2025 GRIT&ROCK Grant Recipients Announced

The GRIT&ROCK Foundation, founded by AC member Masha Gordon with the aim of encouraging greater female participation in pioneering alpine ascents, has announced nine recipients of its 2025 grant awards. As with previous years, the awards are spread across three categories: performance, exploration and apprenticeship.  

 ^{2025 awardee Shira Biner climbing on Baffin Island, 2023}

The 2025 awardees are:

Performance

• $1,500 for Allie Oaks and Angela VanWiemeersch to attempt the first ascent of the north face of Muz Tok peak (5100m), also known as Shurovsky West, in the Jiptik Valley, Kyrgyzstan.
  
  
• $2,000 for Michelle Dvorak and AC member Fay Manners for a return expedition to attempt the first ascent of Chaukhamba III (6995m) in India's Uttarakhand region.
  
  
• $1,500 for Caro North, Belen Prados and Amelie Kühne to attempt a first all-female/first female free ascent of the South African route on Torre Central in the Torres del Paine.
  
  
• $2,000 for Oksana Kochubei, Nadezhda Muzhikina, Nadezhda Pilshchikova and Olga Paduchieva to attempt a new route on White Sapphire (6040m) in the Kishtwar Himalaya.

Exploration

• $1,500 for Pachi Ibarra and Celine Jaccard to open new routes in Baffin Island's Auyuittuq National Park.
  
  
• $1,500 for Angelina Di Prinzio, Catalina Unwin and Paloma Farkas to fund their attempt to open a new line on Cerro Steffen (3056m) on the Southern Patagonian Ice Field. (This remote peak has seen only one previous ascent).
  
  
• $1,500 for Shira Biner, Natalie Afonina, Heather Smallpage and Char Tomlinson to attempt a first all-female ascent on a Baffin island big wall route. (Their transport once on the island will be self-powered, using a combination of skis, packrafts and travel on foot).

 ^{2025 awardees Caro North and Belen Prados during a 2024 expedition to the Turbio IV Valley in Argentinian Patagonia -Julia Cassou}

Apprenticeship

• $2,500 in general funding for the French National Female Alpine Team (ENAF). This is the fifth time in a row that ENAF has received a GRIT&ROCK award, reflecting the scheme's impressive track record. This year's funding will go towards an expedition to Uttarakhand, which marks the culmination of the three-year programme.
  
  
• $1,000 in support of the female members of the Young Alpinist Group, a training programme established by Tom Livingstone which also receives support from the Alpine Club, Mount Everest Foundation and the British Mountaineering Council.

Commenting on this year's awards, Jury Chair Victor Saunders said: "It is our dream that one day we will open our alpine journals to find there are as many notable female ascents as male. Meanwhile, this year’s picks for the Grit&Rock grant awards are a solid step in the right direction. Each of the categories has terrific expeditions; seriously demanding climbs in the Performance category, committing and remote trips in the Exploration category while the Apprenticeship awards will build the foundation for the next generation of climbers. These young women have chosen projects that will bring the dream forward and we wish them success."

The GRIT&ROCK Award was created in 2016 and has so far contributed more than $100,000 in grant funding to over 40 female-led expeditions. The Award is open to individuals and climbing teams of any nationality with majority female participation. 

You can learn more about the award, including past recipients, via the Foundation's website.

Exhibition: Kangchenjunga - The Five Treasures of the Snows

^{Photo by Jakub Michankow (Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)}

"There is no doubt that those who first climb Kangchenjunga will achieve the greatest feat in mountaineering, for it is a mountain which combines in its defenses not only the severe handicaps of wind, weather, and very high altitude, but technical climbing problems and objective dangers of an order even higher than those we encountered on Everest."

This is how John Hunt, the leader of the 1953 Mount Everest Expedition, summed up the challenge posed by Kangchenjunga. Yet, just two years on from his team's successful ascent of Everest, his deputy, Charles Evans, on what was supposed to be a reconnaisance expedition, would lead two parties to (just shy) of the summit.

70 years on from that ascent, our new exhibition, Kangchenjunga - The Five Treasures of the Snows, profiles that expedition team, chronicles their ascent using artefacts from the AC and Mountain Heritage Trust Collections and looks at the wider history of the mountain, including the early expeditions of Douglas Freshfield and Aleister Crowley, as well as its position as a holy mountain to local Buddhist communities.

^{The Second Ice Fall from Camp 2}

^{The summit spire viewed fromJoe Brown & George Band's lunch stop}

‘Kangchenjunga - The Five Treasures of the Snows’ has been curated by John Porter and will run at the Alpine Club's Charlotte Road premises from 8 April to 29 May 2025.

There will be an informal opening on the evening of 8 April, coinciding with that evening's lecture, at which a short film about the mountain will be shown. This event is open to all and can be booked by signing up to attend the lecture.

More generally, the exhibition will be open to visitors from 11:00 – 15:00 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, as well as on London lecture evenings.

Visitors are kindly asked to book in advance using the form below so that we can ensure the necessary level of staffing. Failure to do so may lead to you being turned away.