The Piolet d’Or selection committee has named six finalists for the 2010 Piolet d’Or and chosen Doug Scott as the recipient of the Life Time Achievement Award. (Read more on Doug Scott here.) The six teams up for the award are:
Kyle Dempster and Bruce Normand for their climb on Mt. Edgar’s east face “Rose of No Man’s Land (VI WI5+ M6, 2400m).” (Check out Dempster’s article on the climb in an upcoming issue of Alpinist.)
Ben Ditto, Nicolas Favresse, Olivier Favresse and Sean Vilanueva for their nine big wall ascents in Greenland.
Bjorn-Eivind Artun and Colin Haley for Dracula (M6R AI4+ A0, 10,400′) on Mt. Foraker. (For a longer account of the climb see Haley’s article “Scared” in Alpinist 33.)
Yasushi Okada and Katsutaka Yokoyama for I-TO (ED+: WI5 M6, 2500m) on Mt. Logan. (For a first-hand account of this climb check out Yokoyama’s feature
‘”Rock, Climber, Mountain” in Alpinist 34.)
Max Belleville, Mathieu Detrie, Mathieu
Meynadier and S?bastien Ratel for their climb Close the Door (IV/5, F5, 1,200m) on Lunag I.
And Malcom Bass and Paul Figg for their climb on Vasuki Parbat, which included sections up to Scottish VI, 7.
Since the Piolet d’Or’s rebirth, multiple awards have become standard, and it seems likely that on April 15 there could be several given out. Each of the teams exhibited good style in a committing environment. The Piolet d’Or’s festivities will run from the weekend April 9-10 through April 16 with evening events open to the public. In an age when guided ascents and commercial fiascos on Everest seem to dominate the mainstream media’s view of climbing, honoring the alpinists mentioned above could be a chance to show off the climbing community’s values to the general public.