BURSTIn July 1999, a seven-member team set out to make the first free ascent of a major line on Ulamertorssuaq in Greenland’s Tasermiut Fjord. The team consisted of American climbers Jeff Bechtel, Steve Bechtel, Mike Lilygren, Peter Mallamo, Bobby Model, Paul Piana, and Todd Skinner. Piana and Skinner were veteran big wall free climbers, in 1988 they made the first free ascent of Salathé Wall in Yosemite, a 35-pitch 5.13b.
The Americans departed Lander, Wyoming, on July 1, driving for two days to Ottawa, Canada, in a Suburban packed with hundreds of pounds of food, gear, and climbers. From Ottawa, they flew to Nuuk, Greenland, and eventually reached the small village of Nanortalik. There, they hired the boat Nanortalik Colo to ferry them deep into the Tasermiut Fjord and deposit them below their objective.
After landing on the shore beneath the wall, the team spent several days shuttling loads to a base camp established on a grassy bench below the face. The original objective was to free climb the route Moby Dick, but after beginning the climb, they quickly abandoned it in favour of a more aesthetic line to the right. Their new objective was the 1,000-metre Geneva Diedre, which was first climbed in 1983 at 5.10 A4 by a Swiss team.
Steve Bechtel and Mike Lilygren shared most of the leading on the lower half of the wall. The climbing followed incipient cracks and flakes, linked by long sections of sustained slab climbing. At approximately 1,800 metres of elevation, the team established a bivouac on a long, narrow ledge they named The Dark Heart.
From there, the route’s crux pitches began. Two sustained pitches, both around 5.12, led from the ledge into a massive right-facing corner. The team followed this corner for several more pitches to a sloping ledge and a second bivouac. Higher on the wall, with Paul Piana and Todd Skinner in the lead, the route traversed right out of the ever-widening corner to reach what the climbers described as the most spectacular crack any of them had ever seen. The Bowstring Crack offered nearly 90 metres of continuous hand and finger jams, ending at a small alcove. Above, the difficulty eased, and the final five pitches followed straight-in cracks to the summit.
The team established fixed anchors on the route and named it War and Poetry (VI 5.12c, 31 pitches, 1,000 metres), allowing for safe and efficient descents for future parties. They also removed hundreds of feet of abandoned static line from the wall and donated it to the boatmen in Nanortalik.
The ascent took just over five weeks in total, much of it spent waiting out rainstorms and hauling equipment across Greenland’s remote terrain. By the end of the expedition, all members of the team agreed that War and Poetry ranked among the finest routes any of them had ever climbed.
The route has seen several repeats since the Americans freed it. Read a story by Jasmin Caton about her ascent, that she made with Kate Rutherford in 2010 here (page 127); and read about a 2016 ascent by Scott Bennett, Bryan Gilmore, and Blake Herrington here.
Below is a film made by British climbers Andrew Cherry and Stefan Morris, who visited after Bennett’s team and made a three-day ascent of War and Poetry. “We attempted to team free the line hauling a small pack with minimal bivy gear,” they said. “While we had to send up the emergency aiders a few times higher on the wall, we free climbed the vast majority of the wall, including most of the harder pitches.”
War and Poetry
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