supplemental oxygen, no ropes fixed in advance, no porters beyond base camp.

The three men only used what they could carry on their backs.

“It’s the simplest way to do something,” Rousseau said. “You start at the bottom and work your way to the top.”

Rousseau, Cornell and Marvell gathered in Utah last month to share their story for the first time — their years-long dream; the daily struggle to climb nearly 2 miles of near-vertical rock and ice; the tips of his blackened, frozen fingers that still needed to heal.

The three climbers had not yet fully processed their achievement.

“We did something we didn’t think possible,” Rousseau said. “It gave us the realization that we can scale in one of the biggest arenas there is.”

They called their expedition the “Round-trip Ticket”, in reference to Valery Babanov and Sergey Kofanov, who completed an alpine ascent of Jannu’s west column in 2007.

“Perhaps one day, a pair will ascend a direct route on the North Face in alpine style,” Kofanov wrote in 2017, “but they will need to accept the probability that they are buying a one-way ticket.”

Camping in a crevasse

The expedition began with a 30-hour journey from Kathmandu, Nepal. A trek to base camp began at 5,000 feet elevation, and for six days, climbers used porters and pack animals to ascend through swampy, jungle-like terrain.

The base camp was established at the foot of Jannu’s north face in a meadow at 15,500 feet. Arriving on September 17, the climbers acclimatized to the altitude and studied forecasts, looking for a week-long weather window with clear weather.

In early October, they found a promising period.

“It removed a lot of stress,” Marvell said.

They prepared their climbing backpacks, making better use of their equipment. Climbing tools — ice axes, crampons, ice screws, pitons, and so on — are stronger and lighter than ever.

The strings too. The climbers used two ropes, each 60 meters long. One was a 9mm nylon rope for climbing, the other was thinner so the lead climber could lift equipment, allowing teammates to focus and climb without a load on their backs.

They took dehydrated food. They had a stove, a pan, and a 2-pound sleeping bag wide enough to accommodate three men to improve body heat. The most useful technical innovation may have been the two one-person inflatable hammocks, suspended platforms that could be anchored to the sides of cliffs so that climbers could rest. Climbers tied their hammocks side by side and slept with their heads resting on the rock and their feet facing the void.

The climb began on a Saturday in October. It was a “mixed” climb — a mix of rock, snow and ice — with the men taking turns in the leadership position.

The first two days involved about 6,000 vertical feet of climbing, 200 feet of rope at a time.

They slept the first night at 19,000 feet, in a crevasse “where the movement of the glacier separates from the ice that is attached to the face of the mountain,” Rousseau said. “What seems crazy to a lot of people is that we camped inside a crevasse, essentially.”

They could feel and hear the movement of the glacial ice.

“It’s amazing to see how fast this is moving away from the mountain and how active it is,” Marvell said.

This instability was a constant danger. Rocks and ice routinely fell on the men. Fragments cut into their canvas as they rested in their hammocks at night, but caused no injuries.

“They weren’t big enough to hurt you,” Cornell said of the fragments. “They just destroyed all their equipment.”

On the fourth day, Cornell was below Rousseau and Marvell when he saw them disappear in a cloud of ice and falling snow.

“Oh, God, they’re going to get killed by this, it’s going to rip out the anchor and then it’s going to pull me because I’m tied to the rope,” Cornell recalled. “So I was just getting ready, ready to be sent down the mountain. And then everything passes them by, and they’re moving: We’re good!”

The men laughed together as they told the story. They slept that night in the hole that the fallen piece of ice had left behind. The hood of Marvell’s jacket was torn in the episode. “I was shedding feathers for the rest of the climb,” he said.

Cornell led the group through a long stretch of technical pitches on the fifth day, as the men pushed past the summits of other alpine-style attempts. They were approaching the top of the north face.

“The improbability is gone,” Marvell said.

On a sixth 10-hour day, they reached the top of the wall — the real goal — and climbed a tricky but not vertical stretch toward the summit.

Before he got there, Marvell took off a glove and discovered that his fingers were blistered, a sign of severe frostbite. The men discussed the options.

“We’re 100 meters from the top, and we have the best weather window of the decade,” Marvell said. “Is it worth potentially losing a fingertip, you know, or is this frostbite going to get worse? And it seemed to me like it was worth the risk.”

They reached the summit of Jannu at 4:20 pm on October 12 and stayed only a few minutes. The mission was never the top, but the climb.

Rousseau, Cornell and Marvell have been climbing together for about four years, in pairs and sometimes together. Two previous attempts on Jannu’s north face, in 2021 and 2022, ended early but were valuable reconnaissance trips. Last year, the three climbed what Climbing magazine called “one of the most legendary lines in North American mountaineering”: the Slovak Direct route on Denali, also known as Mount McKinley, in Alaska.

“That was kind of a test, to see how we all fit together, moving through this kind of terrain,” Rousseau said. “And that worked out really well for us.”

Now, they are the new top trio in climbing.

Rousseau, 37, is married and lives in the hills of Salt Lake City. He guides climbers in Utah and beyond. His experience leading others makes him the logistical leader and a calculated voice when circumstances call for difficult decisions.

Cornell, 29, is known as a quiet, compact, ropeless ice climber. He often spends winters near Bozeman, Montana, and summers near Yosemite National Park’s rock climbing center, working at a restaurant (owned by Anker, a mentor) to help finance his activities. He lives in a 2003 Freightliner van with 320,000 miles, equipped with a bed, stove and other amenities.

Marvell, 27, lives in Heber City, Utah, and has a few endorsement deals as well as his own welding business. Tall and lanky, he spends his summers off the coast of Alaska, climbing up and down oil rigs, timing repair work with the tides. Growing up in Utah, he was drawn to the sandstone towers of the desert and was willing to try almost anything.

The descent from the summit of Jannu, by a series of rappels that descended by jumping back down the face, continued until midnight the following day. By then, Rousseau also had frostbite on his hands. After a day at base camp, the men flew by helicopter back to Kathmandu, where Rousseau and Marvell spent five days in a hospital, treating their hands.

Recovery continues, and the men hope not to lose any of their fingertips.

The three already have plans for another monumental climb.

They do not include Everest. But something bigger.