MoJo Climb: China - Genyen - Part 3

This is Joe again. While Michelle and Jay were busy having deep intellectual conversations in base camp, Peter, Julie, and I decided to go try and climb this crazy peak that we had just hiked over 30 miles into the middle of the Tibetan wilderness to try to climb. We still couldn't see the peak yet, but we had a feeling that it was just around the corner. After a little scouting we saw a big mass of rock, ice, snow, hanging glaciers, and talus that we were pretty sure was our peak. We only had 3 days to try to bag the sucker because of time restraints, so we headed up with high hopes.

Luckily it only took 4 or so hours to reach our high camp in a basin below the peak. We figured what was above us, was indeed the 5965-meter peak that we were keen on climbing, but it looked quite difficult to access the main face that would lead the summit ridge.

The views of Genyen were nothing short of, well...

On the morning of day 2, the three of us geared up for our 1st attempt. Our high camp was at 5000 meters and it was pretty darn cold.

Peter getting ready to go.

Julie wasn't feeling well and turned around, so Peter and I continued up an easy glacier. Our hopes were that this glacier would simply traverse around the annoying and rather large rock outcropping on the ridge crest above camp and we would simply walk easily to the final headwall.

Ha! Guess again. Our easy glacier dead-ended into to 200 meter cliff and the peak was still a long ways away. We tried to go up and over the annoying rock thing, but it was beyond the scope of the objective and would not have really been considered progress toward the main summit. But we did get a good look at the summit and the upper part of the route, which looked really amazing. Now all we had to do was get there. In retrospect, we really chose the wrong valley to do the most logical route on the peak. Had we come up the next valley to the west, we would have gained easy access to the main glacier. Such are the tribulations of first ascents.

We descended back to base camp and tried to scout a new route. There were two obvious gullies that looked like they led to the ridge crest. One looked easy and one looked hard. After much thought and discussion, we decided that the easy one didn't go anywhere (in hind sight, a very good assumption). So we decided to take the more challenging looking of the two - the "heinous choss gully of death" seemed an appropriate name.

Here is a rough outline of the route we eventually took on the peak - much of it is very forshortened.

We got up very early and started up the talus to the couloir. Julie decided not to join us on this adventure, so it was just the two of us. Because of the short days and the length and unknown nature of what lie ahead, we mutually decided that we would solo as much terrain as possible in order to get up and down the peak within a reasonable time frame.

Here's Peter in the gully, approaching the crux rock band.

Peter just topping out on the rock band. There was a short bit of rock/mixed climbing, moderate in nature - just on the edge of keeping within our soloing limits.

We were quite glad to be out of the gully and onto the snow. We continued up a moderate ridge, with absolutely perfect snow conditions.

A bit of steep and exposed downclimbing led to the first flat area on the climb, where we took our first and only break.

We were pleasantly surprised to find that a lot of the ice cliffs and seracs that we had seen from below were easily (and safely) bypassed via a long avalanche chute right up the center of the peak. This led to a bergschrund where above stood the 200 meter 55-degree calf-burning headwall. Since the snow conditions were still so good, we decided to continue soloing the headwall to the ridge crest.

Looking down the avalanche chute, below the headwall:

We finally reached the ridge crest and were again surprised, but excited to find a very sharp and tricky final 200 meter stretch to the summit:

We finally decided to bust out the rope. The climbing was very Alaskan in nature - walking the fine line between the cornice break off point on the right, and the steep exposed snow on the left. Very often we would wander a little to far right and poke down into the cornice fracture hole. Funny that the night before we had joked about the Fairbanks belay (if one person falls off one side, then you jump off the other), but now it was the foremost thought in our heads.

Without incident, we reached the tiny summit at 11:55 a.m., just in time to make our scheduled radio call to Michelle and Jay (who actually didn't even know which summit we were on, just that we were very ecstatic, so they figured it must be the big one).

Peter on the summit taking a cheap shot swing at me with his ice axe:

Me throwing up my arms in surrender:

The weather was a bit foul, but we were delighted none the less. We spent 30 or minutes taking pics and vids, before descending. We carefully retraced our steps along the summit ridge, downclimbed the headwall, then walked down the glacier.