Page 22 - 2013 AMA Spring

Red Snows By Duncan Francis MIA
An account of exploration in Sichuan, China and the first ascent of Wupingfen (5640m)
£100 ARTICLE
One of the advantages of living in China is that it gives you access to a lot of unclimbed, indeed unattempted, peaks. Which is how I found myself halfway up an unclimbed moun-
tain in Sichuan. Unfortunately, the AMA hadn’t been interested, so I was with three guys from RAFMA, but then you can’t have eve- rything. A very helpful Japanese photographer called Nakamura logged all the virgin peaks in China, and one of them, Baihaizishan (5924m) in a range near Kangding had sounded good, so we had come to try and climb it. The highest summit, Lamoshe (6070m), and one other peak had been climbed, while Baihaizishan itself had had one attempt by the late Yan Dongdong in 2010 (turned back by avalanches), but the rest of the range was completely unex- plored. And not just by foreigners; as we found once we arrived,
Simon high on the nW ridge of Baihaizishan. Unexplored ridge climbing at its very best
the Big Buddha near chengdu. It’s reALLY BIG!
even the local yak herders themselves had not ventured beyond the highest alps.
These things are never that easy, so we hired a local fixer called Lenny, and he smoothed the way and hired a Tibetan cook called Banjiu. The six of us, plus a pile of gear needed twelve horses to get up to basecamp (3900m), but the camp was comfortable, the weather was great, the yaks were numerous, the juniper plentiful and the mountains were pristine, so all seemed well with the world.
Our original plan was to go straight up the inviting and challeng- ing West face. But arrival at basecamp provided a reality check. The face was beset by hanging glaciers, hidden from below, which blocked almost all access to the upper slopes. And the thing about Sichuan in winter is that it is not only extremely cold, but also very dry. No snow had fallen since September, so there was ice, but little else. And what snow there was, was in shockingly bad condition. Indeed, it was just aerated sugar, peeling off the slabs of shattered granite with great whoompfs. So that was that plan stoofered. Time for Plan B.
We turned instead to the NW ridge, a spiky crest of rock rising up towards a subsidiary snow summit well to the NW of the main summit. It looked easy; up the rocks, traverse across the upper snowfield onto the summit ridge, and Bob’s your uncle. So we acclimatized with a bit of exploration, set up ABC in a small col at 4400m, shifted up some loads, packed up enough for a three day trip, and set off up the unknown, unclimbed ridge. The yak herders assured us that no-one had ever been up there. Why would they?
The ridge was amazing; scrambling and climbing like Skye in Win- ter [well, without the rain obviously], but all at over 4000m, with
20 ARMY MOUNTAINEER