One Man’s Piolet
July 2013. High on K6 West, Ian Welsted and I were still sunk in deep shade but the snowy saddle at our backs already sparkled in the sun. The cloudless sky overhead was the dark blue of high places, so ver y different from the pale lowland sky that we could have been on an alien planet. Kick by deliberate kick we switchbacked across an icy slope, a str ing of shallow tracks in a thin crust of snow unrolling behind us. At last, no more obstacles separated us from the highest point. After al l the earlier tr ips to Pakistan when summits had eluded us, after nearly pulling the plug on this trip because of the Nanga Parbat hor ror, we were f inally going to the top of an untrodden 7,000 - metre peak. We were f inally taking the walk in the sky I’d dreamed about ever since I f irst saw these mountains.
Thirt y-six hours later and three kilometres lower, we stumbled across the rubble covering the Charakusa glacier while the Milky Way lit up the sky. Scrambling up a sandy bank, we saw lights on the edge of the meadow just above. It was our cook Rasool and his helper Iqbal, come to bring us food. Farhan, our liaison of f icer, gave an impromptu speech about how we’d remember this moment all our lives. With less poetr y but no less feeling, Andy Houseman and Jon Griff ith, our English camp mates, produced a bottle of single malt. I was exhausted but struggled to stay awake: I didn’t want the evening to slip into the past.
March 2014. The band f inished another song. The backdrop footage of cows butting heads faded and lights came back on in the theatre in Courmayeur, on the Italian side of Mont Blanc. Kay Rush, the MC, st ylish in a spark ling skirt, invited George Lowe, the president of the Piolets d’Or jur y, onto the stage. Just like at the Academy Awards, an envelope was produced. Seated along with the other nominees, I tried to remain detached. After all, whatever recognition we received wouldn’t change anything about the six days Ian and I’d spent on K6 West, immersed in another realit y. Yet, as much as I liked to think I climbed only for the f leeting intensit y found in the moment, the names in envelope did matter to me.
“Attempting a previous unclimbed summit, the target of severa l earlier attempts, they were confronted with dif f icult technical climbing including an overhanging ice cr ux,” Lowe read out. After the f irst few words I knew the envelope contained our names. Once Ian and I’d joined him on the stage, blinking in the spotlight’s glare, he continued: “After reaching the bergschr und, he had to accept that his climbing par tner thought the r isk too high. In climbing the face alone, he subjected himself to maximum exposure…” Ever yone in the audience knew he spoke of Ueli Steck ’s solo f irst ascent on the south face of Annapurna. The 2014 Piolets would go to Annapurna and K6 West.
Were these two really the f inest alpine climbs of the year? Was our f irst ascent of K6 West somehow more deserving than another nominated climb, the f irst ascent of Kunyang Chhish East, another muchtr ied 7,000 - metre Karakoram summit? Or were Simon Anthamatten and the brothers Hansjörg and Matthias Auer right to be disil lusioned, Hansjörg arguing bitterly that their climb was at least as important as ours? And that’s to say nothing of the doubts swirling around the Annapurna climb: Ueli dropped his camera in a small avalanche and we have only his word that he stood on the highest point that October night.
Inaugurated i n 1991, the awards have often proved controversial. At times it was the jur ies’ choices that polar ized the mountaineer ing community. Steve House was perhaps the most scathing, but cer tain ly not the only cr itic of the 2004 Piolet’s going to a sieged f irst ascent of the north face of Jannu. “Was [the Jannu climb] innovative? ” he asked, and in the same breath answered: “Absolutely not.” At other times it was the ver y idea of choosing the best climb of the year that was cr iticized. In withdrawing his 2006 Piolet nomination for the f i r st ascent of the north face of Cerro Torre, Rolando Garibotti wrote: “How could there be any real value to such a subjective judgment? ” Matters came to a head a year later when Marko Prezelj, one of the winners, shar ply cr iticized the Piolet for being fuel led by competition and hunger for fame. He warned that “fame is a whore: one day she is sleeping with one and the next day with another.”
In 2008, after a year’s hiatus, the Piolet reinvented itself as the plural Piolets, seeking to celebrate rather than rank ascents. Arguably the change has been for the better. It a l lows dif ferent st yles to be recognized: a case in point being the dif ference bet ween Ueli’s Olympic-ca l ibre per for mance on Annapurna, with no margin for error, and