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In the early 2000s we met Charlie, in a semi-legit guesthouse in Kangding, a place that’s still there having changed hands a few times. He had an apartment somewhere, but came to the guesthouse for coffee, sitting out in the sun with some of Kangding’s many cats, practicing his Mandarin and Tibetan, flicking through picture books of the region.

Back then, Kangding was a long days bus ride from Chengdu, often overnight due to hold ups over the passes the road once took. Buses all came from the Xinanmen station in Chengdu which was a seedy hotspot for travelling Tibetans, and the adjoining hotel was a bottleneck for any climbers heading illegally into Tibet, to the pirate underground of the day the equivalent to the famous hotels in Kathmandu and Skardu. Most climbers knew Charlie was about, somewhere, but unlike that other great Fowler – Mick – who did things usually properly, above board and with the blessings of the authorities in London and Beijing, Charlie took the other route, the one no less noble, of seeing the only true authority as himself.

Our brief conversation with Charlie – he never stopped flipping through the pages of the book he was going through, nor suspended his ongoing conversation with the locals – confirmed what we already thought of him long before we met; that he was the consummate expert in all the fields needed to overlap to do what he was doing. The climbing for sure was pirate, but Charlie sure as hell wasn’t, as he ticked every box there was to tick to make him the subject matter expert. That he was a cutting edge climber needs no elucidation here, pushing edges in disciplines from desert walls to 8000m, but what set him apart from others who had similar repertoires in an era before the endemic stratification that was to come, was the cultural, linguistic, geographical and strategic expertise he had, for places that until that day were as obscure as the dark side of the moon.

Charlie spoke Mandarin and Kham Tibetan to a degree that to our ear was excellent conversational, as we saw first hand in seamless dialogue with people he already knew. Just like in the English he spoke with us, he was engaging, interested, deferring and impatient, with the jaded irony and dark humor that all long term travellers to China develop. He was openly evasive about any plans, but openly open about anything else, having useful opinions on how to get further west, to places we were not meant to go. He knew because he’d already been there, and knew how to stay off the radar, and he knew better than to tell people he’d just met stuff that could jeopardize future plans.

To this day, no one really knows how far out Charlie was going, with US made pitons occasionally showing up that are unlikely to be anyone else’s. Well up towards the Qinghai border there are 6000m peaks within a few days of the road, and if he was getting into Genyen secretly 20 years ago then little of North Eastern Tibet would have been too hard. Charlie did all this without any of the arrogance and entitlement that infects some peoples ideas of pirate climbing, where they reinforce their ideas about getting caught with bribes, whinging on social media and insults. We despise this sort of thing because it lacks respect and make dickheads of everybody, and is as far from The Fowler Method as these things can get.

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Kangding is the entry to the Tibetan plateau where westwards its 2000kms until you hit Aksai Chin, and Northwest from there lays unbroken ranges and massifs all the way to the intersection with the Kunlun in Qinghai, forming the Northeastern Himalaya. Peaks go well into the 6000s and this forms the natural division between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ Tibet, with roads following valleys mostly along the eastern ‘outer’ side, with occasional roads cutting across to areas still very difficult to get into.

The pirate climbing of the early 2000s spawned it’s own Sichuan-Tibet style, blending stuff from Alaska, the Tatra, and other Himalayan areas, with the need to conceal it from authorities. There could be no big basecamps or trains of supplies needing extensive logistics as that would draw attention, demanding strategies and styles to be invented for ascents starting at 5000m. Where +6000m ascents in Nepal and Pakistan could be fitted out with locals doing the ground work for a dollar a day, here the strategy meant hitchhiking, dodging road checks, leaving the road quickly and making fast approaches – all with gear in tiny loads that passed hopefully as a backpacker’s.

A decade after this heyday, as China opened, the style remained, picked up by the growing local scene and preserved by a culture that doesn’t include porters or the dollar-a-day industry of the subcontinent. The explosion in China’s infrastructure means roads go well to 5000m and supply lines means transport and supplies way out into the villages, fortifying the style with no need for the things that slow most expeditions down.

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We have spent every Autumn and early Winter in North Eastern Tibet since the days when Charlie set the standard, every year going to new areas – usually entire ranges – that in Charlie’s time were inaccessible, even to him. As brilliant as he was, there were limits to how far out could be ventured given the paranoia, altitude, time and infrastructure of the day, and though we are certain he would have known of these places, the timeline of his trips renders his reaching there unfeasible. Some objectives, notably the north faces of Kawalori, he definitely would have known about as they dominate the landscape from the high passes heading towards Qinghai, but the mountains notoriety from it’s sole avenue of approach – of aggressive monks at the south sides monastery – left it unclimbed until Bruce and Kyle got through in one the last semi-pirate ascents of the era.

For Autumn 2025 we spread ourselves wide across the region, running expeditions across an area the breadth of the European Alps. We climbed and recced places 90% unvisited by climbers, including finally get into the north side of Kawalori. We consider this to be in the tradition of Charlie, that whilst no longer unlawful, is done using expertise, style and attitude he would recognize. We do things at a local level, fast, and alpine style from the road, placing a high value on audaciousness and a high contempt for attention. 

The freedom of vision that comes with such proximity to Himalayan peaks, accessible in hours from towns sufficiently supplied to live over seasons, unleashes the potential to experiment and adapt. The niche we operate in means we can switch objectives and scale things that evolve towards objectives we are just starting to glimpse, including things over in Xinjiang and the Zhangzhung of western Tibet that are starting to emerge. This Autumn we played around with styles and gear that will soon go to the highest peaks on earth, but that need refinement in places where problems probably won’t end in tears.

We know these ranges as the crucible for bigger things to come, for our own trips as well as alpinism in general that has expanded as far as it will in the niche it currently inhabits. When the only element left to improve on is contrived increments then it’s time to expand the vision, and take that vision to places outside the industrial norms to where they can really be set loose. The styles used on these 6000m Tibetan peaks both breaks the old methods and seeds new ones, and keeps a seamless transition of expedition alpinism for those with no interest in ever looping through the bloated commercial trajectory and it’s predictable goals.

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In 2026 Charlie and Christine (who we didn’t meet) will have been gone 20 years, lost to an avalanche in Genyen they couldn’t have survived even if their location had been known. Pirate climbing didn’t kill them, but it did help kill the discipline, along with several other accidents and a shift in collective attitude that watered down the ideals. Charlie would be old now, but so is Mick, but regardless of the hypothetical question of it would have slowed him, he did a good job of passing the baton.

Despite a small surge of high profile attention, Tibetan climbing has kept itself underground, adhering to pirate principles whether it needed to or not. Politics, trends, industry and (a lack of) evolution in mountaineering in general have kept the ranges of Tibet wild and freaky, with the price for being a punkish independence with a solid dose of fuck you that keeps the commercial interest away. Bruce and Kyle reached the high tide point for international climbers bringing international ideas to the region, till they went their different ways, leaving an enormous hole in discipline that is slowly being filled by locals.

The emerging generation of climbers in China retains these pirate ideas, but fuses them with all the attributes of being local, namely exploiting infrastructure for speed, the advantages of not being noticed, and the unique potential that comes from being able to visit the Himalayas every weekend. We know climbers getting 150 Himalayan mountain days a year but none of it wasted on approaches and protracted acclimation – they are racking up 6000m ascents over weekends numbering in the dozens per year, brewing up new styles in the cauldron of altitude over a fire Charlie helped ignite.

Who knows what Charlie might have done had he lived, dying right at the cusp when the really big stuff in Xinjiang was about to open. Like a few others, the natural extension of big Himalayan climbing is big Karakoram climbing, with the number of climbers having the knowledge to do this on the China side countable on one hand. That the Northern Karakoram remains obscure and unvisited could be a legacy of Charlie, who never gave away the secrets of what he was doing, to not compromise climbing in wilderness. Charlie left things at a high level of responsibility and expected the same of anyone who came after, commenting several times that going to obscure places with good friends was the whole point of climbing.

For Feeding the Rat Expeditions the obscure ranges of North Eastern Tibet will always be a home, combining endless exploratory alpinism with a culture we can happily live in. We like the people, the climbing ethics, the landscape and scope for evolution, and we like watching a tradition live on that has no time for all the bullshit of industry. These mountains still teem with bears, snow leopards, wolves, vultures and nomads that we keep an eye out to coexist with, whilst still keeping an eye out for corroding knife blades with a bit of sun-bleached tat.

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