Climbing the Polar Bear Fang | Nat Geo Live

( intro music )

Mike Libecki: Sixty-five expeditions and counting and the goal is to do 100 expeditions by 100 years old. This is what I call the Polar Bear Fang. And I've been trying to this tower for ten years. For a climber, this is as good as it gets as far as unclimbed, untouched.

This was a unique trip because I had planned to go solo and my younger brother said, “Hey, I’d love to go on this trip.” And I was like, “We’re going to do this huge climb.” He’s not a climber, but he was gonna go along anyways and see what happened. And I thought, “Okay, I can just teach you what to do. You can follow me up this climb. We'll go on the belief of blood and brothers and we’ll communicate and it’ll work out.”

There are polar bears here. The easiest way to be safe is to sleep up high on a ledge. You can see our base camp down below. Immediately the next day, after getting dropped off, made a beautiful base camp, packed up our bags and started shuttling loads. That’s the first view that we got of the Polar Bear Fang from camp, because there were some big cliffs in front of us. And so, at this point, we’re getting up there and we’re starting to have to cross glaciers. I’m teaching my brother how to tie into a rope. And, you know, how do you tie a figure-eight knot again and...

This is our high-camp, From that high-camp, we still got about half a mile to the base of the wall. We went, we slept at the base of the wall and we started climbing. It got really serious because my brother is not a climber. And so, he’s on ascenders, he’s on Jumars following me up the rope. A lot of times we had fun, but a lot of times I’m like, “Listen, you gotta do this, this and this.” And, when I am leading pitches, I’m putting directionals in for the rope to run a certain way so he doesn’t pull off a rock and kill himself.

And, you know, it was, it was the real deal up there and we put the cameras away. And I’m like, “We've got to focus on safety.” There were three different times I had to switch routes because it was just too loose and dangerous. There were two times where I talked to him about it and said, “We might have to bail, it might be too dangerous.” And, honestly, my mom, she would kill me if something happened to the baby brother, to the youngest. ( audience laughter )

It was pretty exciting to stand on top of the Polar Bear Fang after a decade of wanting to be up there. ( mimicking horns clashing ) Mike: Yeah, Year of the Ram! Woo! First ascent here in Greenland. Ah, now we got to figure out how to get down. ( audience laughter )

Time is now, life is sweet, talk to you soon. ( Mike chuckles ) He was a good sport to wear the Year of the Ram mask, and... But the summit is pretty powerful. I mean, there is an incredible feeling about standing on a summit in a fjord, an area that's unexplored, a climb that's-- You know, a new climb, a first ascent, it’s, it’s really a powerful feeling. And to share it with my brother... We're very close, we always have been, it was such a magical moment to be up there with him. And it was just incredible.