(Back to: Kyrgyzstan, Pamir Alai – Karavshin)
Asan (4,230m), northwest face, Timofeev Route, first free ascent.
Nina Caprez, Switzerland, with additional material from Robert Steiner, Germany
The northwest face of Asan showing the Timofeev route. visualimpact.ch | Rainer Eder
In August, as part of a Mammut Team Trip, I joined Austrian David Lama and Swiss Giovanni Quirici and Stephan Siegrist, and with photographer Rainer Eder, filmmaker Christoph Frutiger, and expedition organizer Robert Steiner (Germany) made a trip to the Karavshin. We began our adventure in Moscow, boarding the train to Bishkek. It was a four-day, 3,700km journey with time for reading, playing cards, and enjoying the beautiful Russian, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz landscapes. Our trip was inspired by the travels of Lorenz Saladin, who visited this part of Central Asia over 70 years ago. Saladin (1896-1936) was an early pioneer of Swiss alpinism. During the 1930s he made first ascents in the Caucasus and Pamir with elite Soviet mountaineers, and was a noted photographer. In 1936 he joined the famous Vitaly Abalakov to make the third ascent of Khan Tengri. The climbers were caught in a vicious storm during the descent and sustained severe frostbite. Saladin was evacuated from the base of the mountain by horse but died during the journey, most likely from gangrene. Later Abalakov underwent amputations. Saladin’s biography, written in 1938 by Annemarie Schwarzenbach, was recently republished with additional material from Robert Steiner.
Stefan Siegrist on pitch 4 (7b+) of the Timofeev Route. The rock wall behind and in shadow is a subsidiary buttress below Usan (4,378m). To its right, in the far distance, is Pik Piramidalny (5,509m), while below is the moraine-covered Kara-su Glacier. visualimpact.ch | Rainer Eder
After flying to Batkin and continuing by road, we trekked three days to reach base camp in the Kara-su, where we found other expeditions, mostly Russian and Ukrainian. We wanted to open a new free route on the 900m northwest face of Asan and spotted a potential line in the middle of the wall. However, after two pitches we retreated. As one of the Russians later explained, all possible routes on this wall have been climbed; away from existing lines the rock is shit. But the man gave us good advice on possibilities for free-climbing established routes, so we changed our objective to the Timofeev Route. [Editor’s note: It was first climbed during the 1988 Soviet Championships, as primarily an aid climb, and given the hardest Russian grade of 6B. Later it became relatively popular and was downgraded to 6A. Some of the aid was eventually eliminated to give technical difficulties of F7a and A3 on sound rock.]
Nina Caprez belayed by Giovanni Quirici on the first part of the big corner in the lower section of the Timofeev Route. visualimpact.ch | Rainer Eder
After two-three intro pitches, the next four pitches, on steep slabs, were hard, and had originally been climbed with Bathooks. Old Soviet 5mm bolts were in place. As there were no real cracks, we added new ones, side by side. With one exception there was no additional drilling on previously unbolted ground (bolts were added at belays and the route equipped for a rappel descent, but the standard of aid climbing will not have changed). This section proved to be the crux. Above, we continued up a fantastic series of cracks, fixing a total of 10 pitches before making our final attempt.
At base camp the alarm sounded at 1 a.m. We made the one-and-a-half-hour approach to the foot of the route, jumared 500m, and at 6 a.m., first light, we set off on the remaining pitches. Our idea was to redpoint every pitch, and this proved not to be so difficult, as the maximum grade was 7b, and the cracks and protection were super-solid. Lama, Quirici, Siegrist, and I reached the summit at 2 p.m. It looked a long way down to base camp, but by 9 p.m. we had rappeled the face and sat at the table in base camp in front of a great meal.
Nina Caprez, belayed by Giovanni Quirici, close to the top of the corner in the lower section of the Timofeev Route. visualimpact.ch | Rainer Eder
Lama now had to leave. At that stage we had managed to redpoint only two of the first four pitches, so when the remaining climbers went back for a photo shoot, we redpointed the other two. Although we had freed the entire route, at 7b+ (7b obl), we didn’t redpoint all 17 pitches in a continuous one-day ascent. We had the opportunity to try, but to be honest, we’d spent so much time on the wall that we wanted to climb elsewhere. In particular we wanted to do the famous Perestroika Crack on the Russian Tower (Pik Slesov) before leaving.
We walked east to the Ak-su valley, where a large group of climbers from Geneva was based. Leading through on the Perestroika Crack, Giovanni and I on-sighted every pitch. Stephan teamed with one of the Geneva climbers, Sébastien Pochon, as David had returned home, led the entire route, and on-sighted every pitch: the first one-day on-sight. We reached the summit in about eight hours, an effort that left me destroyed. There is still much potential in this region for aspiring free climbers, due to the climber-friendly granite—a climber’s Eldorado as Saladin once described it.
[Editor's note: The single crack splitting the west face of the Russian Tower is one of the world's classic big-wall free routes. Put up in 1991 by four Frenchmen at 7a and A2, with much of the climbing at around 6c, it can be climbed in anything from 18 to 24 pitches. Two years later it was climbed by Francois Pallandre, with only one pitch of aid, at 7a/7b. In 1995, in a single push of 28 hours, Greg Child and Lynn Hill freed it at 7b. The first on-sight was likely made in 2006 by Adam and Pawel Pustelnik, with Slawek Syndecki, though in a much longer time than the Swiss.]
3lg100131
