Forty years ago, on May 11, 1986, Jean-Louis Étienne reached the geographic North Pole alone, after 63 days of walking and more than a thousand kilometers across the pack ice. Hauling his sled, pushing forward no matter what, through pressure ridges shaped by the wind, extreme cold — minus 52 degrees Celsius! — and the drift of the frozen Arctic Ocean. And then, at the end of this “inner pole” —...

It’s not a scoop,  but it jumped out at me during this immersion in a place that has nothing to offer but its ice. No trails, no view that carries, no wall that climbs. No game, no crystals. Not a moped, not a bistro. Nothing but ice. And avalanches over it when the conditions are not suitable, 99% of the time.  Nothing slams, nothing shines. It’s a modest ice but one that must be...

Could it be a lonely cowboy lost in his scotch behind the bar of a Chamonix saloon? Or perhaps an adrenaline junkie having a bad trip? A high-level athlete in the middle of a descent? From Mont Blanc, of course. For a few more seconds. Too many. Or could it be the relentless gaze of the mountaineer, and more recently ridge climber, on the Matterhorn, the Eiger, and the Grandes Jorasses? Read...

Everest has fallen. It was literally taken over by four soldiers dressed in black, in their attempt at speed ascent: Garth Miller, Alastair Carns, Anthony Stazicker, and Kev Godlington. In the race for Everest and novelty, Lukas Furtenbach has set the bar very high. A few weeks ago, we told you how the Austrian guide planned to take four clients to the summit of Everest (8848 m) in seven days,...

It’s a sensitive subject. For the victims above all: mourning a death in an avalanche is simply unbearable. The death of a 14-year-old teenager in Les Arcs on 25 December, that of Swiss snowboarder Sophie Rédiger two days earlier, and the more recent death of an off-piste skier at La Norma, all made headlines in the general press. It’s as if the contrast with the almost obligatory...

Among the host of Everest ascents and a list of increasingly various records, there remains one never-before-done climb that really deserves attention. It meets four criteria that can only be described as ultimate: solo, in winter, without supplementary oxygen and by a route other than the normal one. Although climbs have already been made in each of these categories, the combination of the four...