On Malaysia's high point, Mount Kinabalu (13,435 feet), lurks a climber's paradise, a granite plateau beetling with unclimbed aiguilles and rent by a 2,000-foot-deep canyon. On February 11, the Australian climber Logan Barber, accompanied by the Americans Boer Zhao and Brad Stapperfenne, put up the three-pitch Alpine Birdy (5.12b), a mostly-trad line on the flanks of St. Andrews peak, one of Kinabalu's many spires. The business comes on the final ropelength, with palmy moves up a blank corner and insecure fractioning throughout. The second-pitch arête had an unprotected friction crux above a ledge (a "complete headf-k," says Barber), but the team re-routed and retrobolted this it. "This is the youngest granite in the world," Barber noted. "The rock doesn't have good crack systems, so a lot of the climbing is on suspect flakes." Barber adds that the potential here is limitless. 

Climbing sat down with the team to pick their brains about this magnificent and wild place, and their new route.

Where are you from? Who are the other members of your party, and where are they from?
Boer: I'm from Florida, but I started rock climbing when I lived and worked in Maryland. There are two other members in our party: Brad Stapperfenne who is a North Carolina boy, and Logan Barber who is from Perth, Australia.
Logan: Logan here. I am from Perth in Western Australia. It is one of the most isolated cities in the world and is super flat which is why I don’t spend much time here anymore!
Boer: We all met while working as climbing guides for Chinaclimb in Yangshuo, China. 

MS: Why Mount Kinabalu? How did you find out about it?
Logan: One drunken night in Yangshuo, China we were sport bashing (even though that’s all we were doing at the time) and decided we needed to move on to some granite walls (after a month or two in Thailand sport climbing of course!).
Brad: Logan had seen pictures of Mt. Kinabalu before and looked it up online to show us. After seeing the granite summit plateau with its spires scattered about, we were hooked.
Logan: We noticed some info on Low's Gully which was this mythical 1km deep chasm through the granite plateau of Mt. Kinabalu. That started the interest, and it grew from there.
Boer: They talked me into going with them to photograph the climbing there. 

MS: What does it take to get there? This looks like a very remote place? What brought you there in the first place?
Logan: What brought you there in the first place?
You fly from KL in Malaysia to Kota Kinabalu which is more known for its amazing diving. From Kota you get a 2-hour bus to the Mt. Kinabalu base headquarters, and from there, there is a tourist trail to the top that takes a day and a half with packs. You need special permission from the Park Headquarters to leave the track so we had to apply for a permit to explore the spires on the summit plateau.
Brad: Mt. Kinabalu is actually a huge tourist destination for Malaysia. Mt. Kinabalu is very similar to Mt. Fuji in this regard. There is a tourist trail that leads from the gate (1500m) to the summit on Lowe’s Peak (4095m). If I remember correctly, we were told there can be as many as 200 people on the mountain per day during the high season. The vast majority of the tourist hike to the summit and down in two days. On the western plateau there is small hut where we stayed. The Gurka Hut is only about 1km from the tourist trail. Very few tourists stray from the trail, so despite the close distance we did not see anyone else the while were we staying in the hut. 

MS: How long were you guys there for, and was your main objective this route?
Brad: We didn’t have one main objective. We went up there knowing there was potential for first ascents and some routes with a few aid moves we could most likely free. This is the mentality we went up with. We definitely wanted to put a route up, but we just needed to find a good line.