A First Descent on India’s Meru Central

On October 18th, Tiphaine Dupérier and Boris Langenstein skied a first descent down the West Face of Meru Central ( in India’s Garhwal Himalaya. Meru Central, 6,310 m (20,700 ft), is sandwiched between the taller Meru South, 6,660 m (21,850 ft), and Meru North, 6,450 m (21,160 ft).

According to Dupérier in an interview, she and Langenstein, longtime partners, were on their 10th serious international expedition when they landed in India on October 1 and established a basecamp below Shivling on the 7th at roughly 4,440 m. This basecamp, named Tapovan, sits below Shivling and above the Gangotri Glacier. After settling in, they established an advanced basecamp below the West Face of Meru Central at about 5,000 m. (The trek from basecamp to advanced basecamp was approximately 9 miles.)

They took a few scouting missions higher up the route, partly to acclimatize but mostly to familiarize themselves with an icefall they would navigate while climbing and descending.

On the 18th, with what Dupérier called fine conditions, she and Langenstein topped out, clicked in, and skied back to basecamp in fine style.

According to Dupérier, the only record they could find of a team climbing the route and mountain was an Indian team that summited the West Face in 2023. The AAJ  has a 2026 entry documenting the 2023 and an earlier, 2006, climb on the face.

Who are Tiphaine and Boris?

If you are a THR regular, you may know Tiphaine and Boris. We wrote about their 2025 ski descent of Nanga Parbat in issue 2 of our journal, and some may know them as a team that organizes small-scale expeditions with grand objectives. Recently, Tiphaine was honored with a Piolet d’Or for “female mountaineering.” On the Piolet d’Or site, the committee highlights some of her ski achievements, many of them with Boris.

During this noisy era of mountain culture, when some folks seem to need most of the limited oxygen in the room, Tiphaine and Boris rarely draw attention to themselves. And when they do, it is with a style that shows their humility—a healthy, increasingly rare, and refreshing way to move through a life filled with mountains.

We spoke to Tiphaine on October 26, about a week after she and Boris returned from India. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

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THR: Tell us a bit about how this line came onto your radar?

Tiphaine: I saw this route on this face of Meru in 2024 when I was there with my partner to scout a kayaking project. Then I saw on Google Earth that there is an obvious corridor on the West Face of Meru Central. I started researching the face, then found this crazy photo from an Indian expedition in 2023, so I thought it might be worth a look. Plus, Meru, the surrounding peaks, Shivling, and Thalay Sagar—Meru is an iconic mountain, and with all the alpine history and crazy routes on the north side, I thought it might be fun to ski a mountain that is usually climbed.

We had tons of luck going there. A large snowstorm hit about 10 days before we arrived, and when we got there, there was snow at base camp at about 4300 meters, at the base of Shivling, and that was totally unexpected. Without this snowstorm, I have some doubt we could have completed this—but we arrived, and we could put skis on at basecamp.

THR: You were with your longtime friend and expedition partner, Boris. How is he doing, as I assume he was shaken by the death of Gee when they were on their ski-expedition to K6 in Pakistan. (Guillaume “Gee” Pierrel died in an avalanche on June 24, 2026.)

Tiphaine: He’s doing well, but he’s really still really impacted by Gee’s death. It was a lot for him. It was a lot to take. A bit too much. It will take ages to go away. And I was really surprised that he still agreed to go on an expedition with me this fall,

He just wanted to be sure I wasn’t expecting anything from him, and we agreed before leaving that if the conditions weren’t perfect, we wouldn’t move onto the mountain.

THR: After heading over and setting up an advance basecamp, did you ascend the same route you planned to descend?

Tiphaine: Well, usually with Boris, we don’t want to focus on one goal. We like to acclimatize on other peaks that are attractive to us. But this time, I guess we saw the conditions were there, so we decided to focus on just this one objective. We spent about six days at our advanced basecamp. We acclimatized slowly by going up on the glacier, scouting the base of the face, then going back down and moving up again. We wanted to scout like this because there is an ice fall in the middle of the face. It wasn’t too tricky, but I’m sure it will move in the next few years. I don’t know how it will move, but we were super lucky just to find a tiny stretch of ice.

We used essentially the same or a similar route as the 2023 Indian expedition. It was pretty straightforward climbing. It’s a ski route, so there’s nothing technical. It is just snow, or snow and ice, for most of the route. Our only real concern was a huge serac in the middle of the face above the icefall. But, on the descent, it was all skiable. We skied everything. I told Boris it’s been a long time since I had skied something so pleasant. It was super good skiing. Near-perfect steep skiing snow.

It was steep for the first 400 meters or so. It’s always a big question, but Boris and I agreed it was around 50 degrees. It’s a long steep slope at the top.

THR: How were you feeling up there? I assume you hadn’t been on skis in a while.

Tiphaine: I think you really need to trust yourself and to believe in your skills. To be confident. If you’re not in a good place, like if you don’t trust your abilities, I think it’s not that easy. But no, I was a bit more nervous because I didn’t really ski that much this spring. I switched to rock climbing pretty early in the season, and I didn’t ski. I wasn’t with Boris and Gee.

And so when I arrived in India, and when we climbed the final part, I was like, “Oh shit, it’s steep.” It had been nearly six months since I skied. We did a few turns while scouting the face, but that was it. I told Boris, “Wow, it’s steep. I’m just gonna take it slow.” And he was like, “We’ve done this many times. Don’t worry about it.”

I guess that the first 10 turns, I was very focused. I really didn’t want to fall because if you did, you couldn’t stop yourself. At least not for a long time. So I was a bit tense. But after those first turns, it was just pure joy. At the top, you could also take a bit of speed because it’s super wide, even though it was still steep skiing. It was really nice, and we were both super happy.

But the snow wasn’t soft. But it had super good grip.

THR: Is there anything else you want to mention?

Tiphaine: This was unexpected. When we left France, we were questioning our chances of success. We thought our chances of success were at best 30%. We were a bit worried because of the snowstorm. And when we arrived, it all looked good. And then it worked.

It was our 10th expedition together. But with Guillaume’s death in the spring, we took a moment on the summit to think about the other skiers we’ve lost, and all the skiers who didn’t have any chance that year. We thought about the people we knew. It was kind of a it was something— a nice personal moment.