Nameless Trango Tower, Eternal Flame Route. Our expedition was

Nameless Trango Tower, E ternal F lam e Route. O ur expedition was com ­ posed o f M ilan Sykora, C hristoph Stiegler, W olfgang G üllich and m e. O ur goal was to establish a new route on the south face o f the N am eless Tower in free-clim bing or Rotpunkt (red point) style. G ü llich and I had already done the first free ascent o f the N am eless Tower in 1988 via the Y ugoslavian route. At that tim e, we discovered a great line, a crack system to the left o f the Y ugosla­ vian route. We arrived at Base C am p on A ugust 16. B ecause o f bad w eather, it took us more than three weeks to set up a cam p on the shoulder o f the N am eless Tower at 5400 m eters, with equipm ent and ten days o f food. In the follow ing two w eeks, we were able to com plete the new route. It has 35 pitches o f difficult clim bing: 11 pitches o f 5.11 and two o f 5.12. The excellent cracks rem inded me o f Yosemite and the rock quality o f Joshua Tree. We fixed several pitches before a couple of days o f rest in Base Cam p. A fter our return to the shoulder, the next day we clim bed several m ore o f the finest pitches o f my life before G ü llich fell and severely sprained his ankle. He was helped back to the shoulder cam p, w here ice packs and aspirin kept the pain som ew hat in control. The follow ing day, Stiegler and I clim bed past our high point until we had ascended som e 500 very difficult m eters when the w eather turned threatening. We rappelled back to the shoulder. The day after, Septem ber 18, Stiegler and I j üm ared back up but traversed som e 40 m eters to the right to jo in the Y ugoslavian route, w hich we follow ed some 300 vertical m eters to the sum m it. W ith the help o f aspirin and plastic boots, G ü llich accom panied me the next day. We pushed the route further past the crux o f the w hole route before being driven dow n by an icy w ind. Septem ber 20 was for me the sixth day w ithout a rest. We clim bed back up and

past our previous high point, despite a slip which took the skin off my right hand. Finally we com pleted this direct finish to the sum m it (6251 m eters, 20,510 feet). We nam ed our route “Eternal F lam e.” The inspiration for this was the flam e­ shaped rock tow er and a song o f a four-girl English rock group, the B angles. The song accom panied us on the w hole trip and the lyrics o f the song gave us the nam es of every pitch. This is the hardest rock route (5.12c) yet done in the H im alaya or the K arakoram . K urt A lbert,

D eutscher A lpenverein