Photos: Alaska climbing highlights of 2015

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Skiy DeTray warms up in the sun after sleeping atop this snow mushroom, high on the east face of the Moose's Tooth during an ascent of a route called Illusions of the Raven.

Some of Alaska's greatest adventures and physical accomplishments happen in remote mountains far from the public eye. Each spring, as the sun returns and the winter passes, some of the world's finest alpinists flock to Alaska to test themselves against our state's giant mountains and brutal weather in a quest for adventure and exploration.

In May of this year, Alaska Dispatch News published a report of the first ascents -- climbs of peaks or routes to summits that had never been done before -- accomplished in Alaska during 2014 and the earliest parts of 2015. Continuing what I hope becomes a tradition, some notable ascents of 2015 are chronicled here.

Oddly enough, there was relatively little action in the typically crowded area around Denali, but a relatively large number of new routes were put up on the state's most remote and least-visited ranges. Three new routes were climbed in the Revelations, two in the Neacolas, and another in each of the Kichatnas, the Hayes Range, the Stikine, the Arrigetch Peaks, the Coast Range, the Hidden Mountains and the St. Elias Range.

Four different climbs from 2015 were listed in the previous article: two were in the Revelation Mountains -- a British team of Peter Graham and Ben Silvestre climbed the east face of Jezebel Peak (9,650 feet), and Anchorage climbers Clint Helander and John Giraldo did the first ascent of a mountain known only by its elevation, Peak 9,304. Silvestre and Graham named their route Hoar of Babylon, "to keep in line with the area's biblical theme and the British tradition of mixed climbing puns," according to Graham.

Read more: With courage and skill, climbers established several firsts in Alaska mountains this year

Every year, the number of unclimbed summits shrinks bit by bit — in Alaska and across the globe.

That's why it was noteworthy that 12,388-foot Mount Malaspina in Canada's Yukon Territory, the highest named but unclimbed summit in North America, fell from the ranks of virgin peaks when exploratory climbers Camilo Rada of Chile and Natalia Martinez of Argentina stood on top of the 12,388-foot peak, not far from the Alaska border, in August.

Read more: Reaching the biggest unclimbed summit in North America