Cholatse West Face climbed by Radoslav Groh, Zdeněk Hák

On November 2-3, 2023 Radoslav Groh and I managed to make the first ascent of the west face of Cholatse (6440m). Originally we came to the Himalayas with slightly different goals. We acclimatised on Cholatse with Radoslav’s girlfriend and three other friends. Unfortunately, one of them, Jan Ros, fell during the ascent of the southwest ridge and died on the spot. After transporting his body to Kathmandu, we spent another four days there.

Jan Ros' family expressed interest in the GoPro camera that he had been wearing during the fall. We still had a week to go before our flight, so we decided to go back to Cholatse. The goal was to try to find the GoPro camera, and also climb any route there that we could dedicate to his memory.

In order to save time, we flew by helicopter to Syanboche on October 31, and from where we continued on foot to Portse. The next day we walked up to base camp and bivouacked about 200 vertical meters above it at 4,900 meters. We chose the middle of the west face for the climb, which we had already scouted from our previous stay at base camp.

We had no idea about any previously climbed routes on the west face. The line was perfectly clear and seemed to us in a good condition. We were only worried about falling seracs at the bottom of the wall and rocks in the middle part. We observed that the seracs at the bottom fell mostly from 4am to 6am and the rocks from the middle wall around 11 am. Hence, we had planned to traverse this section between 7-11 am. In addition, the wall above the lower serac no longer provided the only option for safe bivouac. That is why we decided to spread the climb only into two climbing days. The weather was still perfect, so we decided to start climbing the next morning.

On the morning of November 2, we went below the wall at around 6 am and started climbing at 7:30 am in order to be at the safe ice cave as soon as possible. We got there around 10 am. The first three pitches in the ascent couloir provided WI4, M5 climbing. The rest was easier climbing in firn snow to 50°. We pitched our small tent in a good ice cave.

On November 3 we got up about an hour after midnight and started climbing again around 2 am. The goal was to push up to the summit ridge, which we finally reached after 14 hours of mostly ice climbing. The ice slope ranged between 60 - 90° and we graded this WI4+. We encountered only one pitch of mixed climbing, about halfway up the climb, which we negotiated at M4/M5.

Around 5:00 pm we reached the southwest ridge which led us after half an hour to the summit. Already in the dark we started descending down the southwest ridge to C1 (5600m) on the normal ascent route. The following day we descended from C1 to the spot where we had recovered our friend after his fall ten days earlier. After searching the area closely, we found his GoPro camera. The same day we descended to the village of Portse, and the next day we went to Lukla from where we travelled to Kathmandu on 6 November. The next day we returned to the Czech Republic.

We named the new route Just one solution! (ED, WI4+, M5, 1200m) and dedicated it to the memory of Jan Ros who tragically lost his life on the mountain.

Zdeněk Hák and Radoslav Groh

Editor's note: In October 1988 the mountain's prominent West Rib (in the centre of the face) was climbed by Greg Collins, Andrew Selters and Tom Walter, while the NW Ridge was climbed a few days later by Selters and Walter. See americanalpineclub.org