The Definitive Account of an (Utterly Bewildering) Alpine-Climbing Controversy
Two alpinists recently set a blistering speed record in the Alps. Maybe.
On April 5, Nicolas Hojac and Philipp Brugger linked the three most iconic north faces in Switzerland’s Bernese Alps—the Eiger (13,015ft), Mönch (13,484ft), and Jungfrau (13,642ft)—in a blazing 15 hours and 30 minutes. Their blitz vastly eclipsed the previous record, 25 hours, set in 2004 by the late Ueli Steck and Stephan Siegrist.
Hojac and Brugger’s effort was meticulously planned, documented, and publicized; both men wore action cameras on their heads, drones buzzed overhead, and camera crews waited on summits. When they started their climb, the pair stood on a glacier in the darkness, staring at synchronized watches on their wrist like bank robbers before a heist: “Three, two, one, go!” Chief sponsor Red Bull churned out a flashy short film, The Fast Line. In it, Hojac pays homage to the original linkup, calling Siegrist and Steck’s feat, “badass.” “Our motivation is not to beat their record, but to finish their project,” he says.
Watch Nicolas Hojac and Philipp Brugger climb sections of the North Face Trilogy project:
When he and Brugger reached the summit of Jungfrau (hugging each other and uttering odd remarks like, “You horn dog, you!”), the world of alpinism applauded. Red Bull’s press remarked that the climbers had “shattered” the 21-year-old record, and other alpine speed demons, from Benjamin Védrines to Dani Arnold to Killian Jornet, offered praise.
But there was an outlier: Stephan Siegrist.
In an email to Red Bull and another sponsor, Mammut, the veteran alpinist cried foul, saying no record had been broken. He called comparisons between the recent climb and his 2004 effort “damaging to the spirit of alpinism.”
Siegrist’s issue? Hojac and Brugger had taken an easier and less committing line—the Lauper Route (M4)—to ascend Jungfrau, instead of the Ypsilon Couloir (M6+) that Siegrist said he and Steck climbed. (Siegrist made the first ascent of this route with Ralf Weber, and in the Swiss Alpine Club’s guidebook it’s referred to as the Siegrist-Weber.) Hojac’s route choice not only made their 2025 climb less technical but, according to Siegrist, was not a true “North Face” route, as it ascended a lower-angle ridgeline. Siegrist said he and Hojac had spoken by phone before the climb, so he could offer the younger alpinist beta. He also wanted to clarify his 2004 lines of ascent, in case Hojac and Brugger intended to try to beat his time. Then, Hojac had deliberately taken the easier line.
Siegrist argued that Red Bull should amend their coverage. “I’m convinced that [Nico] and Philipp could have done the original routes even faster,” Siegrist wrote, “and I would’ve truly celebrated that. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have shared my tips so openly. But the way Red Bull has now presented the story in the media, I simply can’t be happy about it, because it’s not factually correct.”
He said, he said: Alpine style
At first glance, what follows—sans axes, crampons, and GoPros—could have taken place inside the universe of Mean Girls. And like the eponymous high school divas, this cast of characters is interlinked, a hodgepodge of erstwhile friends, mentors, and climbing partners.
All are highly regarded alpinists. Siegrist, 52, is of the old guard and Hojac, 33, the new, but the two have partnered on three expeditions. Hojac also tied in with Steck on occasion, and they still hold the roped speed record on the Eiger’s North Face. Brugger, who largely stayed out of the drama that ensued, is better known as a mountain runner, and mostly followed Hojac on the ascent. But he’s no slouch climber, either.
Red Bull never responded to Siegrist’s email, he said, so he reached out to Hojac privately to work things out. “I told Red Bull I won’t make it public, since in my opinion [this] should get discussed in-person [to] find a solution,” Siegrist told me. Siegrist said Hojac never responded to his texts, and instead leaked the controversy to the media, presenting events in a skewed light. “For me it is clear [Hojac knew], attack is the best form of defense,” Siegrist told me.
The older alpinist also opened his own 2004 link-up to criticism, by retroactively editing his website’s trip report. Currently, it says he and Steck climbed Jungfrau via the Ypsilon Couloir, just like he told Red Bull. But view the site with a web archive tool, and one can see that, as recently as a few months ago, the page claimed he climbed the Lauper Route. This matches what he wrote in his printed 2007 biography. Siegrist also removed photos of the route from his website, saying they had not actually been taken on the climb.
Siegrist admitted to me that he made all of these changes, saying that he was merely trying to be more specific, and that he and Steck had originally referred to the route as the Lauper because, back in 2004, they had been lax in their documentation. They’d been the first to ever perform such a link-up, had failed in their personal sub-24 hour goal, and were not thinking about setting records. “At the time, we unfortunately didn’t give enough importance to the detailed route description,” he told me. “For the sake of simplicity, we just noted Lauper in some places.” He acknowledged that making the amendments, “in retrospect, may have been a naive mistake.”
After the media picked up the news from Hojac, affairs began to devolve into mind-numbing territory. Swiss magazine LaCrux published an article that reads like a pinball game of back-and-forth allegations. (“I think I just had a seizure,” a friend and fellow climbing journalist told me when he tried to read the piece.) German magazine Bergsteigen noticed other slight discrepancies in the email Siegrist sent to Red Bull. For example, he said that he and Steck had not eaten “soup and noodles” provided by their support team, as written on his blog, but “self-cooked spaghetti.” (Death penalty!)
It was these articles that initially led me to reach out to Stephan Siegrist. The existing accounts were rather damning, and from my first communications with him, Siegrist bemoaned that Nicolas Hojac had the power of Red Bull and the media on his side, and he hadn’t been given a chance to tell his side of the story. So I went back and forth with him for a week over email.
Siegrist’s explanation for his meddling is more than a little hokey. But in essence, when Red Bull refused to clarify or amend their press release, he said he felt compelled to take matters into his own hands. He attempted to clarify all the specific differences between the 2004 and 2025 climbs himself, so that even if Red Bull’s press wasn’t accurate, his own personal website would tell his version of events.
The bedrock of Siegrist’s case, in his eyes, is that both his biography and original website have always explicitly said he and Steck took three hours to climb the last 150 meters of Jungfrau, which would only make sense if they were on technically demanding terrain on the face, not the easier Lauper ridge. He also offered a witness. Siegrist said his friend Thomas Kohler “can confirm that we did in fact exit from the North Face, as he lowered a rope for the final 50 meters and belayed us up.” This blatant aid had never been mentioned before, by either climber. It appears to be an almost unfathomable case of shooting oneself in the foot. In a two-part exposé with Platform J (Part 1, Part 2), Hojac called this admission not only “unsportsmanlike from an alpine ethical perspective,” but also outright “fraud.”
When I mentioned this to Siegrist, he shrugged it off, and alleged a longstanding pattern of dishonest behavior by Hojac. He shared a six-page document entitled: “Dishonest and Unclear Communication Examples from Nicolas Hojac,” listing other instances of claimed records that were not quite what they were presented as. A case in point: Hojac’s 2022 Instagram announcement of “setting a new record” on, ironically, a skyline traverse of the same Swiss mountains, beating a 2016 Steck ramble that had never been portrayed as a speed attempt (“I wasn’t in a hurry,” Steck said at the time.)
It was then that I contacted Hojac, who also had his guns loaded. He sent me a 46-page PDF file in German, entitled “Dokumentation,” which laid out, in intricate detail, all the discrepancies in Siegrist’s account.
I began to feel I must have uncovered some greater conspiracy. Surely these two talented alpinists had other mountains to climb. Surely they weren’t up in arms about a minor route variation on an objective that otherwise covered 20 miles of stunning alpine terrain. Was there perhaps some secret link to Russian spies here? The Kennedy assassination? The moon landing? What had I uncovered?
Trying to figure it out, I analyzed all 46 pages of Hojac’s “Dokumentation.” I pored over photographs and trip reports and guidebook route descriptions, and near-endless screenshots of WhatsApp messages and emails between the two men. It was all in German, and switching back and forth between the document and Google Translate, I developed a pounding migraine. Was this climbing journalism or celebrity gossip?
You either die a hero …
Reading “Dokumentation,” I was reminded of something I wrote in my review of Race to the Summit, a film about Steck and Dani Arnold’s battle to one-up each other for solo speed records on another North Face trilogy in the Alps:
Once you punch the clock and declare a ‘speed ascent,’ you leave with your shield or on it. It’s a zero-sum game. Either your record holds until the end of your lifetime, or (more likely) someone younger, faster, stronger—and perhaps more tolerant of insane levels of risk—will come along and one-up you.
I imagine this is what most people will assume happened here. Stephan Siegrist got old, he got one-upped, he got salty, and he tried to wheedle his own record back into existence on a technicality. I wish I could tell anyone with that assumption that they’re wrong, because when I began writing this story, I was sympathetic.
Yes, Siegrist behaved oddly and looks guilty, but he also climbed this route over two decades ago. He’d already written that he and Steck climbed the Lauper in his print book, so it’s hard to imagine he truly intended to “erase” history by updating his website. And voluntary admission of using a rope, which was offered by Siegrist in defense of his ascent, is so absurd that you almost have to believe he genuinely feels he’s in the right. His actions struck me less as malign machinations, and more the bumbles of an older guy out of touch with the times. What’s more, I’m not sure Siegrist even wrote the report on his website in the first place. An identical write-up in Alpinist, dated December 2004, is credited to Ueli Steck, and refers to Siegrist in the third-person. (Siegrist told me he couldn’t remember.)
Siegrist reminded me of Christophe Profit, another legendary old guard alpinist who also chose a strange hill to die on, seemingly in defense of old school ethics. (In 2022, Profit was arrested and charged for removing fixed hardware from Mont Blanc, in protest of commercialization on the mountain. After his release, he went back and did it again, and was charged again.)
But when I talked to Nicolas Hojac, my sympathy for Siegrist waned. After the Red Bull email, Hojac said he reached out to the older alpinist to smooth things over. “I had a call with him, and everything seemed okay,” he said. (The WhatsApp screenshots in “Dokumentation” indicate this. On April 20, Siegrist sent Hojac a text that said, “For me, the matter is settled. I wouldn’t jeopardize a friendship in the mountaineering world. Happy Easter!”)
Two days later, Hojac reached out and asked Siegrist to draw the line he had climbed in 2004, so that in upcoming presentations on the project, Hojac could explain the differences between what was done in 2004 and 2025. He said the elder alpinist, “drew a route that is absolutely not the route that was communicated over the last 21 years. So I told him, ‘Stef, that’s just not true. On your website, you have written the Lauper, but what you have drawn has nothing to do with the Lauper.’” Five minutes later, Siegrist’s website had been updated to say that he climbed the Ypsilon Couloir.
From the beginning, much of the controversy has focused on what Siegrist’s Ypsilon Couloir actually is. As noted above, there is no such route in the SAC guidebook—though the Weber-Siegrist could be another name for the line. There are other things in the Siegrist/Steck report which, as much as I’d love to believe him, objectively make no sense. For one, the author writes, “This was the only route both of us didn’t know at all.” This simply cannot be true if the Ypsilon Couloir is the Siegrist-Weber route in the SAC guidebook. Siegrist had established that route himself just a few years prior. Another line also begs questioning: “This, theoretically, should have been the easiest face to climb.” This again, would not be true if Steck and Siegrist had been about to climb the M6+-rated Siegrist-Weber. That route is even harder than the Heckmair on the Eiger. “In my opinion, this Ypsilon, it’s just a variation,” Hojac said. “It’s just the upper part. But now Stephan [calls] it a whole new route.”
Hojac says he chose to climb a different route than the original team only because Siegrist had communicated to him, in advance of the climb, how they’d gotten off-track on the final pitches of the mountain and veered into unknown terrain. “On [their] ascent, Stephan told me they got lost in the dark, and they took this ‘variation’ to the left,” Hojac said. “We are talking about two pitches, maybe 40 meters of climbing that are not the same.”
As certain points of the Siegrist case began to be rebuffed, Hojac said he switched tack, taking issue with other minutiae of the climb, such as how Hojac and Brugger had descended the Mönch. “Come on, it doesn’t matter where you go down!” Hojac said, laughing. “I mean, you can take a plastic bag and slide down the face. Who cares? It’s a project about three north faces. In the end, we both did three north faces.” Another of Siegrist’s arguments is that the Lauper is not a true north face route. Hojac noted that, not only does this contradict the narrative of years past, but if true, it also means the route both parties took on the Mönch would not be a north face route, since the guidebook also labels that route a “northwest ridge.”
Or you cook your own spaghetti
Nicolas Hojac said he still holds immense respect for the original team: “I am not saying we are better than them. They were the pioneers. They had the idea. They executed the project, and they did it 21 years ago. The time they set for this project is still good. We had good conditions and everything went fine. We were nine and a half hours faster, sure. But that doesn’t mean we are better than Stef and Ueli.”
In the tit-for-tat battle, Hojac’s “Dokumentation” blows most of Siegrist’s case out of the water. But the irrefutable fact remains that Hojac and Brugger did not climb the same route as their predecessors. Sure, they had a good reason, Steck and Siegrist got lost and had a mini epic on their line. But if they took a different route, is it a slightly different effort? Hojac argued that the goal was to climb three north faces, not three routes, so it shouldn’t matter. But if it were me, and I wanted to tell the world I shattered a speed record, I think I’d follow the original lines precisely, just to be sure. In light of this, the situation seems better described not as a record that was set by one team, and broken by another, but as two extremely similar efforts, perhaps misconstrued as identical.
Maybe that means Siegrist got shafted, but in the process of calling this out, he also cooked his own spaghetti (to use an idiom I just invented). The omission of the lowered rope is damning enough, from an ethics perspective, but by not telling Hojac about it before the latter went for his ascent (while encouraging him to use the very same route), Siegrist effectively handicapped the younger climber. And despite the discrepancy with the lines, Hojac and Brugger were nearly ten hours faster than Steck and Siegrist. These guys could have sat down on the glacier, pulled out their phones, watched every film in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and still have had 11 minutes to spare to beat the record.
My vote? Neither party gets a record. One of them used a top rope belay for a crux pitch, the other took an easier ridge route instead of following the harder path set by his predecessor. One of them ate soup and noodles cooked by their support team, the other called his buddy a horn dog on the summit. Is drinking Red Bull aid? I should get a record for reporting on this gobbledygook.
In this rare instance, I may have more respect for keyboard warriors than the alpinists in question. In the comments below LaCrux’s gossip chain, one reader offered a stimulating comparison: “If you could fall to your death twice, someone would definitely try to see if they could do it a third time … just to get media coverage.”
Another fellow, commenting on ExplorersWeb, perhaps summed it up best: “How pointless and depressing all this is.”
The post The Definitive Account of an (Utterly Bewildering) Alpine-Climbing Controversy appeared first on Climbing.