While crowds queue on the fixed ropes of Manaslu’s normal route, Andrey Vasiliev, Sergey Kondrashkin, Vitaly Shipilov, and Kirill Eiseman will head to the peak’s lonely Southwest Face to attempt a new route.
There is a good reason why that face of the mountain is rarely visited. It’s difficult, isolated and its central line — the one they’re targeting — will be a handful. But that is just why the Russian team, which attempted the daunting South Face of Cho Oyu in both 2023 and 2024, has chosen it.
For now, the Russians are acclimatizing on the normal route. According to their latest update on Mountain.ru, they should be in Camp 1 today and heading up to Camps 2 and 3 next.
First ascent of Southwest Face
Reinhold Messner made the first ascent of that side of Manaslu in 1972, in a dramatic no-oxygen ascent that took the life of his climbing partner, Franz Jaeger. Jaeger had turned back due to exhaustion without summiting and disappeared during the descent. During the search-and-rescue attempts, another team member died.
The Tyrolean or Messner route on the Southwest Face of Manaslu avoids the center of the face and gains the ridge to the west. Photo and Topo: Animal de ruta
Since then, several expeditions have repeated that route, which has become the second most-repeated line on Manaslu. However, no one has ever attempted the central part of the face. Check an excellent report on Manaslu’s routes on Animal de Ruta.
We will wait for updates from the team about their climbing plans. On Cho Oyu, they used traditional Himalayan style tactics, going up and down the mountain and fixing the most technical passages.
Nowadays, expeditions to other sides of Manaslu are rare. The latest one was the 2022 attempt on the West Face by Helias Millerioux, Charles Dubouloz, and Symon Welfringer of France. Bad weather prevented the team from launching an alpine-style push.
