‘It’s What Dreams are Made of’: Matt Cornell Shares His Experience on Jannu
An inside look at the challenges, triumphs, and hallucinatory experiences of the historic ascent of one of the Himalayas’ most daunting peaks
Photo by: Alan Rousseau, Matt Cornell, and Jackson Marvell
I ring Matt up in mid-January, two months after Alan Rousseau, Jackson Marvell and Matt Cornell’s successful ascent of the 7,710-meter Jannu. I’ve read about their feat in The New York Times and Rousseau’s interview about the climb in Gripped, and I was curious to hear about the epic climb from Matt’s perspective.
Straddling Nepal and India and overlooking Everest, Jannu, also known as Kumbhakarna, is connected to the long ridge that leads to 8,586-meter Kangchenjunga, the third-highest peak in the world. Jannu was first climbed in 1962 via the Southeast Ridge, which was repeated in 1976 by a Japanese team. In 2004, a Russian team became the first to ascend its north face, spending two months fixing lines using siege tactics, and was recognized with a Piolet d’Or. Many teams have attempted the north face in alpine style and without bottled oxygen, but none were successful until Matt, Jackson, and Alan.
The trio climbed the 2,700-meter north face, a wall of snow, ice, and rock, to the right of the Russian route from 2004. Unlike the Russians, they climbed in pure alpine style, meaning no fixed ropes and no fixed camps. Just one continuous push from the bottom to the top and back again.
Our Call and Climbs Together
I’m calling from Mariposa, just outside Yosemite, and reach Matt at Conrad Anker’s place in Bozeman, where Matt and his girlfriend Whitney Stowe are house-sitting. As we chat, I can hear them wolfing down pasta. Between bites, he tells me it’s bitter cold in town and is expected to drop to negative 30 in the coming days, conditions I imagine were like what he and his team experienced in Nepal this past fall when they climbed their route One Way Ticket from October 7 to 13.
“I hear it’s cold out there too,” he says, “and rumor has it that Widows Tears is in.”
Matt’s referring to the here-today-gone-tomorrow 1,000-foot ice route he and I attempted in Yosemite between his trips to Jannu. During our climb on Widows Tears in 2021, we hiked in shortly after midnight, where our headlamps shining on the snow created an otherworldly scene. Snow crystals sparkled under the glare of our lights as we post holed to the route, only to see it had collapsed above the first pitch. But we forged on anyway, and he led pitch 1, snow-covered rock with sections of bare stone with no protection – standard fare for Matt — in his rope-stretching lead. He tied off a tree branch and brought me up, and from there, we bailed.
Our other Yosemite outings include The North Face of the Rostrum during a boiling summer day where at one point, he got his knee stuck in an offwidth – that was our first climb – followed by a day on Astroman under skies stained orange with smoke from nearby wildfires. We also attempted the multipitch 5.13 Final Frontier on Fifi Buttress in winter. Matt (who is also a frequent free soloist) climbed confidently, boldly, and fiercely strong on all these climbs. Not to mention, he’s one of the kindest people I know.
The team, which has put up multiple first ascents in Alaska and beyond, began to come together in 2019. That’s when Matt and Jackson went on a six-week trip to Pakistan and made the first ascent of a 7,000-meter peak. In 2020, this time with Alan, the trio climbed their first route together, El Cap’s Zodiac, in a day. “From there, we just realized this was the team, and we began to plan objectives together.”
Attempts on Jannu
On Jannu, there were three attempts overall. The first, in 2019, included only Alan and Jackson, who made it high on the wall but retreated due to an incoming storm. They made it to “7,200 meters on the headwall,” Matt says, “but a big storm was forecasted to come in, and they didn’t have the time margin to continue. So, they had to bail. And then it dumped three meters of snow in like a week.”
“It was good they decided to turn around when they did. Otherwise, they could have been stuck up there.”
In their second year in 2022, they had poor weather again. It was a late monsoon, and they didn’t get a good climbing window. It was too late in the season, too cold, too windy. “We went up there and were just getting blasted by the wind because of the jet stream, and it was far too cold. We didn’t even get close to our high point. We were just shut down.”
“Then this year, it all lined up.”
Success | A Three Man Sleeping Bag
The climb started from a basecamp at 4575 meters. This is where they left their porters behind and committed themselves to the route with food for five days, carrying one custom sleeping bag and two G7 Pods with an expedition fly. Other equipment included two skinny ropes, one and a half sets of cams to a 4 Camelot, six beaks, an angle, and one knife blade. Also on their rack were a dozen ice screws, the final tools needed to navigate a mix of rock, snow, and ice over nearly two miles of mostly sheer terrain.
Matt says of the sleeping bag, “This was the first time using it—totally custom. Nathan Kukathas from G7 hand-delivered it to us in base camp. He flew it all the way from Squamish to Nepal.”
Made of a Dyneema composite fabric and lined with synthetic insulation, Matt credits the sleeping bag as one of the crucial items they had. After helping one another remove their boots during their hanging bivies, they slid their legs inside, pulled the bag to their waists, and sat upright. Their puffy jackets kept them warm from the waist up. Matt took the middle, and Jackson and Alan took either side, which proved problematic as Alan, on the left, got frostbite on his left hand, and Jackson got frostbite on his right. In hindsight, Matt says they should have taken different seating positions each night to share the warmth of the middle spot, which was most protected from the blistery cold winds rattling against their fly.
Other than the sleeping bag, the handful of beaks also proved necessary, sometimes placed in a long string in a row while climbing up to M7 above 7,500 meters. “They were essential,” Matt says. “On some pitches, you’re climbing on the face, just placing beaks as your pro. And they’re good beaks.”
Matt says, describing the technical climbing, “It’s what dreams are made of, you know.” In the background, I hear Whitney, who joined Matt at basecamp, mumble under her breath, “It’s what nightmares are made of.”
The Route
Matt sends a text showing their M7 AI5+ A0 line. A red line drawn over a picture of Jannu shows that the route climbs vertically up a rock wall right of an icefall. From there, it traverses the icefall and goes up a ramp below the headwall, then connects to the headwall at three-quarters height.
To train, the trio climbed hard ice and rock back in the States, and when they got to Nepal, they made two laps up a non-technical peak near Jannu that topped out at over 6,000 meters. Once they got a clear weather forecast, they went for it.
Climbing out of basecamp, “It’s exactly like the Royal Arches,” Matt says. “It’s like the same length, the same difficulty. Very similar climbing, just covered in moss and snow.”
Royal Arches is a 5.7 A0 Yosemite climb we once did with Whitney that includes chimneys, slabs, and finger and hand cracks strewn along a passage that weaves the easiest way up a 2,000-foot wall.
Here, “Conditions were good enough that we didn’t need to use crampons on the rock buttress,” he says, adding that they climbed in crampon-compatible hybrid approach/climbing boots and then swapped them out for double boots once they got past the initial difficulties of the mountain.
To overcome the next objective, a hanging icefall. In that section, he says, “There’s a couple of proper pitches, and they’re like Jenga since the icefall is always deteriorating. Things are always falling in that, but we’re on the side, and it’s pretty safe. We would hear the ice cracking and creaking, and it’s not uncommon to see big avalanches ripping down the center of it from things falling.”
Once past the icefall, they bivied for their first night in a bergshrund at the base of a ramp leading up and left up the primary wall.
The following morning, they traversed the ramp at an 11 o’clock angle to reach the El Cap-sized headwall at 7,200 meters, where many previous teams had bailed. This is also where the trio touched the Russian route from 2004, which still had hanging fixed lines.
On night three, falling debris hit their portaledge. “There were always things coming down and whacking us.” This resulted in three sizable holes in their expedition fly.
Here, they veered right off the Russian Route, never to connect with it again. Technical and demanding with each pitch, Matt says climbing the vertical terrain high on the face was easier than snow slogging, which can quickly increase your heart rate. However, he says, the altitude impacted the team in ways they weren’t expecting.
For example, once in their G7 Pods, if they tried to hunch over to remove their boots, their diaphragms would compress, and after fighting with their footwear, they would get out of breath. “You do that for like 30 seconds, and you get your boots shell off, and then you almost pass out. The small things you don’t think about were more taxing from the altitude than the actual climbing.”
He says up there at the top of the world, your heart rate is often maxed out, and you have to stop for five minutes at a time to regain everything. “None of us got altitude sick, and we all coped well but moved a lot slower. You have to pace yourself when you’re climbing and match your breath and rhythm.”
On day four, as Matt followed a pitch, a snow mushroom collapsed over Jackson and Alan, shock-loading the anchor (likely a cam and a screw; Matt doesn’t recall) and ripping Jackson’s hood open.
Blown Beaks at the Anchor
The next night, near the top of the route and deep in the headwall, the team’s anchor consisted of four beaks and a tied-off knifeblade. Here, after Jackson and Matt were already situated in their portaledges, Alan crawled in and sat down. Just then, one of the beaks sheered out of the rock.
“I was like, oh man,” Matt says. “Maybe that’s a little too much weight. But it was ok; we’re alive.” They left their camp intact the next day and led one M5 pitch to reach the ridge. They climbed with only a single backpack containing extra gloves, water, and snacks. From there, it was another 300 meters of ice and mixed climbing on the Southwest Pillar to reach the top.
The Phantom Fourth Member of the Team
As if tackling an El Cap-sized wall above 7,200 meters isn’t hard enough, the team also had to deal with hallucinations set off by the extreme conditions. “Each of us individually all felt the fourth climber, who was not there, and we didn’t acknowledge that until we got back down,” he says.
“At one point, I felt like I was back in the forest in Hyalite, Montana, doing my own thing. And I looked around, and I’m not where I thought I was.”
In total, the team spent four nights above 7,000 meters. “It was fairly psychedelic up there,” Matt says.
After 500 meters of climbing up the steep headwall with plastered blue ice and sharp grey rock, the team dipped out right to reach a ridgeline. They followed this to connect to the summit of Jannu, which they reached on their sixth day. They topped out at 4:20 pm and immediately retreated from where they came.
They made “10 to 15 rappels,” Matt approximates, to return to their beak-anchored high camp. Here, they ate candy bars because they were too tired to cook dehydrated meals. After brewing water for the morning, they crawled into their sleeping bag and shivered the night away. They continued their descent in the morning, upwards of 80 rappels back to camp.
Getting Back Down
I asked Matt if there were any accidents on the way down due to fatigue. I said, “I’ve heard of people dropping crucial things like ropes. After being exposed to the elements for so long and climbing 10 hours on the final day, were you guys still feeling sharp enough to keep it together?”
Matt replies, “Jackson dropped his ATC on like the second or third rappel. He had to do the biner brake rappel the whole way. Miraculously, he found his ATC at the foot of the face.”
Jackson led the rappels from the summit back to the beak anchor, but to Alan and Jackson’s frostbitten hands, Matt led the entirety of the rappels back to the ground. Since the route was so steep, their lines pulled smoothly from their anchors, which were V-threads, beaks, cams, and bashed in nuts. They reached the ground with two or three pieces of their rack remaining.
Frostbite
After Jannu, Alan and Jackson spent five days in the hospital in Kathmandu, where doctors treated them for frostbite. Here, Matt visited with them daily to give them snacks and meals.
As for what’s next, “We’re going to see how their recovery goes and what we’re psyched on,” Matt says. “There’s so much more to climb in the Himalayas.”
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