Raphael Slawinski

This past summer, Alik Berg and I went to Pakistan to have a mountain adventure. Below is a brief report from our expedition. For a more impressionistic account, check out this  Bird Blog . For a photo essay, check out this Flickr album . *** In the summer of 2018 Alik Berg and I traveled to Pakistan to climb in the Karakoram. As often happens, neither the final team nor the final objective ended up being what they had been originally. To begin with, there were four of us intent on exploring the largely untouched peaks of the Kondus valley. Over the winter, however, Chris Brazeau and Ian Welsted pulled out. Then, just a couple of months before our departure, military authorities refused the permit application for our primary objective, the unclimbed K13 (6666 m). We scrambled to find another goal, and settled on the unclimbed Pumari Chhish East (ca. 6900 m). I was familiar with the peak, having attempted it unsuccessfully in 2009 , and knew to be a difficult and inspiring...

Ducking my head, I stepped from the plane onto the jetway, and from the cool air inside the cabin into the oppressive heat of an Islamabad evening. After more than thirty hours of contorting ourselves into cramped airplane seats, and lounging at airports from Vancouver to Beijing, Alik and I had finally arrived in Pakistan. Down at the baggage carrousel, one big duffel appeared, then another and another... I held my breath as the conveyor belt grew empty with one of our bags still missing, but then a bulging blue duffel emerged. I exhaled in relief.  Outside, dazed from jetlag and sleep deprivation, we stood by as a cabbie secured a small mountain of expedition duffels to the roof rack of a Corolla. The thin string he used didn’t seem adequate for the purpose; I hoped gravity would help to keep the heavy bags in place. As we drove into the city, lightning flashed and sheets of rain came down, forcing commuters on their small motorbikes to seek shelter under overpasses. “You...

The first time I tried a really big mountain was in 2006. In the summer of that year Ben Firth, Eamonn Walsh, Ian Welsted and I traveled to Pakistan to attempt the then-unclimbed Kunyang Chhish East (ca. 7400 m). We felt strong and fit. In the weeks before our departure I went on an alpine climbing binge on Mt. Andromeda. It culminated with the first ascent, together with Scott Semple, of DTCB, an unlikely line left of the Andromeda Strain. Onsighting virgin Rockies’ choss, I felt on top of my game. As we made our way to Kunyang by plane, jeep and foot, I was optimistic about our chances. The 2500-metre tall southwest face of Kunyanf Chhish East, Pakistan. It was not to be: our highest attempt ground to a halt nearly a vertical kilometre below the virgin summit. It happens; after all, success on an expedition to Pakistan is never a given. But it wasn’t overhanging rock or thin ice that stopped us. In fact, our climbing skills were never put to a real test. No, what made us t...

The last time I wrote a post for this blog, I was on a 13-hour flight from Vancouver to Guangzhou, the second of the three flights taking me from Calgary to Kathmandu. A great deal happened since then, most of it unexpected. Was the Nepal earthquake a black swan event ? Or was it merely an instance of Russell's turkey ? I suppose it's a matter of perspective. I wrote about my experiences on the north side of Everest on my sponsors' blogs. For raw impressions of our expedition as it first unfolded and then folded, check out the blogs of Arc'teryx (instalments 1 , 2 , 3 and 4 ), Black Diamond (instalments 1 and 2 ) and Scarpa (instalments 1 , 2 , 3 and 4 ). I didn't feel I had much to add to what I wrote there, so rather than repeat myself I thought I would relive the trip through images. I didn't find the experience I was looking for in Tibet, but I lived through the one nature dished out. I am one of the lucky ones: I still have a future to dream about. ...

The night sky to the north, over the Bering Straight, was the surreal blue of another planet – perhaps the methane-rich atmosphere of Neptune, with all the red sucked out of the light. I was halfway through a fourteen-hour flight, itself only the second of three. Step by step, they were transporting me from the familiar surroundings of Calgary to the alien chaos of Kathmandu. It’s on the plane that a big adventure first becomes alarmingly real. For months we dream, plan, train and organize. Then one morning we wake up, make one last espresso, load bulging duffels bugs into the car trunk and head for the airport. The future becomes the present. What was still in the future, but a very near one now, was my first experience of the highest mountain on the planet. Everest? Really? How is it that after saying for years that I was too much of a climber to have any interest in that massive, graceless peak, I was headed there? What had changed? Photo: Gunther Goberl. Everything is ch...

1995 Humble Horse on the north face of Diadem Peak was my first “hard” alpine route. Or at least it was the first route I’d ever done where you couldn’t sit down anywhere. Stopping for a drink and a bite meant kicking out a foot ledge in the ice, hanging the pack from a screw, and carefully fishing out bottle and sandwich. Anything you dropped, be it a piece of ice or a snack, would end up in the ‘schrund hundreds of metres below. Still, given all the gear I dragged up and over the route, it couldn’t have been that hard. Empty, my pack weighed nearly three kilos. A board-stiff Gore-Tex suit, plastic boots, Footfangs, a Canadian Tire sleeping bag, a bulbous Peak 1 stove: today I wouldn’t like to hike with that kind of weight, much less climb vertical pitches with it. Luckily twenty years ago I didn’t know any better. Cody Wollen on the first roped pitch of Humble Horse. 1998 The night before the climb we slept comfortably, if briefly, in Jim Sevigny’s Eurovan. We were...