EXTREME climber Leo Houlding, from Staveley, has reached the summit of Spectre on his trip to the Antarctic mountain.

Alongside Jean Burgun and Mark Sedon, Leo reached the summit of the Gothic Mountain via a route on the north side of the mountain.

Although the team’s original intention had been to attempt a new route on the south face, the very variable weather and the difficulties of their journey into the area, limited the time available for climbing. After fully assessing options on site, the team made the decision that their primary objective should be to get all three members to the summit via the “route of least resistance”.

Starting at 8:00am on Thursday, December 7, the team set out from camp to repeat the original Mugs and Edmund Stump route on the north side of the Spectre. The route that they eventually climbed followed much of that, but was also in part new. It was a fully committed push that was very much touch and go at times, always with the threat that a deterioration in the weather would force them to abandon their climb. However, after an extremely arduous ascent, they reached the summit around midnight, and after a quick descent got back to camp safely over 20 hours after setting off.

Because of the nature of their expedition, the team has little time left for additional exploration and climbing before they have to start their long journey home (they still have over 1,700km to travel – man hauling and kite skiing with 100kg pulks), which makes a viable attempt on the south face an impossibility. Therefore, they have decided to focus attention on their secondary objective - a skyline traverse of the Organ Pipe Peaks.

"We have travelled so long, and worked so hard, to get here," said Leo on his expedition blog. "I have schemed, trained, planned and grafted with so much energy to get us to this magnificent mountain.

"But we must accept we are at mercy of the weather. Already this far out, and with such large scale objectives, we need some stability to make a safe attempt at anything."