Ueli Steck, the climb up Shisha Pangma

Precise information about Ueli Steck's fast ascent of the 14th highest mountain in the world is hard to come by, but we now have confirmation from his press office that the Swissman combined a number of existing routes in his 10.5 hour ascent to the 8027m high summit of Shisha Pangma. Steck combined the original route up the SW Face - the British route established in alpine style by none other than Doug Scott, together with Alex Macintyre and Roger Baxter-Jones - with a section of Krzysztof Wielicki's extraordinary 1993 solo and the 1995 Spanish route.

Adventure documentarist Rob Frost witnessed Steck's ascent and wrote on the Himalayspeed blog that Steck geared up 5 hours after reaching ABC and then "left the tent door at 10:30 that night, headlamp fading into the darkness. When I awoke the following morning I tried to find him on the south face through the telefoto lens but had no luck. It was like finding a needle in a haystack- a dot in the abyss of a 2,000 meter Himalayan wall. Eventually I spotted him way off to the right of the British route as he was traversing into a hidden gully just below the summit ridge. We caught some of his descent several hours later, and then he strolled into ABC after his sub 20 hour speed ascent of 8027 meter Shisha Pangma."