One of the World’s Most Famous Alpine Big Walls Is Soloed
Italian alpinist Stefano Ragazzo broke new ground on July 25 by making the first rope-solo ascent of the 2,100-foot Eternal Flame on Pakistan’s Nameless Tower (20,508ft/6,250m). He climbed the route over nine days in a ground-up style.
Long, high, technical, and remote, Eternal Flame is one of the hardest alpine rock walls in the world. It was established in 1989 by the legendary team of Wolfgang Güllich, Kurt Albert, Christof Stiegler, and Milan Sykora at 5.12c, A2.
For decades after its first ascent, many of the world’s leading alpinists journeyed to Pakistan to try freeing the wall, notably Eneko and Iker Pou, who came extremely close in 2005. It wasn’t until 2009, however, that Eternal went free, by Alex and Thomas Huber at 5.13a. The route saw a second free ascent in 2022, by Catalan climber Edu Marín, supported by his father and brother, and a third just days later, by Babsi Zangerl and Jacopo Larcher who, incredibly, onsighted the route.
Ragazzo, admittedly, did not free Eternal Flame, or even come close. He described his efforts as “French free” (a loose term which refers to pulling on gear whenever needed to move quickly). He told Climbing that he freed up to 5.11c, then climbed the pitches graded 5.11d/5.12a “as free as possible,” and then fully aided the hardest free pitches.
Ragazzo had no qualms about pulling on gear and indicated that, for him, the objective was less athletic and more about overcoming the logistical and mental hurdles of making it up a 2,100-foot wall alone at altitude. The only personal requirement he held himself to was that, unlike the free ascentionists, he would make a continuous ground-up ascent without any fixed lines. He brought only a single 60-meter rope and a tagline for his haul bag. Once he started his climb, he resolved not to descend unless he had ticked the summit or accepted defeat. [Ed: This, by the way, is extremely badass.]
For Ragazzo, the story of Eternal Flame began in 2016, during his first expedition to Patagonia, with longtime girlfriend Silvia Loreggian. “We were 25-year-old kids, with our minds full of dreams and peaks,” he said. While in El Chaltén, the pair stayed in the same apartment as climber and artist David K. Russell. Trapped indoors by storms, Russell was constantly painting. Ragazzo asked him to draw a picture of a wall somewhere in the world he should attempt some day. Russell drew a picture of two faces: El Capitan and the Nameless Tower. Eight years later, Ragazzo has ascended both formations rope solo, first El Capitan via the Nose, in May, and now Nameless via Eternal Flame.
Still, his trip to the Nameless Tower came almost as a whim. Ragazzo originally planned to attempt an 3,000-foot face on an unclimbed peak on the China-Pakistan border with his teammates at The North Face (TNF), but in recent weeks he kicked both his partners and TNF to the curb after the brand downgraded his athlete contract—citing a lack of social media posting. So, after a confidence-boosting rope solo of the Nose in May, Ragazzo booked a ticket to Pakistan for July.
Rope soloing each pitch requires first climbing it, then descending to clean it, then jugging up it again, then hauling the gear. Ragazzo said that particularly in the lower portions of the route, his haul bag constantly got stuck in chimneys and cracks, and he often had to rap pitches a third time just to retrieve it. “I watched the movie of [Jacopo] and Barbara, and there were a lot of fixed ropes,” he said. “There were the cameramen, there were other parties on the route, they went up and down, fixing ropes. My technique was just going up slowly, slowly, slowly, alone. Never down.”
Ragazzo made clear that his achievement did not exist in the same realm as that of those who freed the route, but said it offered difficulties all its own. “It’s the same mountain, but the effort is different. If you are a team of two, everything is divided by two. If you are a team of three, it’s divided by three. When you are alone, you have to do everything yourself.”
(Marín, admittedly, was alone on the route for longer during his free ascent, when he spent a solitary 12 days in a portaledge during a blizzard. His father and brother descended to wait out the storm, then jugged back up when the weather cleared.)
A noted low point for Ragazzo was around day six, when he ran out of water. Lack of water is a game-over for just about any climb, but it’s particularly crucial at 20,000 feet where hydration staves off altitude sickness. “Before dark, I realized I only had 300 milliliters of water,” he said. A light snow was falling, but the route was so steep that there were no ledges collecting snow that he could melt.
He spent the night nursing his scant water, and in the morning decided to continue up, hoping to find a ledge with water. A few pitches higher, he found “a little square of snow, like 30 cm by 20 cm,” he said. He quickly rapped back down to his portaledge and melted the snow into water. “I was like, ‘OK, I can survive a little bit more.’”
His eighth day was another sour one. He’d only brought enough food for six days, and though storms made him lose two days trapped in his portaledge, he refused to descend. “I had so little food, so little water, I started to be very, very tired,” he said. Ragazzo had a friend from Italy sending him weather updates via inReach, and the forecast for the following day included a brutal snowstorm. He figured it was the end, because he didn’t have enough provisions to wait out the weather and survive. “I don’t know what happened, but I woke up at 5:00 a.m. and there was blue sky. No clouds. I knew it was my last chance.” He summited a little over six hours later. “When I reached the summit I realized I didn’t even know how many days I was on the wall.”
Ragazzo laughed when asked what his next objective was. “Man, now I have to go home and go to work,” he said. “This is how I pay for my trips.”
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