How Two Unknown Young Alpinists Established One of the Gnarliest Routes of the Year

George Ponsonby says that for alpinists, a tendency towards amnesia is probably advantageous.

If climbers had total recollection of how decidedly un-enjoyable the process of pushing up hard, long technical routes at high elevations was—then most would probably stay home after their first expedition and spend the rest of their days scrolling Instagram and bragging about Wordle scores. “It’s quite hard to enjoy alpinism in the moment,” Ponsonby said.

We were talking shortly after Ponsonby returned from northern Pakistan, where he and partner James Price made the first ascent of a 3,000-meter (9,840-foot) route on a peak called Aikache Chhok (6,673m/21,893ft), breaching difficulties up to M7, AI5, and A2+. Their trip was a grand success, and the high water mark of Ponsonby’s career thus far. But, as most trips of this caliber are, it was also a sufferfest. “When you’re on these routes, you’re like, ‘I hate this. This sucks,’” he said. “You think, ‘I’ll give up my life savings to get off this mountain right now.’ Then you get off, and looking back it feels amazing. You recall it as the best experience ever. You remember the good, forget the bad.”

“That’s why you go again,” he said, laughing. “You just forget how shitty it was.”

Ponsonby, 29, and Price, 28—who set out on this expedition as part of the United Kingdom’s Young Alpinist Group—spent nine days in mid-October picking their way up Chhok’s northwest ridge and then descending its southwest face, via a route they dubbed Secrets, Shepherds, Sex & Serendipity. They operated out of a base camp in the Chalt Valley at around 3,400 meters (11,154 ft), along with several other climbers from the Young Alpinists Group who were pursuing other objectives.

“We had no idea what we were going to climb when we got there,” Ponsonby said. “We had bad weather for the first week and a half at base camp, so we spent that time exploring and seeing what lines were possible.” He and Price eventually decided on what they believed was an unnamed summit, which they would later learn was Aikache Chhok, a peak which has seen one ascent, from the south, but nothing from the north.

Their chosen line offered a bit of everything. After an approach day, which established them below the north face, they spent a day moving mostly unroped, up a steep gully system, before tying in for half-a-dozen mixed pitches up to M5. “We made a lot of progress that first day,” Ponsonby said. Unfortunately, the second day wasn’t as mellow. “It completely kicked our ass,” he said. “We climbed maybe three pitches total, but it was the hardest mixed climbing of the route.” The pair tooled through thin ice and rock at M7, and employed a short section of aid (A2+)—the only of the route—before gaining the ridge proper, where they bivvied. “Until we could get on the ridge, there was no other option,” Ponsonby said. The following day, they covered significant ground up the ridge, but at one point deviated off onto a glacier to the west, to avoid a high, steep rock band that looked impossible to climb without rock shoes.

This glacier harbored its own threats. “It was one of the most complex, cracked glaciers I’ve ever seen,” Ponsonby recalled. At one point, after leading up through a constriction between the ice and the rock, he popped out, looked up, “and saw this overhanging wall of blocks of ice. I could hear it all creaking above me. I was like, ‘Get me out of here…’”

Ponsonby quickly drilled in a V-thread and retreated. Within minutes, the entire overhang had collapsed, obliterating the surrounding terrain. “If we’d been up there like, 20 minutes later, it would’ve been curtains,” Ponsonby said.

The following day, the pair hit another, more difficult rock step, and attempted to avoid it by rappelling onto the north side of the ridge and climbing up hard ice. But they were unable to regain the ridge. “It just didn’t work,” Ponsonby said. “We both spent several hours trying, got into some pretty hard mixed climbing, and eventually it just got too late.” Darkness falling, they retreated to their previous bivy site.

Ponsonby described the next day, their fifth on the route, as “a brutal day of horrible, black ice.” He took the lead with a light bag, and, he says, “the mission was just to get through this shit as quickly as possible.” This calf-burning climbing, up to AI5, lasted for around eight pitches. It wasn’t incredibly hard from a technical standpoint, but it fried the nerves. “You had to bash to get anything to stick,” Ponsonby recalled. “You could only get like six screws in for each 60-meter pitch, and after four or five pitches of that you just start to break down. Your feet started to ache pretty badly, your hands are numb. You start making mistakes.” They got back on the ridge in the dark, but hadn’t made it far. In two days, they’d gained no more than 240 vertical meters from their previous bivy.

The next day they found thin, hard-to-protect ice on the ridge crest. Price and Ponsonby moved up this for a while, but later traversed right, onto a glacier below the summit ridge, to find a spot to bivy. They woke to find themselves socked in by heavy clouds, but the major difficulties of the route were behind them. A handful of vertical pitches landed them on the summit ridge. “We got up there, saw the sun again, and I’m not religious at all, but at that point I was like, ‘Thank you, God, for sending us this sun,’” Ponsonby recalled.

He seemed to have jinxed it. Within minutes, a swarm of clouds blew in and a “mini summit storm” began firing around them. Price led them across the ridge, in a total whiteout, toward Chhok’s high point to the west. But their goal proved elusive. “We got to where the summit was on the map, but it wasn’t there. Then it was like, ‘Okay, just 50 meters that way.’” No dice. A half-hour later, they were still trudging uphill through whiteout.

“Eventually, we breached out of the mist and found this weird, cornice-snow lump that you needed to pitch out,” Ponsonby said. They thought it could be the summit, but it was already past 4:00 p.m. and darkness was coming fast. Winds were high, and visibility couldn’t be worse. “We didn’t know if there was cornice to our left or right. We couldn’t see anything,” Ponsonby said.

He and Price realized that, as close as they were, they couldn’t top out that day. So they bivvied there, spitting distance from their goal, at 6,645 meters (21,800 feet). Ponsonby was candid: “Definitely the worst day. Horrible conditions. Fucking freezing, just miserable. That bivy hurt.”

The morning brought clear skies. Though they were prepared to climb steep, scary snow to the summit, with better visibility, they realized that wouldn’t be necessary. “We went around the corner and realized you could pretty much walk up the other side,” Ponsonby said.

Having both tapped the narrow fin of snow that marked the summit, Ponsonby and Price decided to descend via the southwest face. The first half of their descent came easy. “A bunch of abseils off of rock, then pretty much endless V-threads with a bit of glacier walking thrown in.”

A local shepherd named Akbar, who rented them a hut, sold them a goat, and “showed us a ton of hospitality” during their time at base camp in the valley, had told them he would shine a headlamp at the mountain each night at 7:00 p.m. to check in with them. For the past few nights they’d been out of sight of the base camp, so they’d missed Akbar’s light.

Now, reaching a bivy site at roughly 5,000 meters (16,400 feet), they had a line of sight on their base camp. “We rounded this rock buttress just in time to see Akbar’s headlamp flashing,” Ponsoby said. “That was a really good feeling, just to have that little bit of human contact, even from so far away.” Here, they got their first decent sleep in days, too. Even though they were still above 5,000 meters, after four nights above 5,500 meters, “the air felt thick,” Ponsonby said.

The final day still held some risk. To descend, they needed to find a way through a pair of “absolutely horrific” glaciers. One, on skier’s left, was “completely cracked apart” with “stuff constantly falling.” The other, on the right, was more cohesive, but overhung with massive seracs. “These were collapsing and wiping out the entire [face] once or twice a day.”

To navigate these twin deathtraps, Price and Ponsonby rappelled down a rock buttress between the two glaciers, but eventually the rock ran out, and they had to move onto the right glacier. “It was like a race,” Ponsonby said. “We tied into the rope and it was, ‘Three, two, one,’ start moving as fast as possible.” Instead of drilling V-threads, they rappelled off their screws to save time. “You’re sticking in a screw, abseiling straight off of it to get down one section, then running as fast as you can across an exposed slope, sticking in another and abseiling down the next section. Whatever we could do to get off it as fast as possible.”

They ran this gauntlet successfully, and before long were within sight of Akbar and their fellow expedition members, who’d come out to meet them. Done.

When I asked him about the philosophy that drove him into the mountains for big, hard routes like this, Ponsonby talked about the Type 2 Fun phenomenon, of forgetting the bad and remembering the good. He also likened the experience of tackling a committing route to the rewarding challenge of taking a final exam. It’s not fun when you sit down with your Number two pencil and scantron, but getting an ace grade is a treat. “It feels like this is what all the climbing you’ve done up until now has prepared you for.”

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