You may think you want to be here but you really don’t. I thought the same thing at one point. The first time I saw a picture of this face I became its captive. Alexi Shustrov showed me that photo in Leningrad (that was still its name at the time) in August 1990. The unusual blue glow from a 16mm slide, in all its resolution-poor glory stuck in my head all the way back to Chamonix.

The bureaucratic and mechanical complications weren’t enough to stop us but the cold, the wind and unimaginable objective hazard finally shut us down. Michel Fauquet and I managed to get almost halfway up the face in a single push and at that point — having run the gauntlet of falling ice and escaping narrowly several times — it probably would have been safer to fail upwards than to retreat but it was too cold. Minus 17 degrees fahrenheit in Ace and John’s tent, and they were 5000’ feet below us, sheltered from the wind.

I HAD wanted to be there but in that hours-long moment while we climbed slowly upward without commitment, and later agonized with the decision on a hastily chopped ledge, I would rather have been just about anywhere else.

From below the face didn’t look mind-crushingly steep, and we were confident we could avoid the risk of the lowest icefall by skirting left. The major avalanches all came from the serac on the right, about 3/4ths of the way up the face but we could avoid that too by staying left. And the serac guarding the summit? Well, we were both comfortable rolling the dice with that one. But during our reconnaissance we were too preoccupied by those features to notice the ice gargoyles and seracs perched on the climber’s left of the face. Those were the ones that nearly killed us. At first …