The Outside Penguin

Press Release

New Route: The Outside Penguin (V: 5.10, A1) in the Latok Group, Karakoram Range, Pakistan.

The summer of 2007 of the Karakoram was unusually wet, thwarting most attempts at climbing. Backed by the AAC’s Lyman Spitzer Award and Mountain Equipment Co-op, our original objective was the unclimbed feature just under and southwest of Latok II (7108m; see below). We facetiously named this gargantuan gendarme “Latok II¾” (~6500m); its southwest face presents a 1500m wall of near-vertical, unclimbed granite. With all the bad weather, this normally rock climbable objective was shrouded in verglas and powder, rendering it too full on for the likes of us.

Ken Glover (Canmore, Canada) and I (Vancouver, Canada) turned our attention to lower altitudes, and settled on Peak 5750 (see below), located two peaks down a ridge to the southwest of Latok II. Italians may have climbed the peak in 1977 and Americans Doug Chabot and Jack Tackle climbed it from the north in 2000. Its triangular south face rises 1200m out of the talus-covered Baintha Lukpar Glacier and appears to have some of the best granite in the valley. At the tail end of one of the few high-pressure systems of the season, we started up the rightmost of the twin buttress with light alpine packs, where one sleeping bag, two down jackets, and a siltarp comprised the extent of our bivy gear.

The face presented three steep headwalls; we hoped to weave our way up the wall via a devious line of weakness. After an initial broken section, we reached the base of the first headwall, framed on its right by a ridge crest. By traversing two pitches, we reached crest and followed it upward for a pitch before it stopped us at a blank overhang. A slab traverse rightward dropped us into a chimney, which we followed for three pitches to a sandy ledge atop the initial headwall. The second steep headwall loomed above. Searching for the line of weakness, we traversed for two pitches to the right again, where we climbed a ramp system before slipping behind a prow to find a hidden corner. Above the corner, moderate terrain led to a scree slope and a comfortable bivy. At each daunting wall, we had luckily found a moderate solution.

Seven hundred meters up the face, we hoped for a quick, sun-bathed dash for the summit on Day 2. Instead, threatening skies and false summits made for a more Blue-collar finish. After soloing up moderate terrain past the false summits, we reached the base of the third and final headwall. A long, broken pitch led to a steep cirque with no obvious line of weakness, where our streak of luck appeared to end. Straight up presented thin, vertical cracks; to the left stood a complex prow blocked by an overhanging wart of granite; the right was blocked by a crackless buttress and an overhanging rotten ice gully. Ken scouted the right options, launching into ledge-fall potential on an unprotectable face. He wisely retreated as the difficulty ramped up. Next, I tried the left prow. By stemming past an ice-chocked corner, I reached the base of the overhung wart, where our luck returned. A moderate ramp allowed us past the previously hidden side of the gendarme, beyond which the crux pitch gave way to the wart’s top. Ken then led two mixed pitches with our one pair of crampons to the summit, as snow began to fall.

We began a descent immediately by scoping our first option, a line that may have lead into easy descent gullies. The idea appeared to be far more involved than anticipated whilst scouting. Hence, we began rappelling our line of ascent; shortly thereafter, darkness and a powerful snowstorm descended upon us. At the first decent ledge, we endured a miserable, sleepless bivy as the storm raged on. On the third day, we continued our descent, again finding that any quick-and-easy descent ideas turned out to be complex and dangerous. Thus, we continued rapping and downclimbing our line of ascent. We reached the base that afternoon in the pouring rain, after some 800m of rapping, overjoyed for having made the most of what the weather gods permitted.