Climbing Northern Ushba - one of the most difficult ascents in Caucasus mountains скачать в хорошем качестве

Climbing Northern Ushba - one of the most difficult ascents in Caucasus mountains

Ushba is one of the most notable peaks of the Caucasus Mountains. It is located in the Svaneti region of Georgia, just south of the border with Russia, so technically our base camp was located in Russia. Although it does not rank in the 10 highest peaks of the range, Ushba is known as the "Matterhorn of the Caucasus" for its picturesque, spire-shaped double summit. Due to its steep profile and unstable weather some consider Ushba as one of the most difficult ascents in the Caucasus. It took us 31 hours of non stop climbing to summit it from the base camp and get back. Sure we're not the fastests mountaineers, but we've made it. Here are some video fragments of the endevour. -- More on the climb: It takes ~two days of hiking and climbing the glacier to get to the plateau, where we made a base camp (4000 m). Getting there was rather dangerous, with shooting stones and crevasses. One of the fallings rocks barely missed our heads as it ricocheted horizontally from the mountain. I literally saw the world in bullet time like in the Matrix movie and dodged the incoming rock. I guess we were lucky. The summit itself had a large section of steep wall of ice. While it was not so vertical and technically difficult as some frozen waterfalls might get, still it was very long and exhausting, not to mention the effects of being in 4500+ meters heights. A falling stone cut one of our ropes down below, so instead of 60 meters we only had ~45 meters rope left. Thus we had to make a lot of stops and it tooks us at least 10 pitches of iceclimbing alone. To make matters even more challenging, the most experienced teammate had some problems with his crampons, so I had to lead most of the pitches. Initially I was really happy with that - I love ice climbing. But after 10 hours of climbing nonstop, my energy resources were rapidly depleting and I really had to put lots of effort to concentrate and continue. Even though the ice wall required way more time than expected, we decided to continue our ascent through the ridge, totally aware that we will not make it back down before dark. Weather forecast was good, visibility clear, we had headlights, so we continued. We were going up and down several times along the ridge for another ~4 hours. Eventually we summited (4694 m.) ~16 hours after leaving the Base Camp, and got back to BC after 31 total hours of climbing.