BOLDERZN'WALLZ

In an article from the Japanese Alpine News (Future Climbing Park – Nyainbo Yuze in Qinghai – 2014) the ever prolific Japanese explorer Tamotsu Nakamura stated “When you stand on the high pass, Longgeshanyaku (4,398 m), you must be overwhelmingly touched by the grandeur of numerous granite rock peaks and pinnacles tower to the sky range after range like the teeth of a saw. It is a really breathtaking panoramic view of the west face of Nyainbo Yuze massif, which will be a future alpine paradise”.

Like a moth to a flame - These words and the experience behind their author foreshadow an uncharted land, beckoning great adventures and notable exploration.

Also known by the Tibetan name Golog Shan (or spelled like Nyenbo Yurtse), Nyainbo Yuze is located in the Golok Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Qinghai; Jigzhi County, Qinghai Province, China. This is a region between the two mountain ranges of Amnye Machen and Bayan Har Shan.

Nyainbo Yuze is the peak with snow on the left.

It is said that Golok was once an infamous borderland of fierce and ruthless Tibetan people, which on occasion, attacked trade caravans and even explorers. However it is now a peaceful land with fertile pastures and magnificent monasteries. Ximen Co Lake just north of Nyainbo is now becoming a tourist destination and many Chinese are visiting. Nonetheless, the other area, almost all of the massif, remains isolated and untraveled.

Although not a high massif (sub 5,400 meters), the Nyainbo Yuze group is an extensive collection of unclimbed granite peaks ornamented with challenging big walls and is destined to become an alpine climbers Shangri-La. It’s almost hard for me to believe that an area like this has gone virtually unnoticed by climbers.

Setting up camp bellow a peak we named 'Grant Peak' 5202meters.

In the Fall of 2015, I traveled to this remote mountain range hungry for adventure with fellow climber, Marcos Costa. We managed two first ascents... but, the rock quality was not what we wanted; big walls indeed, but most of the larger features were cursed with friable choss. Still a fun area to explore and bag summits.


Marcos Costa keeping fingers strong while we waited for the rock to dry. We climbed the tower on the far right, naming it 'Mini T' 5125 meters.

On the summit of Mini T

Easy climbing on Grant Peak

Building one of many rap anchors on Grant Peak

Stoked! On the summit of Grant Peak. Nyainbo Yuze in the background.

Vampire Lake

I'm a very big fan of solitude. In the Vampire Peaks, there's no hype, no circus of other climbers racing to the base of cliffs. Even the remote Cirque of the Unclimbables, near the Vampire Peaks, sees some 70 people a year, mostly gunning for Lotus Flower Tower. In the Vamps, chances are you won't see another soul.

This was my ninth expedition to the Ragged Range in Nahanni National Park and the second for both Jessa Goebel and James Q Martin. In 2014, Jessa and I attempted the first ascent of the south face of Dawn Mist Mountain (a.k.a. Moraine Hill), and Q was with Jeff Achey, Jeremy Collins, and me when we made the first free ascent of the Phoenix Wall, via Phreenix (VI 5.11, AAJ 2013).

Last summer, Kluane Airways dropped us at Vampire Lake in mid-July with 18 days of provisions. The weather, for the most part, was quite wet; it would rain for a few hours then dry up for a few hours, like clockwork. We had one clear 27-hour window and a mostly clear 23-hour window, during which we sent our two new routes.

Racking up for round 2 on Dawn Mist Mountain (aka Moraine Hill).

The southeast face of Dawn Mist Mountain as seen from North Moraine Hill Glacier.

Pat Goodman (leading and Jessa Goebel connecting the dots on pitch 3.

Moraine Hill was first climbed in 1968, via the fourth-class west rib, by Bill Buckingham and party. He named the peak Dawn Mist Mountain during his very successful expedition to the area, during which they named most of the prominent spires in the Vamps and climbed them by the way of least resistance.

Jessa and I had faced several unexpected hurdles in 2014, from deep snow and slush on the North Moraine Hill Glacier, which must be crossed for several miles to reach the wall, to Jessa fighting the reality of this remote area’s extreme solitude. She rallied, though, and fought with determination while climbing—it was inspirational watching her take control of her mind and try HARD! We also had shit weather that kept us tent-bound except for one attempt that ended after four cold pitches in a snowstorm.

So, this time we thought we knew what route to try on Moraine—until we got there and found the wall running with water after a big snowstorm. We opted for a line to the right that looked less "splitter" but, in all honesty, was probably a better, more consistently steep rig than our 2014 attempt. The cruxes were more about staying calm while free climbing with wet shoes and numb fingers than any particular sequence. (A dab of fresh snow crowded many of the lesser-angled features on the wall.) That said, pitch four was pretty feisty—we had to do a big iron-cross, backhand move left from a fingery flake (wet, bad feet) into the base of a slightly overhanging, stem-box corner—one of those features in which you jam your shoulders and wiggle around until you can get your feet under you. My fingers were about as sensitive as chopsticks, but I reckon that section was solid 5.11. Most of the pitches had some sort of wide (5.10ish) funkiness to overcome.

I led the entire route, free and onsight, with no bolts. Jessa followed with only one fall, while Q ascended a rope I fixed as we went, in order to capture the action. We reached the summit around 11:30 p.m. as the sun was beginning to set. The sky was on fire—possibly the most stunning display of colors I will ever witness. It was Jessa's first big, remote summit, and she was glowing with delight—she seemed nearly unable to comprehend what was happening. Those kinds of moments are fleeting and few people ever get to experience them. To be a part of that, to help her accomplish that, and to witness her struggle and success, especially after getting skunked the previous year, was a high point of my life.

Pat Goodman leading pitch 5.

We rapped a series of lower-angled gullies left of our ascent route to our 2014 high point, then down the anchors from that attempt—nine raps in all—and returned to the tent 22 hours after leaving.
The south face of Dawn Mist has more adventure value than high-quality free climbing, but three shorter (500–1,000’), neighboring buttresses that top out on a separate, unclimbed spire look to offer excellent splitters up golden granite.

Summit glory!

After this climb, we wanted try something a little less committing, since the weather was fickle at best. I first saw the wall holding our second new route in 2006, while Hank Jones and I were exploring the area. This feature is one of three distinct sub-walls flanking the southern aspect of the massive granite formation known as the Sundial (a.k.a. Mt. Dracula), whose northeast aspect hosts the Phoenix. Hank dubbed the wall Bela Lugosi, in honor of the actor who portrayed the original Dracula.

Scoping the Bella Wall from the east.

From the ground the wall looks steep and several distinct crack features jump right out. But we soon found these were bottomed-out water grooves. Time not being a commodity, I wandered from crack to crack, ledge to ledge, avoiding the grooves and trying to find clean cracks. We eventually traversed from the right side of the wall to the left, but it was a very fun outing and a pretty good route. This wall offers excellent free climbing potential, especially if you have time to clean and work around the crackless features. We descended via a fourth-class scramble to the west, going 16 hours tent to tent.
Our 2015 trip was sponsored by Parks Canada in exchange for historical, logistical, and climbing information I’m providing. Parks Canada is working with the Alpine Club of Canada to build a website that will cover climbing throughout Nahanni National Park. Can you imagine our National Park Service sponsoring climbing trips? Me neither. No wonder I love climbing up here so much.

Tools of the trade.

Climbing pitch 6 of Ramshackle Affair.

Getting crushed on the summit of the Bella Wall.

Soggy but happy, we make our way back to our basecamp, stoked to have squeezed in another first ascent.

Basecamp in the Vampire Peaks.

Summary: Two new routes in the Vampire Peaks (Ragged Range), a sub-range of the Logan Mountains in the Northwest Territories, by Jessa Goebel, Pat Goodman, and James Q Martin (all USA). Fighting Till Dawn (460m, V 5.11- R) was the first ascent of the south face of Dawn Mist Mountain (Moraine Hill) and second ascent of the peak, on July 19–20, 2015. Ramshackle Affair (330m, IV 5.11+ A0) was the first ascent of the Bela Lugosi Wall, on July 26, 2015.

It’s unmistakable. Any seasoned climber will cringe, shoulders up, head down with even the slightest reverberation from above as stone missiles whirr through the air in an ensemble of high and low tones—the lower the pitch, the bigger the twitch.

Cowering under small packs 300 vertical meters above the talus on a wall three times that size, Marcos Costa and I were in full twitch mode. This was my sixth attempt to scale the still unclimbed “great wall of China” —the 900 meter west face of Seerdengpu, a barbaric mountain of granite soaring to an elevation of 5592 meters in the Shuangqiao gou of China’s Sichuan Province. We took a beating that day; bruised shoulders, bloody shins, chopped ropes and aching stoke sent us packing, so anxious we were to leave we each carried loads for two from our quaint basecamp below the monolith.

Humping a big load down from Seerdengpu attempt.

Marcos Costa burning off some calories after lunch at the Five Colours Mountain Lodge.

After our defeat we regrouped down valley at a guesthouse called Five Colours Mountain Lodge. We had almost three weeks left in the alpine wonderland of Shuangqiao and our ubiquitous penchant for vertical adventure was rank. We poured over some maps, then quickly turned our attention to an unclimbed peak across the valley from Seerdengpu that held the skyline with a jaggedly ominous arrogance, the kind of which assured our desired vertical value.

Prayer flags from a Buddhist Stupa as seen from the valley floor bellow Peak 5467.

Camp below Peak 5467. In the background, Oxheart 4942 (left), unclimbed Peak 5404 (center) and Seerdengpu 5592.

Somewhere on the 1,000 meter Moo Moo Ridge. The summit of Peak 5467 in the distance.

After 10 hours of scrappy climbing up frosty, less than ideal rock, we completed the first ascent of the long and complex southeast ridge—Moo Moo Ridge (1,000m, 5.10+ R) —thus making the first ascent of Peak 5,467 (17,936') and momentarily satiated our appetite.

From the summit of Peak 5467 we could see nearly every peak in Bi Peng Valley, Changping Valley and Shuangqiao Valley.

No rest for the wicked—the next day we hiked up into a wonderful sub-valley called Dagou, home to an impressive collection of granite peaks. We were interested in the unclimbed stuff, and two substantial features stood out: Peak 5,100 and Peak 5,184.
Once in the valley we met four French climbers Elodie Lecomte, Aurelie Didillon, Simon Duverney and Sebastian Ratel. They were heading up to climb the impressive east wall on 5100 – they succeeded and established Les Rescapes de la forget magique 600m 7b A.2, over the course of 3 or 4 days (they dubbed the peak, Four Pigs Peak 5100).

Dagou Valley. Four Pigs Peak (left), Dayantianwo 5240m (center), Peak 5180m (right of center), the mighty south face of Seerdengpu (back right).

Marcos in his element during our first ascent of Peak 5184.

Marcos and I set out for an attempt on the northwest face of Peak 5184. A recent snowstorm had deposited an uncomfortable amount of white on the rock, but we persevered through hours of screaming barfies and established a “fun” 1,000-foot 5.11 on the northwest face of Peak 5,184 (17,008'), bagging another new peak. From the summit, Daugou East and Daugou West overwhelmed the skyline, and we both knew where we were going next!

Finally in the sun on a 5.11 pitch near the top of Peak 5184.

Looking over at the north faces of Daugou East (left) and Daugou West, from the summit of Peak 5184.

With just under a week left before my flight home, Marcos and I headed up into another sub-valley called Xiaogou to look at the other, sunnier side of the Daugous. We were immediately drawn to a brilliant granite pillar that dominated the south face of Daugou East (5,462m/17,920'). We climbed through squalls of snow and sleet, shivering our way up incredible cracks and good granite. The best pitch was perhaps the last: a 40-meter, 5.11 thin-hands splitter.


Marcos Costa pointing towards the south face of Daugou East. South Pillar climbs the obvious rib up the center of the peak.

We found no anchors or signs of a previous ascent and our subsequent research determined that the earthquake of 2008, (which killed approximately 69,000 people, destroyed countless homes and permanently scarred every peak in the Park) lowered the previously recorded 5466m elevation of Daugou when the summit block fell off nearly erasing the route climbed by Chad Kellogg, Joe Peryear and Stoney Richards in 2005.

Pitch 8 on The South Pillar of Daugou - Marcos Costa Photo

Marcos nearing the summit of Daugou.

During our descent that took us deep into the night, we were what appeared to be 60 meters from the security of the talus below. However, a relentless fog swirled around us, at times restricting sight to just a few meters. I was aiming for what looked like a ledge, or the ground. With the ends of the rope at the brim of my rappel device, I barely reached the discouraging feature and set a small piece of protection at its crumbling edge. With the tiny nut set, but unweighted, I balanced on the small ledge and released the rope, wincing as it ripped through my device and up into the dark. Upon closer inspection my ledge was in fact a “scab” of rock pasted to the wall with little more than friction keeping it secured. With a firm tug the nut pulled, I held on in silence until I could see the light of Marcos’s head lamp coming down. I calmly asked him to find another anchor, after a few tense minutes he replied “There is nothing. What are you hanging on?” “My fingers” I replied. He rapped down to me and we managed to get a sling around the top of the flake that by the grace of good fortune managed to hold for our final rappel.

We dubbed our route the South Pillar, 700m 5.11+, our ascent was the second recorded ascent of Daugou East and the first to climb to the current highpoint summit pillar.

Summit of Daugou, Siguiniang in the far back. Celestial is the pyramid behind Chibu just above Marcos.

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Vampire Peaks – NWT, Canada

Nyainbo Yuze – Qinghai Province, China

Manali – Himachal Pradesh, India

South Africa

Charakusa Valley - Pakistan

Nyainbo Yuze, Qinghai Province, China

Fighting Till Dawn in Canada's Vampire Peaks

Peak a week in China's Shuangqiao Valley.

Pat Goodman