Mkinvartsveri / Kazbek (5054 m)
Mkinvartsveri - A most personal mountain
February 2019. It is a stormy winter day on 3000 m in the Georgian Caucasus. A dog looks at me as if he knows me, as if I have been here before. In the background Mkinvartsveri (5054 m) rises, the sun shining on the upper slopes of the southeast face. Somewhere up there, my fascination with the Caucasus started. First with an image of these slopes in my father`s geology book, my fingers tracing lines up and down snowy slopes and ice faces; later standing with skis at the drop-in to what had become my dream line - the SE face direct or “3B”.
But it was not just the mountain. Georgia fascinated me from when I first showed up there in 2005. The combination of a chaotic Tbilisi, a city still struggling with transitions into a new, capitalistic wold, with the powerful, mystical Caucasus mountains – the mountains of poetry - sucked me right in. Little I knew back then what would follow.
Between 2008 and 2013 I skied four new lines on Mkinvartsveri - among them the SE direct with the late Andi Riesner (>>website) and the NE face via the Japharidze ridge with Trevor Hunt. The trip with Andi was special because everything was new and exotic. When I met Trevor in Tbilisi in 2013, Georgia was familiar ground for me. Yet, the remote NE side had been climbed a few weeks before us by Georgians - but that was the first time in over 50 years. We did the route in a 2.5 day return trip. The ski descent took us down the NE face an onward to the Abano glacier, where very few people have have stood. It was my last ski decent from the summit, and a worthy final.