A 16-Day First Ascent Sufferfest

In the spring of 2015, National Geographic Resident Explorer and my good friend, Mike Libecki, called me and said he had an idea to climb a remote tower in the jungle of Ua Pou Island, French Polynesia. “There will be moments that you wish you never came,” he said. Oddly enough, that was exactly what my filming partner Keith Ladzinski and I wanted to hear, as the best expeditions usually hold a good bit of struggle. Plus, Libecki has a knack for finding the most unexplored and uncharted climbing locations on the planet and being the first to summit.

For this expedition, Libecki enlisted Angie Payne to be his climbing partner. Payne, after a successful trip to Greenland with Libecki in 2012, made the mistake of telling Libecki she would go on any “crackpot” mission he ever conjured up. The only issue was that Payne had never climbed a big wall before. But Libecki wasn’t looking for climbers as much as he was looking for people that could take the suffering. In that way, we were all a perfect fit.

We set out on the 21-day mission this March, and after 16 days of debris-filled climbing in horrible conditions, Libecki led us to the summit of Poumaka in a tropical storm.

Photo: Libecki and Payne with unknown pitches and struggle above them.

Our first look at the towers of Ua Pou Island.

Libecki and Payne cut a trail to Poumaka and take in the view of the tower from the base for this first time. Everything was so dense and the jungle seemed to climb right up the tower with the same overgrown ferocity it possessed on the ground.

Libecki showing off the gear that keeps them safe—muddy “bird beaks,” which he hammers into small cracks and crevices on lead.

Vertical mayhem: Libecki gets more than he bargained for during his 12-hour lead of pitch two, which he described as one of the hardest pitches of his life.