After six days on the wall, the Italian team has opened a new route up the East Face of 6,934m K7 in Pakistan.
The team, comprising Matteo Della Bordella, Mirco Grasso, Luca Ducoli, and Giacomo Mauri, is now back in base camp. “It’s 30 pitches of rope, some of them crazy, on vertical ice, mixed with precarious ice axe hooks and difficult aid climbing,” Della Bordella said.
Unfortunately, they were unable to cover the last 350m to the summit due to dangerous conditions on the ridge. Too much snow had formed unstable cornices that were collapsing before their eyes.
They called their 1,600m line Rollercoaster because of the constant emotional strain.
A total adventure
The team will send a complete report once they have returned to a place with a better connection, but their brief descriptions of the East (sometimes described as Southeast) Face of K7 are exciting:
When you look up [from] the glacier at 5,000m, you can’t even begin to grasp the true size of this giant, which reaches over 6,900m, with ever-increasing difficulties.
The line we imagined is completely new: no trace of previous attempts, no one has ever laid their hands on it. A total adventure.
The route they climbed follows new terrain up to 6,600m, where it joins the 1984 Japanese route — the one used for the first ascent of K7. That short section was the one that was too dangerous to attempt.
Two attempts
The team reached Base Camp on June 6 and acclimatized by climbing Sulu Peak (6,050m) that same week. Then they started working on their route on K7’s East Face.
On a first trip during the second week of June, they reached 6,000m before bad weather pushed them back to base camp. They then waited for good weather before launching their main push. They were aware that the most difficult sections of vertical rock and ice lay ahead of them.
The first attempt to 6,000m, courtesy of the Italian K7 team.
Finally, on June 24, the weather window opened, and they began. The team spent six days on the wall completing the new line.
“We gave it our all: heart and soul, for an adventure that will stay with us forever,” said Della Bordella.
K7, also known as Saraska Peak, is a highly technical granite peak located in the Masherbrum massif in the Charakusa Valley. It was first climbed by a Japanese team in 1984. Steve House soloed it in 2004, and Hayden Kennedy, Kyle Dempster, and Urban Novak opened the first route on the East Face in 2012.
