While most autumn trekking traffic funnels into the Everest region, a young French team was quietly rewriting the map a valley over. Eric Bazon, Pierre Girot, Sophie Jacob and Kilian Moni spent late October in Nepal's Rolwaling Valley, east of the Khumbu, and came away with two new routes and a first ascent — plus a paragliding descent for good measure.
Their original target was out of condition, so they pivoted to a sharp ridge visible from base camp. Bazon, Jacob and Girot spent three days on it, bivouacking along the way, to reach the west summit of ChekiGo (6,128m). The climbing was exposed and technical — razor ridges, mediocre granite, improvised protection — graded TD with 5c rock and M4 mixed sections. The main summit had been climbed before, in 2005, but their line to the west summit was new.
With a solid weather window remaining, the team split up. Bazon and Girot repeated the approach to Chukyima Go (6,259m) via the Naa Valley and climbed a new direct line up the west face. Over two days, October 27-28, they linked 23 pitches of rock cracks, steep ice and mixed ground — 900m of climbing graded ED, with M6 and AI5 sections, including a cold bivy with their feet stuffed in their packs.
Meanwhile, Jacob and Moni made the first ascent of Janjmu, an unclimbed 5,205m spire right in front of base camp. Their 600m north face route, named The Eternal Stars after friends who had recently died, felt, they said, like alpine climbing at home in the Alps — just with the extra burden of altitude. As if that weren't enough, the pair then tagged Yalung Ri as a "recovery" day and flew off the summit by paraglider.
For travellers, Rolwaling remains one of the quieter alternatives to the Khumbu: dramatic 6,000m peaks, trekking-peaks infrastructure without the crowds, and a valley that still produces genuine firsts. Anyone trekking there this season may well be walking beneath routes that didn't exist a month ago.
Story via ExplorersWeb.
