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Se'erdengpu, China, Big/Cold Wall 10-Dec-2015 At 11:16:30 AM tripleshot

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put here because i know Dan never would and you should see what hes up to.

"in November 2015 Dan Da Silva and I attempted the west face of Se’erdengpu with three objectives, in order;
1) to prove a previously overlooked stable weather window after the monsoon
2) to find a usable alpine route to access the walls corner crack system, the highest point to begin the wall
3) to climb the crack system, as free as possible.

as far as big walls go, the west face of se’erdengpu is maybe China-Tibet’s most well known. which doesn’t say much. china-tibet has lots of walls and doubtless many times more as yet undocumented, but being on the fringes of the climbing world theres not much interest in them.

se’erdengpu is just under 5600m, with 2300m vertical gain from the road, over 1100m horizontal. half that gain occurs in 800 horizontal meters, then its nearly 1000m of clean granite wall and a few hundred meters high alpine mixed to the summit.
the peak has never been summited by a direct line up the wall, tho theres been numerous valiant attempts, no less by Polish virtuosos who went for a direct line up the face, and Pat Goodman who went to free the only obvious feature system up the walls shallow corner.
both groups got hosed off in bad weather at the tail end of the Asian monsoon.

on the shoulders of these frontier ascents Dan DaSilva and I pieced together a plan that combined what we considered the most useful elements of the previous efforts with what we had already learned from other FA trips to the region. we took Marcin’s big wall style, Pat’s free idea for the corner and the Kellog-Johnson alpine ethic to strip it all back, and devised a caper that gave us 10 days unsupported to make it happen. our secret weapon that saved it all from being just a suicide mission was our weather predictions. hopefully this would let us hit the wall at the high point of the snow, saving us the time and gear needed of going straight onto the wall. hopefully too it would give us some protection from the exposure if our weather predictions turned out wrong…"

rest of the story with photos here
http://iceclimbingjapan.com/2015/12/03/seerdengpu-big-wall-attempt-problems-solved-problems-found/