Last weekend, Silvan Schupbach of Switzerland did the third new line on a long-term alpine project he calls the Six Forgotten North Faces.<\/p>\n
He wants to point out that there is more to alpine north faces than the classic routes up such peaks as the Matterhorn, the Eiger, and the Grandes Jorasses. There are difficult and lonely alternatives on slightly lower, less accessible, or lesser-known peaks.<\/p>\n
In February 2025, Schupbach climbed a new route, called The Cuckoo’s Nest, <\/em>on Switzerland’s Nesthorn (3,820m) with Peter Von Kanel and Carlos Molina. One month later, he did the first ascent of the north face of 3,237m Punta Pioda,<\/a> also in the Swiss Alps, with Philippo Sala and Roger Schaeli. The resulting route was called Luce e Tenebre<\/em> (“Light and Shadow”).<\/p>\n For this third stage, he went to the rarely visited north face of 3,870m Aiguille de Triolet in the Mont Blanc massif. Here,\u00a0he chose a variation route<\/a> up the center of the headwall.<\/p>\n His partners were Philippo Sala of Switzerland and Tom Livingstone of the UK, who continued to climb in the Alps rather than attend the recent Piolets d’Or<\/a> ceremony in Italy to receive an award for his 2024 route on Gasherbrum III<\/a>.<\/p>\n The problem with this most recent goal, Schupbach admitted, was finding a forgotten face around the hyper-popular Mont Blanc massif. Triolet seemed like the perfect candidate, but he soon found out that the place was not as deserted as he expected.<\/p>\n