Night on the southeast pillar. Three headlamps move against black rock and blacker sky, small as fireflies against 3,100 meters of ice, mixed ground, and granite.
At 6,800 meters, there is no ledge to sleep on, so the climbers make one chipping at the ice for the better part of an hour until there is enough of a shelf to hang a hammock from the wall itself. Below them, the Hunza Valley is a smear of darkness.
© Planetmountain
Above, the summit is still two vertical kilometers away, and unclimbed. The three men climbing tonight don’t know it yet, but what they’re about to do here will win them the 2026 Piolet d’Or mountaineering’s highest honor.
This is Ultar Sar’s southeast pillar. Nobody has ever finished it.
The Mountain and the Myth
Ultar Sar rises 7,388 meters in the Batura Muztagh, the Karakoram’s northernmost range, and it does not hide. Drivers on the Karakoram Highway look up and see more than 5,000 meters of relief rear directly out of the valley floor one of the most violent single sweeps of vertical terrain on Earth, visible for miles before you reach it.
The southeast pillar is the mountain’s defining problem. Climbers call it the “Hidden Pillar,” and some have nicknamed it the Karakoram’s answer to the Walker Spur a 3,100-meter line stacked with ice, mixed terrain, and clean granite near its top.
For thirty years, it turned people back. Japanese teams tried it in the 1990s. French climbers tried after them. In 2011, a push reached 6,500 meters before failing. In 2018, an attempt on the pillar killed the Austrian climber Christian Huber.
Each failure added to the ledger. By 2024, the Hidden Pillar had a reputation: unclimbed, and possibly unclimbable in the style that alpinists actually want to climb it in without fixed ropes, without porters, without supplemental oxygen.
Meet the Climbers
The team that finally cracked it was three men who brought three different educations in the mountains.
Ethan Berman was born in Delhi and partly raised by a Tibetan nanny before cutting his climbing teeth on Yosemite granite and Thailand limestone background that eventually carried him into Himalayan alpinism.
He already held a Piolet d’Or, won in 2021 for a new route on Mount Robson’s Emperor Face, and on this team he functioned as the researcher and idea generator, the one who studies snow dynamics through satellite imagery as part of his professional work.
Maarten van Haeren was born in the Netherlands and moved to Canada at eighteen, where he became an ACMG-certified guide in the Rockies. On Ultar Sar he was the team’s logistics and ice specialist, the one thinking in ropes, anchors, and timing.
Sebastián Pelletti, Argentine-Australian, moved to Patagonia at twenty-one and became an IFMGA guide known for hard granite lines around Torres del Paine. He brought the big-wall rock sense the upper pillar would demand.
None of them was a specialist alone. Together, they were the specific combination of skills that this mountain had been rejecting for three decades.
How They Found Each Other
Berman and van Haeren went back years before Ultar Sar old partners from the Rockies who had already climbed together on Mount Logan and in Nepal. Berman and Pelletti’s partnership was newer, forged on a 2023 traverse of the Serra Peaks in British Columbia.
The three of them were not a standing team. They did not climb together as a unit before this mountain, and they have not necessarily climbed together since. They were assembled for one specific obsession the Hidden Pillar and once that obsession had an object, it pulled the right three people into the same place at the same time.
The 2024 Failure, and What It Taught Them
Their first attempt, in 2024, ended at roughly 6,000 meters barely halfway up the pillar when unstable snow made the terrain above too dangerous to continue. They retreated.
It would be easy to file that attempt away as a footnote before the real story.
It was the opposite the hinge the entire climb turned on. On the mountain, they learned how the snow behaved at different hours, and how much safer the terrain became if they moved at night, before the sun had a chance to destabilize it.
They learned the rhythm of the route itself where to move fast, where to move carefully. When they came back in 2025, they weren’t hoping. They were applying an education the mountain itself had given them.
The Climb Itself
They returned to Ultar Sar in June 2025 and climbed from June 6 to June 11, in pure alpine style no fixed ropes, no porters, no supply caches. Everything they needed, they carried on their backs, the whole way up.
They climbed at night. Waking around ten or eleven at night and moving through the coldest hours, they kept the ice and snow locked in place, avoiding the instability that had stopped them a year earlier. The crux of the route came high on the mountain sustained mixed climbing on clean granite, roughly between 6,650 and 7,200 meters, where ice-axe and crampon work gave way to technical rock climbing under headlamp and moonlight.
They bivouacked five times on the way up, hacking ledges out of ice and snow at each stop, sleeping in hammocks hung directly from the wall where no ledge existed. They reached the summit of Ultar Sar at around nine in the morning on June 11.
Then came the descent arguably as demanding as the clim more than seventy rappels down the same line they had just climbed, retracing every meter of exposed terrain. A storm pinned them in place for a full day partway down. They reached base camp on June 13, seven days after they had left it.
They named the route “Shooting the Moon,” after the high-risk, high-reward card game they played at base camp while waiting out weather a name that doubles as a nod to the nights they spent climbing by moonlight instead of sun.
Why It Matters
The 2026 Piolets d’Or jury selected the climb as one of only four standout ascents of 2025, citing its commitment, its self-sufficiency, and its team spirit.
The timing matters as much as the achievement. Most headlines coming out of the Himalaya these days are about crowding on 8,000-meter giants fixed ropes, supplemental oxygen, lines of climbers waiting their turn near the summit. “Shooting the Moon” is a throwback to something else three climbers, one unsolved problem, and nothing between them and the mountain but what they could carry. After thirty years of turning people back, the Hidden Pillar finally let a team through.
