Beyond its highest peaks, Pakistan has hundreds of technical rock spires, many of them unclimbed. Matteo De Zaiacomo and Chiara Gusmeroli of Italy went to the Namgma Valley to make the first ascent of one of these: an obvious and hard-looking granite tower called Sckem Braq (5,300m).
They could see the pillar from the day they left Kande village.
“Sckem Braq means ‘dry mountain,’ but its original name is Look Mon, which means ‘no exit’,” De Zaiacomo explained on social media. “Perhaps because it looks like a wall at the end of green pastures, and beyond it, there is nothing but bare, useless rock.
It took them two tries to complete the route.
“We spent a total of seven days on the face over two attempts,” said De Zaiacomo. “The final, vertical headwall offers a single, uninterrupted crack that took most of our skills, free-climbing and aid-climbing where the crack was just a few millimeters deep.”
Climbing up the crack on the headwall. Photo: Matteo Di Zaiacomo
A close call
From the foot of the face, the climbers used the first day to tote their gear to a middle ledge.
“We climbed six steep and difficult pitches on the second day,” they told the Ragni di Lecco, the famous mountain club they belong to. “While we were at it, we saw a huge landslide below us that hit the pitches we had climbed the day before.”
Summit day featured another scary moment, as De Zaiacomo highlighted in his report:
After resting in the tent [ for one day] during bad weather, we climbed and solved the steepest and most technically difficult part. [It] included a single pitch that took us more than three hours. In the evening, we bivouacked on a ‘comfortable’ ledge of 80x50cm. We woke up in a snowstorm but set off anyway toward the summit.
The day turned out to be splendid. After summiting, we descended to find the tent destroyed by a landslide. (It gives you the shivers to think that we slept there for three nights.) At the base of the wall, all the remaining material was reduced to crumbs by the other landslide on the second day.
Extreme Risk
During the expedition, Chiara read The Shining Mountain by Pete Boardman and Azzardo Estremo (“Extreme Risk,” the Italian title for Joe Tasker’s Savage Arena).
“[The books] accompanied me, motivated me, and kicked my ass when the days were gray and this corner of the world seemed as beautiful as it was impossible and inaccessible for just four legs and four arms,” he recalls.
As a tribute to Tasker, the climbers called their new route Azzardo Estremo. “We felt a bit like Tasker and Boardman on Changabang during our emergency bivouac,” De Zaiacomo wrote. “It’s been three wonderful weeks. Climbing Sckem Braq is an absolute privilege that is only possible in remote places like this.”
