Watch Ascent of War and Poetry 5.12 on Greenland

British climbers Andrew Cherry and Stefan Morris climb War and Poetry VI 5.12c on the southwest face of Ulamertorsuaq in the Tasermiut Fjord, Greenland.

“We attempted to team free the line hauling a small pack with minimal bivy gear,” they said.

“While we had to send up the emergency aiders a few times higher on the wall, we free climbed the vast majority of the wall, including most of the harder pitches.”

They took three days to climb the big wall and had the feeling they’d bail up until they were on the summit.

It was first climbed by a Swiss team in 1983 and named the Geneva Diedre. An American team including Todd Skinner and Paul Piana worked on it in 1998, freeing it and and renaming it War and Poetry.

Scott Bennett and Bryan Gilmore made an ascent a few years ago and wrote on Mountain Project, “The lower half, through pitch 17, is mostly poetic and graceful face climbing, up an ever-steeping slab. The crux of this section is a series of four tricky pitches, 13 to 17.

“The next section is war. The massive right-facing dihedral that forms the upper half is unrelentingly physical, with steep flares and wide cracks. If you’re not honed on this style, the off-width pitches could feel severely sandbagged. Above the offwidth section, the beautiful Bowstring crack provides two pitches of difficult finger crack.”