Outrunning Chaos on the First Ascent of Gasherbrum III’s West Ridge

For Slovenian Aleš Česen and Brit Tom Livingstone, the West Ridge of Gasherbrum III (26,090ft) demanded the full package: sustained, technical climbing at extreme elevation with a high level of commitment. “Anything happens at that altitude, and you’re in a deep shit,” Česen told Climbing.

Just 150 feet shy of the coveted 8,000-meter mark, Gasherbrum III is a stone’s throw from the heavily commercialized 8,000ers Gasherbrum I, II, and Broad Peak, but it sees almost no visitors by comparison. It was the highest unclimbed peak in the world when first summited in 1975 by a co-ed Polish team of Alison Chadwick-Onyszkiewicz, Janusz Onyszkiewicz, Wanda Rutkiewicz, and Krzysztof Zdzitowiecki. (It remains the highest peak on which women have participated in a first ascent.) In the 50 years since, Gasherbrum III has only seen one other summit, by a team of Spaniards in 2004. Both ascents were via the peak’s southeast face.

Česen, 42, and Livingstone, 33, are perhaps best known for their Piolet d’Or-winning second ascent of Latok I (23,442ft) with Luka Stražar in 2018. The trio powered through three-quarters of the peak’s infamous North Ridge, then traversed west to the col between Latok I and II, and summited via the peak’s southern slopes.

At the time, Livingstone wrote that, while he appreciated the gesture, he didn’t believe awards had a place in alpinism. “To award a trophy is to signify that something is the best, implying others are not as worthy. Alpine climbing is a subjective activity; it’s artistic, serious, and there are no winners or losers.” Livingstone called his adventure on Latok I “unexplainable, unquantifiable,” and also noted, “I do not appreciate how the [Piolet d’Or] makes me feel. It plays on my human ego. I already have a devil on my shoulder at the end of a run-out who whispers, ‘Uh oh, you’re gonna take a big one!’ I don’t want another offering me a golden trophy.”

This same penchant for the ephemeral and immeasurable, the sort of objective that doesn’t lend itself to a podium, seems to have driven Livingstone and Česen’s mission on Gasherbrum III. It is not an unclimbed peak, and it misses the flashy 8,000-meter mantle, albeit narrowly. The duo first attempted the mountain in 2022, making their push via the west ridge, which had previously been scaled to 25,250 feet by a Scottish team in 1985.

[Ed Note: The Scots called it the southwest ridge in their reports, but on modern maps it’s clearly a west-pointing prominence, so Livingstone and Česen referred to it as the west ridge.]

Livingstone said the objective appealed to them because of its technical, committing nature, but also because of the relative safety of a ridge (minimal seracs or avalanche and rockfall risk) and the relatively smooth descent option offered by the standard route on neighboring Gasherbrum II. “We wanted it to be kind of psycho,” he said, “but not too psycho.”

During their 2022 attempt, 60 mile per hour winds that would’ve seen the men “blown into China” forced them off the ridge and onto the north face, where they were ultimately stymied by a 300-foot rock tower just below the summit. The ponderous, technical aid climbing that the tower would require, in combination with the elevation and high winds, forced a retreat. “We’re under-gunned for this; we’d take all day and freeze,” Livingstone later wrote. But they vowed to return.

The 3,300-foot west ridge, which they’re now calling Edge of Entropy, is an undulating granite prominence, demanding everything from tenuous slab climbing to knife-edge traverses and delicate stemming sequences. A good portion of the rock was clean and dry, but the slabs on the second half the ridge were sketchy, requiring delicate precision. “These slabs were layered with unconsolidated powdered snow,” Livingstone said. “Your crampons and axes would slip, and you’d skid down a few inches with each move, like a cat on claws, sliding down a pane of glass.” There were also sections of deep, collapsing snow that the climbers had to wade through, sometimes taking as much as 30 minutes just to move 150 feet. “It was sometimes quite depressing,” Česen said.

Livingstone and Česen said it was hard to apply an accurate grade to the climbing due to the altitude, which turns climbing that would be easy at sea level into a desperate endeavor. “M6 is a good guess [for the hardest pitches], but it doesn’t tell you much,” Česen said. “It’s not representative of what it’s like up there.” Both men noted that although the difficulty was similar to their mission on Latok I, that mountain was lower. “When you get close to 8,000 meters, it’s incomparable,” said Česen.

The duo brought a light kit, with protection consisting of a single 60-meter 7.7mm rope, Beal Escaper, single set of cams, half set of nuts, and a few pitons. Sometimes this pro was of little use, like on one of the hardest pitches, at 25,900 feet, just below the summit. “It had no gear, about 70 feet of difficult climbing, traversing away from the belay,” Livingstone remarked. “You just had to switch off your brain and do it.”

The biggest obstacle of the climb was no single pitch of rock or delicate sequence, though, but simply having to climb hard for several days with the effects of altitude. The men moved like automatons, and as they battled higher and higher up the ridge, their mental function decreased dramatically. “I remember chopping snow for a bivy ledge and not knowing if I’d been doing it for five minutes or five hours,” Livingstone said. “If someone asked you what’s five times five, you would struggle.” He recalled an apt analogy made by a friend: “It’s like climbing 5.12 with a plastic bag on your head.”

“You’re out of energy very quickly,” Česen added. He paused and corrected himself. “Actually, you’re not out of energy quickly, you’re just out of energy all the time.”

The pair’s third and final bivy was particularly heinous. They chopped a snow ledge near 25,600 feet, bundled inside their tent, and then half of the ledge collapsed, leaving the tent hanging over the abyss. With no room for the tent, they took it down, slipped into their double sleeping bag and spent the night sitting on the remains of their snow ledge, snowfall piling around them. “Our teeth were chattering like in the cartoons,” Livingstone said.

It took the pair the better part of three days to make the summit. Once on top, they began their descent on the southeast face route on Gasherbrum III, then traversed to the standard route on Gasherbrum II, using the fixed lines established by commercial parties to aid the descent. This was a decision both men had mixed feelings about. “From a stylistic perspective, it’s not perfect. It’d be nice to descend under our own steam,” Livingstone said. “In a sense, we would’ve preferred not to have these fixed ropes on the mountain, but it’d be bizarre not to use them, since they were there anyway.”

On Instagram, Livingstone remarked that Gasherbrum III had him thinking of alpinism as, “a beautiful trap of what you want and what you need.” He elaborated for Climbing, explaining that even when you spend years striving for an objective like Gasherbrum III—training day in and day out, traveling across the world, spending thousands of dollars and months away from home—the process itself is still often supremely unenjoyable. “You’re up there thinking, ‘Fuck, this is miserable. Why am I here?’” he said. “But you keep going. It’s funny how much of alpine climbing is discomfort and uncertainty and fear, but we still go.”

Initially, the pair weren’t going to name their line, simply calling it the West Ridge in traditional fashion, but they later changed their mind, and began looking for a name to add some “color” to the route. Edge of Entropy came about after Česen, who holds a Ph.D. in physics, explained the concept of entropy to Livingstone. Per the Oxford English Dictionary, the term describes “a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system’s thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system.” In short, a measure of chaos.

Česen said this name came to mind partly for literal reasons (because most of the climb was on the edge of a ridge) but also philosophical ones. “Both our minds were growing more and more chaotic as we climbed,” Česen said, “and so was the quality of rock, the routefinding, everything.” The men were operating on the edge of the “death zone” (8,000m), the altitude above which oxygen pressure cannot sustain human life. The clock was ticking.

“In physics, entropy is a measurement that can only rise,” Česen explained. “It will never decrease… at least until the summit.”

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