Adapted from the 2022 trip report by Tess Smith.
Alan Goldbetter and I first attempted Starikatchan (5904m), an unclimbed peak in India’s Zanskar Range, in August 2019. That year, based in the village of Tungri, we approached the peak from the northeast, up an unnamed valley climbers-right of an old monastery, and made our basecamp at 4760m.
We ascended the glacier to reach the toe of the peak’s east buttress. Four quality pitches of 5.6 brought us to the east ridge, where the rock quality deteriorated. After a couple of hundred meters on the ridge, we decided to rappel left into a large snow-filled gulley. Zanskar had an uncharacteristically big snowpack this year.
We bivied for the night in the gulley with the hopes of climbing the snow in the morning. It proved to be too warm and unstable. We tried weaving our way up rock slabs to the left but were ultimately turned around due to deteriorating weather conditions.
With the help of the McNeill-Nott Award, we returned to the mountain in 2022.
Our friends in Tungri informed us that Zanskar had received much less snow this year, and we were pleased to find Starikatchan’s east face generally snow-free upon arrival. Excited to repeat our line from 2019 with an easier passage, we re-established our base camp in mid-July.
After the initial pitches on the east buttress, we found easy passage into the gully, which proved to be solid enough to climb but not solid enough to be fun. A few hours of third through low fifth class climbing brought us to the base of a short, steep headwall.
A short A2 pitch followed by some steep and loose 5.8 climbing brought us into yet another gully, which we followed until we found a bivy spot. The following morning we climbed another pitch or two, landing at the base of a third or fourth class section. We only found stacked shale and risk here. We returned to base camp after a solid multi-day attempt to summit.
We had exhausted our options on the east side of Starikatchan. I believe that one could find reasonably safe routes from this side, but they would likely be on the peak’s clean east face, which was well outside our skill level.
We then decided to move our camp up the Shimling Valley. Szu-Ting Yi and Dave Anderson visited this area in 2019 and tipped us off to some good possibilities on that side of the mountain.
We established camp at 4600m and decided our best ascent option would be to use a gully on the west side of the peak to gain access to the south ridge.
Leaving camp at 3 am, the gully proved to be reasonably pleasant second and easy third-class terrain.
Unfortunately, by the time we reached the base of the south ridge at 9 am, a storm moved in. Not having access to weather forecasts at base camp, we were limited to a forecast we had received just before leaving the village several days ago thanks to a cell phone tower constructed there two years ago. Based on that, clear skies were expected for the next two days, so we decided to dig in under a boulder and see what happened.
By early afternoon the storm had eased to intermittent showers and sun. Ultimately, we decided just to bivy under the boulder and hope for clear skies in the morning.
Fortunately, that’s exactly what came, and we began working up the south ridge. We climbed for eight pitches up moderate slabs with difficulties to 5.7 until reaching a large gendarme. We followed a ramp system down and to the left, bypassing the gendarme, then climbed two pitches back up to the ridge proper. From here, we found the ridge convoluted and time-consuming, and by 4 pm we were less than 100 vertical meters from the summit, but still many hours of climbing away from it.
We had made the fateful mistake of leaving our stove and sleeping bag back at the base of the ridge, and after some consideration decided to be conservative and forego the open bivy.
The descent was time-consuming, and we arrived back at our bivy at the top of the gully at 10 pm. The next day we returned to base camp.
We waited as long as we could, hoping for one more weather window, but the next week proved rainy. We packed up camp and returned to Tungri in time to journey back to Leh and fly home.
As it turns out, the bottom 90% of Starikatchan can be climbed relatively quickly and with little technical difficulty, and I’m sure by more routes than what we tried. However, the last bit to the summit seems time-consuming no matter which way you approach it.