This year I planned an expedition to the relatively unknown Kyrgyzstan.
I heard about the region because a lot of well known climbers like Lynn Hill, Greg Child, Steph Davis and Stephan Siegrist have climbed there but we still don’t know almost anything about the region.
We were surprised because is a very nice country and really unspoilt.
Our main goal was to climb as much granite as possible in light alpine style.
We chose the Aksu valley in the Karavshin region on the southwest part of the country. There were five members of our team, Andrej, Tina, David and me all from Slovenia and James from Canada.
The base camp was idyllic, around 2900m above sea level, on grass near the river and big granite walls like there is in Yosemite one or two hours away.
The weather wasn’t very good but we managed to get a lot of climbing in. We also spent some very beautiful moments with the friendly local shepherds even if we didn’t speak their language. They speak Kyrgyz and some Russian (some words are similar to Slovene language).
Our longest route was 38. pitches long on Peak 1000 York, 4.520 m a.s.l. 5.c to 6.c. The last 12 pitches we climbed in a snow storm. We made a bivouac climbing up and one rappelling down (the rope get stuck at least ten times…)
Tina, Andrej and I also went to climb the famous Perestroika crack on Peak Slesova, but I had to stay on a shelf 12 pitches from the top because I felt really unwell. Andrej and Tina climbed to the top, Andrej made it free, 7b+.
We also climbed some smaller peaks. At the end of our expedition I managed to climb 65 pitches and Tina did a record number of 78, so we were very happy with the result.
On our way back we had to walk 45 km in one day! But I decided to ride the last 25. A very nice experience.
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