Americans Make Notable FA of Big Pakistani Peak: ‘Tiger Lily Buttress’ (AI 5+ M6 A0; 2,000m)

They’d put it all on the line. In one sense, Dane Steadman, Cody Winckler, and August Franzen’s attempt on Yashkuk Sar (6,667m/21,870ft) had been over a year in the making. In another, it was the product of a lifetime of busting ass in the alpine. They had spent months planning, securing a Cutting Edge Grant from the American Alpine Club, trucking into Pakistan’s remote Chapursan Valley, and blasting over 1,200 meters up the awe-inspiring north buttress of an unclimbed mountain. Now, they were nested just below the headwall, at the apex of the buttress.

“It was the make or break of the entire route,” said Franzen. “During our recon missions, and when acclimating on Sakar Sar [a neighboring 6,271-meter peak], we’d fixated on the headwall, looking for veins of ice and runnels and trying to piece together these systems.”

From below, they had spied a subtle ribbon of ice—steep enough that it was protected from overhead hazards like seracs and rockfall—extending to the top of the headwall. They thought they’d found their highway. “It would be steep, hard climbing, but we were pretty damn certain this was the way,” Franzen said.

So they set up their bivy to the right of this system, cooked some dinner, crawled into their three-man sleeping bag, and settled in for the night, prepping to wake up early and “climb right up the gut of this runnel,” Franzen said.

That’s when all hell broke loose.

Jammed in their tent, the men heard what sounded like the wall collapsing. “Cody and I peeked out, and the entire headwall was in a haze of falling snow,” Franzen said. They’d watched small slides and pockets of snow and ice collapsing around them the entire climb, but now their chosen “safe” line was being obliterated by the largest avalanche they’d seen on the wall thus far.

In a way, the men were lucky. If they’d been on the wall a day earlier, they’d likely have been blown off the face like leaves. In another sense, they were hosed. Their “safe” line was clearly nothing of the sort.

“There was nothing to do,” Franzen said. “We just sat in silence, experiencing this sinking feeling of knowing we shouldn’t be here. All our planning, our scouting—we put so much faith and certainty into this line, and all of it just blew up as this avalanche tore down our intended route.”

Up till this point, things had gone pretty smooth, at least as far as technical routes on unclimbed 6,000-meter mountains go. “There were no fist fights,” Franzen joked. Franzen and Winckler were longtime friends and had climbed together for years. He and Steadman, on the other hand, had never so much as climbed a pitch of rock together, but had been nudged towards each other by mutual friend and mentor Kelly Cordes. (“Yashkuk Sar was a pretty long blind date.”)

The group settled on the peak as an objective last year, after scrolling through Google Earth—Steadman’s idea. “We had this desire to find an unclimbed peak in the Karakoram at that sweet spot of 6,000-7,000 meters,” explained Franzen, “where it’s still high altitude climbing, but we could also climb hard technical pitches and be able to focus on the climbing, without having to worry so much about the altitude.”

Yashkuk Sar checked all these boxes. It had been attempted twice previously, first by a Russian team in the early 2000s, then by a Japanese team in the early 2010s, but neither expedition made it far. After raising $20,000 from Patagonia, the American Alpine Club, La Sportiva, and Beartooth Alpine, they headed to Pakistan’s Hunza for a two-month trip. They flew into Islamabad, and then Skardu, and drove northwest along the Silk Road, tracking the Indus River towards the Chapursan Valley. This remote fastness, within spitting distance of Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and China’s far-western Kashgar Prefecture, had been closed to foreign teams for nearly 15 years.

Their porters, Franzen said, still remembered past failures on Yashkuk Sar, and were skeptical that the Americans would get far. The team’s camp cook, who spoke just a little English, even dubbed them the “Pussy Boys.”

“It seemed like they were all thinking, ‘Oh, another team going for Yashkuk Sar… They’ll be back to carry their shit out in a week or so when they get shut down,’” Franzen said.

Undeterred, they spent days scouting their objective, later making the second ascent of Sakar Sar, just to the north, to acclimatize and ogle their planned line.

After waiting for a prime weather window, they set off in an alpine-style push. They first climbed a large snow and ice gully, which split two huge rock faces, then began an angled traverse on mixed terrain to a sprawling snowfield below a series of ice runnels. Amid the runnels, they took a snowy slab out left to an ice arete, and set up their first bivy, roughly 1,000 meters up the spur. The next day, they picked up 400 meters of moderate ice to a ridge, where they bivied on a compressed cornice.

That’s where they were when their “safe” route up the headwall was blasted by an avalanche.

Franzen, Steadman, and Winckler scrambled to find an alternative, even considering retreat until Steadman saw a series of mixed bands to the left of their intended route, topped by a “crazy mushroom field, like a Cerro Torre simulator.” So the following day, they rappelled off the spine and “vision quested” across the headwall, going partway up their sketchy intended runnel, where “slough and rock was still clattering down as we climbed” and then escaping onto the far left of the headwall.

They made a “ridiculous” third bivy on another narrow cornice, with both sides of the tent sticking out over the abyss. “We had to fill and line the sides of the tent with clothes and bags and boots and clip everything in to keep it weighted so that the tent wouldn’t sag and tip off one side or another,” said Franzen. “It was the wildest sleepover I’ve ever had.”

On the fourth day, they encountered tenuous, steep, heavily corniced snow that Winckler led with a mixture of “levitation and burrowing,” and the hardest technical climbing (M6) of the route. From there, the angles slackened and they entered the sprawling maze of snow mushrooms they’d seen from below. It was non-technical, but slow-going, a bonafide slog. After Steadman led an isolated hard pitch at AI 5+, the team cruised a few pitches of mellow ice up to semi-flat ground.

They weren’t at the summit yet, but they were above the headwall. They ended up bivying just a few hundred feet below the summit, in a “total wind funnel.” (They cracked the door of their tent for ventilation, and woke up in the middle of the night completely buried in snow.)

The following morning, they took day packs and rambled up to the top, a hike Franzen said he’ll never forget. “It was surreal,” he recalled. “It felt like a lucid dream.” In the distance, they could see Nanga Parbat in the Himalaya, and Rakhaposhi in the Karakorum. To the north were the mighty Pamir Mountains. On their other side was Afghanistan and the Hindu Kush. “It was this crazy confluence, four different countries, four of the great mountain ranges, all accumulating in one valley,” said Franzen.

Loath to descend via their chaotic line of ascent, they made 10 rappels down a prominent western couloir, then climbed up the west ridge and then went straight back down the westernmost edge of the north face to their camp, reaching the glacier around 4:00 p.m.

The men dubbed their effort Tiger Lily Buttress (AI 5+ M6 A0; 2,000m), not after the eponymous Peter Pan princess, but as an ode to the legendary Moonflower Buttress on Alaska’s Mount Hunter (14,573ft), which had served as a proving ground for all three at various points over the years. (But the name had a double meaning: Upon returning to their base camp successful, the team’s cook removed his “Pussy Boys” moniker and rechristened them the “Tiger Boys.”)

Franzen said the experience was a resounding pushback against the narrative that Earth’s mountains have tracks all over them, and to find a “first,” alpinists have to perform some contrived variation. “There are countless peaks out there that are unclimbed,” Franzen said. “I mean, we were looking at them from the summit. Unclimbed peaks, unclimbed faces, features, and it’s all so tangible. All it takes is careful planning, flexibility, creativity, and patience.”

Brimming with success, Franzen, Steadman, and Winckler returned to civilization only to be hit by the sobering news that fellow American Mike Garndner had perished trying a new route on Nepal’s Jannu East (7,467m). The tang of loss had already rimmed their own trip—Franzen spread his late-girlfriend’s ashes on Yashkuk Sar’s summit—and now a compatriot had been killed on a remarkably similar objective: a hard technical route at high elevation.

“It definitely took away the buzz,” Franzen said. The news was particularly shocking because of Gardner’s prowess. “Unfortunately, it seems as though every year [death] happens,” Franzen said. “I don’t want to say we or I are accustomed to it, but it is part of the game. Still, it was jarring that it was Mike. He’s one of the best—maybe the best—American alpinist right now, him and Sam [Hennessey]. If it was going to happen, it wasn’t going to happen to them.”

Flexibility, creativity, and patience were certainly crucial in the journey up Tiger Lily, but Gardner’s death also made the men reconsider the role luck had played, in not just their success, but survival. “Being at that bivy and deciding to climb a day later, not being in that gully when the avalanche ripped, any number of things could have changed the outcome for us, ” said Franzen. “It’s sobering.”

If there was another lesson Franzen and his companions learned on Yashkuk Sar, it was to axe their vainglory before tying in. Abandoning their original ascent line by rappelling off the cornice after their second bivy didn’t just mean going into untracked territory, it also meant that the men lost the chance to claim a “free” ascent, netting a A0 rating on their grade.

“I’m not too proud to say we rappelled,” Franzen said, “but getting down, climbing through this runnel, and getting out of the hangfire was more important than doing a contrived traverse just to claim the free grade. We weren’t going to piss away all this time for numbers or credentials. There is no room for ego up there.”

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