This is the complete story about Ren Zhong Feng,
written and illustrated for www.rock-ice.com by Kristoffer Szilas and Martin Ploug.
In November 2009 Carsten Cooper-Jensen,
Martin Ploug and I went to Sichuan to attempt an ascent of the unclimbed
mountain Ren Zhong Feng.
Martin and I originally had
other expedition plans, but one evening in the Danish Alpine Club Carsten
came over to us and showed some photos from the Sichuan province in
China taken by the Japanese explorer Tom Nakamura.
Carsten told how
easy the approach was for the many unclimbed peaks in the area and quickly
persuaded us to change our plans. We were first looking at Xiarudoji
but we could not get a climbing permit since it is a sacred mountain
for the locals so we then looked at Ren Zhong Feng.
 Camp #1
Two weeks before we were to
travel from Denmark, I got a surprising e-mail with a link to a Hungarian
expedition blog, which described in detail their ongoing ascent of “our”
mountain!
 Verglas and fog.
Through a Chinese agency we
had purchased an expensive “unclimbed mountain” climbing permit
so initially we were pretty unhappy that we had not been told that this
mountain had also been offered to another expedition.
If the Hungarian
expedition reached the summit, we would have spent a lot of unnecessary
money, but nevertheless we agreed that it would not make any difference
to our ascent of the mountain. Whether one is the first or team number
one thousand takes nothing from the experience, assuming all previous
expeditions have climbed in alpine style and therefore left no traces
on the mountain.
 From camp #1
One week before departure to China, the situation took a new turn when
I received an e-mail from a Hungarian journalist who asked me for some
information and photos about the mountain for an article about the Hungarian
expedition that was reported missing and assumed lost!
I was stunned
and quickly discussed the situation with Carsten and Martin. We agreed
that we would continue no matter what had happened, but we could not
know what the consequences of their disappearance would be for us before
we were in Sichuan.
 Minya Konka
I had previous experience with climbers who had perished on routes shortly
before I started up an ascent. This had happened on both the Eiger and
Denali and I had also experienced losing a climbing partner while climbing
a route in the Mont Blanc massif.
Repressed incidents came to mind and
I went about in the following days contemplating things. In the end,
there was no doubt that we would have to go and try the mountain. No
mountaineer would ever ask other climbers to stop just because they
experienced an accident, but we shouldn’t expect understanding from
non-climbers.
The old question of why we expose ourselves to "unnecessary
risk" would surely pop up among friends and family who heard about
our trip.
No matter how hard you try, you cannot explain to them how
the challenges and experiences that come with mountain hazards actually
make it worth the effort. It is one of the things that can only be understood
by experiencing it for yourself.
We arrived in Chengdu in China and were greeted by our interpreter and
liaison officer. The day was spent purchasing supplies and then we drove
towards the mountains. Two days after we left Denmark we stood in the
base camp at an altitude of 3000 meters.
This was only possible because
a huge dam was under construction at the foot of our mountain, so there
was a very well-developed road system in addition to full mobile telephone
coverage in base camp!
The first few days were spent finding a route up the valley to set up
our first camp. This was, however, hampered by the verglas that covered
everything in a thin layer of ice. This forced us to use crampons from
day one in terrain that we otherwise should have been able to walk through
in trainers. We found a small platform in the moraine at around 3900
meters and set up tents there.
There had been snow and fog since we arrived, but we had seen from Tom
Nakamura’s expedition report that the weather usually cleared by mid-November,
so we were confident that the weather would improve. After a few days
in the first camp, we continued to our second camp located behind a small rock tower at an altitude of 4500 meters.
After a few days of acclimatisation we were ready to cut ourselves free
of the camp and continue towards the top in pure alpine style using
bivouacs. However, a quick count showed that we did not have enough
gas for the rest of the trip, if consumption continued as it had thus
far.
We had based our calculations on how long new gas canisters would
last, but we got refilled gas in China that did not last as long. We
discussed the situation back and forth and finally Carsten said he thought
that Martin and I should continue alone. He had felt that he was walking
much slower than us the whole trip and did not want to hold us back.
There was no point in arguing about the decision, because he was quite
right that our chance of reaching the top would be significantly improved
if we were only two with this amount of gas and we would move faster
up the mountain. It was certainly a hard decision for Carsten, who had
found the project in the first place, but it was the only solution if
we wanted to climb the mountain.
The following day Carsten left camp and went down to base camp, where
the two locals had plenty of supplies, including two huge cylinders
of gas, so at least they did not have to starve down there.
 Sugar snow on day #1
 Kristoffer cleaning rock of sugar snow.
The weather was beginning to improve, so Martin and I started up the
east face the following day.
The first challenge was to cross a steep slope of frozen dirt that we
had to climb with ice axes. Tired and dirty we came over on the other
side and into the colouir we had chosen to lead us further up the east
face.
At the beginning the snow conditions were quite good, but the
higher we got, the worse the conditions were with loose and unconsolidated
snow. We had to dig our way through a thick cover of sugary snow, which
made climbing slow and tiring. We climbed without using a rope to move
faster and climbing was not harder than WI3 in a few sections.
When it began to get dark we scouted for a possible ledge for our small
bivouac tent. Despite one and a half hour of digging, we did not managed
to make room for more than half of the tent in the steep loose snow
slope, so we had to squeeze together. We had climbed 700 meters in altitude
in a day and we could feel the day's hardships.
We chose to rest the
following day, so we were better acclimatised for the upper mountain,
which we suspected had the hardest climbing on the route.
After the rest day, we were well recovered and ready for whatever might
come. The climbing was fairly hard from the day’s first pitch. We
took turns leading mixed terrain on loose rock and we often climbed
on shale that was so rotten that we could use our ice axes directly
in the rock as if it were ice. The only problem with this was that it
was completely impossible protect this type of climbing. At other times,
however, there was sandstone with good cracks to put in protection.
 Climbing during day #1
After another full day of climbing
the darkness crept up on us. We could not see anywhere that was suited
to set up a bivouac and certainly no place that was large enough for
our tent. We ended up half sitting in our sleeping bags with the rope
tied to our anchor on some random ledge at around 5500 meters altitude.
 Bivy #2
 Mixed climbing on the east face.
The next day we climbed the last couloir on the east face and were now
on the very exposed north ridge. The storm that met us on the ridge
was overwhelming, so we had to try to find a sheltered bivouac on the
east side. Luckily we found a good bivouac site after an hours scrambling
along the ridge. There was a small ledge system a few meters below the
ridge on the east side behind an obvious rock tower.
Unfortunately the
ledges were so narrow that there was only space for one person in the
tent, so Martin chose to sit on a small ledge in the wall. We were now
on the ridge at around 5675 meters and had seen the summit ridge. It
looked as if there were no more than 100 meters in height to the summit
and we thought that we could reach the top in a few hours the following
day.
We could not quite make it fit the official height of the mountain
of 6079 meters.
We would have to follow the ridge for a mile to the summit, but cornices
and bulletproof ice on the west face would make the climbing a slow
affair. The first part of the climbing on the ridge consisted of easy
scrambling on rock, but then we would have to traverse steep ice on
the west face, because the top of ridge consisted of loose cornices.
We only had seven ice screws, so we used a running belay and placed
protection for every 20-30 meters and swapped lead when we ran out of
screws. We continued like this until we reached the first of two
steep ice walls that bared the ridge and we had to belay properly on
these. The first ice wall was only about ten meters high, but consisted
of a strange mixture of ice and snow, which made it very challenging
to climb.
Moreover, the wall was irregular and overhanging, so we had
to traverse around the worst obstacles and put plenty of ice screws
in, because it was impossible to know what could be trusted. The second
ice wall that led up to the final summit ridge was also overhanging,
but it consisted of closely packed styrofoam snow that made it easy
to climb.
 Kristoffer Szilas on the ridge.
It was only after these last hurdles that it dawned on us that there
was no longer anything that could stop us. After four days of climbing,
poor bivouacs and constant stress over whether it was even possible
to reach the summit by the route we had chosen, it was a liberating
feeling to know that it is now just a matter of putting one foot in
front of another and then we would be the first people to stand on the
top of this mountain.
First, however, we had to climb a couple of false
summits from which we could see a new and higher peak behind every time,
but eventually we could not go higher. The narrow ridge made it a challenge
to get a summit photo, because the edge consisted of loose cornices
which overhang to the east while the western side consisted of steep
hard ice.
 Bivy #3
 View from bivy #3
We noted that our altimeters read 5820 meters and not 6079 meters, which
was the official height of the mountain. We began the descent just as
the sun was about to go down so we hurried, because the darkness would
soon put an end to our pace. We just managed to down climb the two ice
walls and then had to put on the head torches and big parkas. It had
blown all day, but now the wind picked up and the temperature was dropping
fast.
We had to back climb every rope length of the ridge and the darkness
and storm certainly was not making the front pointing any easier. After
many hours of traversing steep ice fields we were back on easier terrain,
where we could walk along the ridge.
To save time we did not place any
protection, but soon we reached another ice field and had to traverse
it. Martin was just about to place the first ice screw for yet another
monotonous traverse when he suddenly lost his balance in the wind and
slid with full speed down the 1000 meter high west face.
All I saw was
that the beam from his head torch began to accelerate down to my left
in the darkness. Instinctively I rolled off to the right on the opposite
side of the ridge to counter the pull that would inevitably come when
Martin's weight was caught by the rope.
The impact force was not particularly
hard, which might be because of the rope dynamics and in part because
Martin slid over some rocks which slowed him down a bit, but there was
no doubt that I would have been pulled off the mountain together with
Martin had I not acted as a counter weight on the opposite side of the
ridge.
I shouted to Martin that he should make an anchor, so I could down climb
to where he was. Once I was down at his stance I asked how he was feeling
and he ensured me that he was not about to go into shock.
Apart from
a trashed fibre jacket, some large bruises and strained tendons in one
leg he seemed to be okay. We couldn’t find any bivouac site in this
place and did not have enough clothes with us to survive a night in
the open, so we simply had to continue. After a couple of hours of climbing
we were at last back at the previous bivouac site were we had left our
sleeping bags. It was now three o'clock in the morning and after having
melted some snow we fell into a deep sleep on our ledges.
 The ice traverse.  The ice traverse.
Next day Martin's pain was too great to continue, so we took a rest
day which we spent eating drinking and sleeping. The descent would take
us a very long time, because we had only brought a single strand of
70 meter half rope, so we could only rappel 35 meters at a time. Martin
was still feeling bad the following day, so he would descent on the
full length of the rope and then I had to follow with two abseils or
down climb after him when I could. However, this was further complicated
by the fact that Martin had lost his belay device and had to use an
HMS-knot to descend.
This belay method twisted the rope badly, so the
descent was even slower. Additionally he had taken a lot of painkillers,
which did not exactly make him faster. On one of my intermediate anchors,
I ended up in shale which was almost impossible to protect and I eventually
had to settle for a single piton in loose flakes that flexed under my
body weight. I suddenly remembered why I hate to rappel. It is the only
time where you must rely blindly on protection no matter how bad it
may be.
 Hanging out on the west face.
Another memorable rappel was from an Abalakov anchor made in ten centimeter thick
ice that started to crack under load. It was a huge relief when the
last abseil was over and we were on ground that we could down climb.
Our rack was largely used up and we had only four out of our original 15
pieces of protection left even though we had also used almost all of
our slings for rappel anchors despite the fact that we had only placed
one piece for each anchor. We found our tent at camp two long after
sunset and could, for the first time in six days, sleep on a flat surface
and did not have to keep the harnesses on.
The day after Carsten came up to help Martin down to base camp with
his backpack and by the following day we had driven back to Chengdu
from where we got on the first possible plan home.
 The second ice wall under the summit ridge.
 The summit.
 Kristoffer Szilas on the summit.
 Sunrise from bivy #3.  Abseiling.
 The valley.
Text: Kristoffer Szilas Photo: Kristoffer Szilas and Martin Ploug
On Danish television:
About Kristoffer Szilas on www.rock-ice.com:
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