Cerro Kishtwar / Cerro Kishtwar

Nordwand

First ascent of the north face of Cerro Kishtwar

As part of Mammut’s 150th anniversary project, on 4 September 2011 the three Mammut Pro Team athletes David Lama, Stephan Siegrist and Denis Burdet set off for Delhi in India in an attempt to become the first climbers to completely scale the around 1,000 metre, breathtakingly beautiful north face of Cerro Kishtwar. Back in 1991, a British team narrowly failed to conquer this imposing wall in the Indian Kashmir Himalaya. The climbing team have allowed themselves a timeframe of six weeks to reach the peak located at 6,200 metres above sea level, on the border between Pakistan and China. The journey to the base camp at 3,500 metres alone takes two weeks. Over the course of the next four weeks, the Mammut team will be attempting to successfully complete this tour out of the 150 tours in the Mammut Peak Project.

Of course David, Stephan and Denis will be documenting their progress and as soon as they get back from India they will be publishing a detailed report on our website. Something to look forward to...

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Expedition report
Read the blogpost about the final expedition report here.

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Update 30.09.2011
We did it!
We successfully reached Cerro Kishtwar’s summit on Wednesday. We slept in the wall Wednesday night and made it back safely to basecamp late on Thursday. It was so great!
We will tell more about our adventure once we’re back in civilization!

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Update 27.09.2011
The post monsoon season this year has been very humid and as a result we have had pretty wet, windy and sometimes miserable weather since we relocated our base camp. We’ve spent our time getting ready, acclimatised and hauling all the equipment we will need on the wall up to our ABC. Crossing our fingers for a good window of stable, or more or less stable conditions to start climbing, we finally got good news from our weather guru Charly Gabel in Innsbruck...
Our team accompanied by filmers and photographers Rob and Stefan left early Saturday morning for ABC with the hope of continuing and working our way towards the summit.
With a little luck and dry weather we should be busy climbing hard for the next few days :)

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Update 19.09.2011
After a day in Dehli sorting out paperwork, we travelled 3 days by bus to the north of India where, with the help of donkeys we walked 4 days with all our supplies and gear into the Kashmir valley. About a week after our arrival in India we finally set up base camp and head deeper into the valley to get our first glimpse of Cerro Kishtwar.

Before leaving we had been in contact with Andy Perkins who climbed Cerro Kistwar 20 years ago . He kindly passed on the information he had which was a great help in preparing our project. We knew the distance between base camp and the foot of the mountain was going to be far. Conditions over the past 20 years have changed and we hadn’t counted on a 14km hike with so much altitude difference separating base camp from our ABC (advanced base camp)..
So after a lot of consideration... and walking we’ve decided to move our base camp closer to our ABC. As we move further into the valley, finding good terrain to set up a base camp gets difficult... But we’ve found a solution!

So we are on the move again! Weather conditions permitting (it’s snowing at the moment) we hope to be sorted, set-up, rested and ready to start climbing in the next few days...

Tour Pictures