Mount Tyree is Antarctica’s second-highest mountain, officially 4852m. Sitting only 12km north of Vinson it may as well be on another planet. While 1090 individuals have summited Vinson since 1966, only seven have stood on top of Tyree. No one has climbed it for ten years. The south face, the north face and the east, northeast and south ridges are all unclimbed.

From the west, Tyree is just a huge wall - the west face, over 2000m high. From the east, above the Patton Glacier, it’s an enormous pyramid with swooping ridges and rocky buttresses. The summit is the highest point along a crest of summits that starts with Mt Gardner in the north, then Tyree, then Peak 4360 and finally Mt Epperly, before dropping to a col with Mt Shinn, just north of Vinson. It was along part of the crest between Gardner and Tyree - the NW ridge - that the first ascent was made in January 1967 by John Evans and Barry Corbet. Barry and John left from a camp set on the col just down from Gardner’s summit, put in place by other members of the team. They considered Tyree the hardest of all the peaks they climbed on that trip. Barry was paralysed in a helicopter accident later in the 60s and only died in 2004, after decades of participation in, and advocacy of, sporting for the disabled. John continued to climb strongly and to this day still works in Antarctica.

Tyree was not climbed again until January 1989 when the legendary American alpinist Terry ‘Mugs’ Stump blasted up the west face, alone and wthout a rope, returning in 12 hours - to this day the most audacious climb ever done in Antarctica. In 1992 Mugs died beneath the south face of Denali in Alaska, when the lip of a crevasse collapsed, taking him down beyond recovery.

In 1997 a very strong team of French military alpinists (GMHM) landed on the Patton Glacier. Members of the team made the first ascent of Mt Shear and the first ascent of the beautiful Evans Peak (named after John) but the highlight was Antoine de Choudens and Antoine Cayrol doing the ‘Grand Couloir’ - a 2300m high couloir on Tyree’s east face. De Choudens is not famous in the climbing world, yet he was arguably the strongest climber in the world during the 90s - a freak. I say ‘was’ as Antoine died in 2000 when a cornice collapsed on a peak near the south face of Shishapangma in Tibet. Before that he had become the only person - and still is - to have skiied to both Poles unsupported AND summited Everest without oxygen. But those are just an addition to his record of hard technical climbs, from WI7 in Europe to technical alpinism at altitude in the Himalaya - hard climbing on Nameless Tower, Arwa Peak and others, plus adventures like China’s deadly Minya Konka. After the French left the Patton, they sledged through the range and came home down the west side, as we did last year. But in sight of home one member, Jean-Marc Gryzka was killed in a fall descending to the Branscomb Glacier - in bad weather he and leader Bernard Virelaude, with their sleds, slipped down over a serac and Jean-Marc sustained fatal head injuries. He was foremost in my mind as I went down the same slope last January.

A month after the French did Tyree, Conrad Anker, Alex Lowe and Dave Hahn arrived on the Patton to repeat both Evans and Tyree. They found dangerous conditions in the  Grand Couloir and a couple of hundred metres from the summit traversed onto mixed ground. Climbing unroped, Hahn slowed to a stop while Alex and Conrad tagged the top, collecting Dave on the way down. Conrad was the last person to stand on Tyree’s summit. Less than two years later Alex was killed in an avalanche on the south face of Shishapangma, not long before Antoine died in view of the same place.

In January 2006 Steve Chaplin, Camilo Rada, Manuel Bugueno and I attempted the Grand Couloir. But after starting up the bottom of it we found not hard icy snow like the other similar routes we had done, but a thin icing of snow, just a centimetre or so, over ice that was hard like concrete. It made for very insecure climbing. As usual, we simul-soloed, no rope and at one point both my crampons ripped out of their tiny nicks in the concrete. My weight came all onto my arms and their axes - not good at any time. As I regained my breath, which had been scared out of me, I looked several hundred metres down the ice gully into the  gaping bergschrund and thought “Fuck, I nearly died just then” - and, as you do, kept climbing. We soon traversed onto the northeast ridge. This was safer but slow and not what we had planned for. With full packs it made hard work but we continued and set a tent 1/3 the way up. However, conditions above looked bad, weather was moving in and time running out, so I decided to bail, not knowing if I would ever return. But that was OK - it remains one of my best memories of climbing in Antarctica - challenging climbing on the continent’s grandest mountain.

I can’t wait to return.