French Duo Makes First Ski Descent Of India's 6310m Meru Central
Himalayan ski mountaineering is having a moment right now.
Climbing and skiing mountains of this scale is always a gamble, and the stakes are as real as they get: life and death. This fall, a few expeditions were blessed with excellent weather and conditions on objectives they had been chasing for years: cold, stable snow that brought these ephemeral high-altitude lines into skiable condition.
Just yesterday, reports came out from two teams that successfully summited and skied two coveted lines on 6000-meter peaks in India and Nepal. Both are teams made up of notoriously quiet crushers (two of the five don’t even own social media accounts).
On October 18th, 2026, French duo Tiphaine Dupérier and Boris Langenstein skied a first descent of the West Face of India’s famed 6310-meter Meru Central Peak. This is adjacent to the harrowing alpine big-wall climb made famous in Jimmy Chin’s 2015 film Meru.
Both IFMGA guides, Dupérier and Langenstein, are longtime ski partners who have sought massive objectives in the greater ranges for years. The duo skied 8126m Nanga Parbat in 2025, and Dupérier has won the Piolet D’Or, climbing’s highest award. Earlier this year, Langenstein was with close friends Gee Pierrel and Christina Lustenberger when Pierrel was tragically killed in an avalanche while attempting to ski Pakistan’s K6. In an interview with The High Route, Dupérier says she was surprised that Langenstein even joined this trip to Meru.
The duo set up a base camp on the Gangotri Glacier at 4400 meters and spent the next week and a half acclimatizing by climbing and skiing lower peaks. A big part of high-altitude ski expeditions is the acclimatization portion, which, if conditions are good, means you get to ski a lot before warming up to your main objective. From that basecamp, nearly nine miles from their objective, the duo moved higher on the mountain to set up an advanced basecamp below the imposing West Face of Meru.
The route had been climbed by an Indian team in 2023, but no records exist of it ever being skied. Dupérier and Langenstein spent a few days forging a path through a complex icefall near the bottom of the route before committing to climbing and skiing the entire line in good conditions on October 18th.
They were able to ski the entire line without rappels, including a crux 50-degree section, marking a huge milestone in the history of self-supported expedition-style ski alpinism.
Simultaneously, on the other end of the Himalaya Range, a trio of American skiers and snowboarders achieved a first descent of the South Face of 6966m Dorje Lhakpa.
Teton-based IFMGA guides Adam Fabrikant (check him out in the new POWDER print annual) and Billy Haas joined pro snowboarder Nick Russell on an expedition to climb and ski the massive pyramid-shaped face visible from the Kathmandu Valley.
While camping on the mountain and joined by filmmakers Leo Hoorn and Blake Gordon, the team climbed and skied the route on October 20th.
The 2026/27 print issue of POWDER Magazine is here. Click here to have a copy shipped to your front door. Copies can also be found on newsstands at major retailers like Barnes & Noble, Target, Walmart, and more.
Related: Colorado Skier’s Head Buried In October Avalanche On Popular 14er
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