Greenland's Mythic Cirque

By: Symon Welfringer

By KAVU

December 7^th, 2021

Home after 25 days in the wild, so much joy was found after spending nearly a month in this amazing landscape with such good friends.

Silvan Schupbach, Matteo Della Bordella and I managed to access a remote area in Greenland's fjords called the "Mythic Cirque", by fair means..... meaning only by paddling on our Kayaks.

Once there, we managed to open an amazing new rock route over 6 KAVU days.

From the beginning, we felt lucky because you don't discover a pure line like this everyday. During our expedition to Tasilaaq, "Siren Tower" was our main objective..... and when we finally arrived in the Mythic Cirque, it was even more obvious that we should attempt a line on this virgin wall.

Initially, it took 5 days to get to the Base camp in the boats. Fortunately, we found some really nice conditions for paddling and as soon as we arrived we aimed all attention to our main goal for the trip, the Siren Tower.

At the start of the route, we were facing many unknowns, the central part of the wall seemed very steep and the cracks looked discontinuous, suggesting long and hard pitches.

These concerns turned out to be quite justified. After having climbed the first 200m quickly, we came up against the steepest part of the wall with many overhanging lengths.

Climbing in "big wall" style (going up and down from a portaledge camp), we found an obvious line following some amazing cracks. But, as the wall was getting steeper and steeper, the crack systems became too thin and finding the right way to free climb the whole route was tricky.

This section turned out to be completely insane, with the bare minimum to be able to climb free at our level. Many of the pitches were between 7b and 7c (hard 5.12) and were really technical..... and a bit scary.

On the 5th day of climbing however, we managed to open the upper pitches and get to the top.....

.......but still, a few pitches remained unclimbed in the lower part of the wall.

On the sixth and very last day, after bad weather came and went, I managed to flash the last unclimbed pitch, originally attempted and opened by Matteo, which turned out to be a sustained 7c (5.12d) crack climb.

After that and thanks to the great vibes of the day, we freed all the other pitches that remained.

It took us 6 days to complete the opening and the redpoint of all the pitches, using the purest opening style possible based only on cams and pitons (no bolts).

We ended up calling our route "Forum" in reference to the many hours we spent discussing every single topic you can imagine. As Matteo, silvan and I are all from 3 different countries and speak 3 different languages, we communicated mostly in English. Also, we are three personalities with kind of the same strong character. Most of the time, each of us wanted to impose his idea..... which lead to very long, yet interesting discussions, like a Forum;-)

These endless debates you can find on the internet ?

That was us at every belay of the route;-)

But in the end, it was super interesting and too much fun to discuss all the topics involved in doing a route like this.

When we arrived at the top, the wall wasn't virgin anymore as Nico, Sean and Alexei had finished their route to the right of us, two days before. Lots to celebrate!!