The three-man team of Horia Colibasanu, Peter Hamor, and Marius Gane has succeeded in fixing the steepest part of their pioneering route up Dhaulagiri’s Northwest Ridge.
“We managed to equip the whole wall to Camp 1,” Colibasanu said yesterday. “It was hard to climb because the route has changed as well. There’s less snow this year so we have more rock climbing.”
The trio knows that lower 600m cliff well, as this is their second attempt to establish this new line up the NW Ridge; their third attempt, if you count last year when the pandemic shut them down when they were already in Nepal but before they could start.
The 600m wall at the beginning of the Northwest Ridge. Photo: Horia Colibasanu
This time, Colibasanu and his partners put in about a kilometre of rope, zigzagging their way up the wall. Almost all the fixed line that they had placed in 2019 had disappeared.
“We had to redo everything,” said Colibasanu. “There were days when I only advanced 40m.” Once, it took them an hour and a half to advance five metres.
They did find 150m of old rope in place. This, and their familiarity with the route, helped them move more swiftly. They are already 20 days ahead of where they were on their 2019 attempt.
Today, they planned to go back up to Camp 1, stay there overnight, then start working on the next section of the climb.
