Calendar of expeditions

In February despite the very dry conditions in the wall we managed with Jacek Czech to climb “Colton-MacIntyre” route in good time of 16 h. The mountain action in all took us 32h non- stop: Start in bivaco Leshaux and finish in the valley at the Italian side of the massif. Jacek completed that way the Alpine trylogy, the North Faces of: Matterhorn, Eiger and Grandes Jorasses.

Due to pandemic my climbing activity was restricted to local climbing regions. In Tatras I manged to climb demanding artificial climbing route “Polskie Muppet Show” VI A3 on “Mniszek” with Kacper Kłoda. with the same partner I did “Długosz -Popko” in Kocioł Kazalnicy (all possible straightening variants at M7). At the end of the season I did with Jacek Czech Junior “Superdirettisima” M6+ on the north face of MSW. I also learned a lot during retreats from the route “Długosz” on Kazalnica and from solo attempt on the “Filar Kazalnicy” on the same wall.

Three weeks of my stay on Greek Island was very fruitfull, I did many sport routes up to grade 7c, RP and 7a+ OS.

Cassin route on Piz Badile was my dream since I read (long time ago)Gaston Rebuffat book: ” Starlight and Storm” similarly the six other routes described by him as “Great North Face Walls in the Alpes”. Despite the passage of time this are still a serious big wall climbing endeavours and the legends have a solid base as we painfully discovered loosing hour and a half trying to find the bold route in the wall. I admire Ricardo Cassin and his partners for delineating this beautiful route. Some facts: we started at 4:20 and after 4 rappels we found ourselves at the bottom of the valley, we wanted to start at the base of the wall as the first climbers did, not traversing into the wall as contemporary climbers usually start the route. At 7:30 we stared the lower part of the wall by the route “Another day in Paradise” at 10:15 we joined the traverse that starts today’s Cassin Route. At 20:30 (much later than anticipated) we were on the summit of Piz Badile. After comfortable night in Bivacco Alfredo Reaelli it took us 5,5 h to rappel downal the way to our tent at the base of the wall.

This was part of the climbing-paraglading project that initially assumed climbing few dolomites classics and paragliding from the summits. We managed to fly down from Marmolada and climb among others the Cassin Route on the North Face of Cima Grande di Lavaredo. Unfortunately my accident and broken leg forced us to end of this endeavour earlier than planned.

See the movie from the expedition

Lightweight, two members expedition, its goal was to lead new route in pure alpine style on the North-West Face of Annapurna. Due to very harsh weather conditions, the team did not managed to accomplish the acclimatization climb on Langtang Lirung – 7227m. Around 6300 was the final achieved height. Due to lack of sufficient acclimatization the team dropped the attempt to the main goal of the expedition .

During this short climbing trip I managed to do some pleasant ice routes up to WI6. The most difficult route I did during this trip was “Rubenzahl” – WI6.

The goal of this small, lightweight expedition was the exploration of the Gasherbrum Massif and the final effect was the light style (without fix ropes, without oxygen and without HAPS) new variant on the West Face of Gasherbrum II.

Short, spontaneous trip to Kenya to climb the diamond couloir on Mount Kenya. Unfortunately we were late and there was no more ice, but we managed to climb and summit in very good time (2h from the start of the wall to the summit) the second highest mountain in Africa.