Cory Richards Plans a New Route on Everest and It's Bold and Gnarly

Cory Richards Plans a New Route on Everest and It’s Bold and Gnarly

With the curtain about to rise on the spring Himalayan climbing season, Cory Richards dropped a bombshell, announcing plans to attempt a new route on Everest, in alpine style and without supplemental oxygen.

As you’d expect from the National Geographic photographer who Snapchatted his first Everest summit in 2016, the film is gorgeously shot and slickly produced. But the glimpse it provides of Richards training and preparation leaves no doubt this will be a serious attempt at a captivating line. So does his choice of partner, 31-year-old Ecuadorean phenom Esteban “Topo” Mena.

If successful, theirs will be the first new line on Everest in a decade, and only the second route on the mountain’s northeast face. Richards keeps photographs of that imposing wall under his bed and studies them obsessively. The line he and Mena have targeted rises directly above advanced base camp to the right of the northeast ridge, the standard route on the Tibetan side of the mountain.

“Both Topo and I have climbed Everest without oxygen. Together, we have six summits, and we’ve spent all six of those seasons sitting under that face, watching the conditions of that line,” Richards, 37, said in an interview with media sponsor Roam, which plans a series of videos on the climb. Hundreds of prominent mountaineers have shared the same view but only a handful has attempted to scale the northeast face.

In 1988 Barry Blanchard and Mark Twight gave it a good try in alpine style but turned around when when Blanchard developed symptoms of high-altitude edema. A 12-man team from the city of Krasnoyarsk in Siberia arrived eight years later. Their leader, Nikolai Zakharov, later described the scene in Everest: Eighty Years of Triumph and Tragedy (Mountaineers Press). “The northeast wall came into view and I saw a very beautiful couloir on the right part of the wall. I immediately said to Alexander Kuznetzov: ‘That is our route,’ to which he replied, ‘You are crazy! Find something simpler.’”

Zukharov’s plan prevailed, and using fixed ropes and oxygen the Russians bulled their way up the couloir. Three of them topped out in a blizzard; Zakharov, for whom the route is named, turned around 15 minutes from the summit. More recently, Raphael Slawinski, Daniel Bartsch and David Gottler planned an alpine-style assault on the northeast face, only to be thwarted by the 2015 earthquake and the subsequent climbing ban imposed by Chinese authorities. They were acclimating on nearby peaks and never made it to advanced base camp.

Richards and Mena will target the same route “with potential variations depending on conditions,” Richards said in an interview with Alan Arnette. “The line is a stunning one, and the most natural unclimbed feature on the face,” he said, adding that if snow conditions prove too unstable the buttress that bisects the two prominent couloirs is also an option.

Flexibility will be key to a successful climb. As Slawinsky said, “You kind of draw red lines on the photo and then the realities on the ground dictate exactly where you go.” The lower reaches don’t look to be particularly technical, just snow and ice with slopes of 45 to 60 degrees. The trick is that the hardest climbing comes above 8,000 meters.

“There are several hundred feet of technical mixed climbing—mixed meaning rock, ice and snow—that will be extremely strenuous at 28,000 feet,” Richards said in the reveal film. “That’s hard climbing for that high.”

Altitude may prove to be the wild card. Richards summited Everest without oxygen in 2016 and used gas during his 2017 summit push in order to help his climbing partner Adrian Ballinger, who had turned around during their attempt the previous year. Richards has been following a grueling training program under the tutelage of climbing legend Steve House. The regime includes four or five days in the mountains and two gym sessions each week. To prepare his physiology for the rigors of high-altitude mountaineering, he doesn’t eat during the climbing workouts or for 12 hours before. The masochistic routine is designed to pay dividends high on the mountain, where consuming food is difficult and long days are inevitable.

Early in his climbing career, Richards set three very simple goals: Climb an 8,000-meter peak in winter, climb Everest without oxygen and climb a new route on an 8,000-meter peak. He accomplished the first objective with the historic winter ascent of Gasherbrum II (8,035 meters) with Simone Moro and Denis Urubko in 2011. On the descent all three were swept up in an avalanche. As soon as Richards realized he and the others were alive, he turned his camera on himself, capturing a moment of feral intensity.

The photograph became the cover of National Geographic’s 125th anniversary issue and vaulted Richards, then 29, to prominence as both a climber and photographer. Though the avalanche launched his career, it also planted the seed of post-traumatic stress underlying his medical evacuation from his first Everest attempt in 2012.

Richards has been very public about his struggles with mental health and substance abuse. He was homeless at 14 and spent time in rehab and a psychiatric facility. He hit bottom in 2015, when he got divorced, jettisoned his sponsor and walked away from the creative agency he co-founded, all in the same month. Then he got sober and accomplished his second big goal, Everest without oxygen.

The third objective may be the most ambitious. Despite the crowds of climbers that descend on Everest each spring, only a relative few alpinists have climbed the world’s highest mountain on non-standard routes. The statistics are revealing. Of the 9,108 Everest summits since 1953, all but 265 have come via the southeast ridge, aka the South Col, or the northeast ridge. Arnette points out that while about 4 percent of those who try to climb Everest die in the attempt, 27 percent of climbers who attempt non-standard routes perish.

No wonder new routes are so rare. Alpinists have been coming to Everest since 1921 and have established only about 18 routes to the top. The most recent was the 2009 Korean line linking the southwest face to the west ridge. Another telling statistic: In 2018, a record 802 people reached the summit of Everest. Only one did so without oxygen.

Richards and Mena will attempt the world’s tallest mountain with the trifecta of enhanced difficulty: A new route, without oxygen and in alpine style above advanced base camp. Can they pull it off?

“If we get the weather window, we’ll do it,” Richards said. “No question. I know it.”