Begehungen in Kirgisistan

Holiday grades?

Good rock, great climbing. Shame about all the bolts

10 pitches. Bailed from storm. All pitches climbed were super high quality.

Bailed from afternoon thunderstorm. Bottom half grass, top half was splitter

To P8 then another weather bail. After P2, rock was superb Chamonix style orange granite

Onsight through crux, then carried on up to the final hard pitch which we didn't have OW gear for so rapped.

First alpine route. I remember having altitude sickness and feeling dizzy and uncomfortable on the way back.

I think this is what we climbed? Google translate says this is Baichechekei so I guess so? We did the route with heaps of ice climbing followed by a couple rock climbing pitches at the end, although I don't think we did a traverse as the route name suggests, we kind of went straight up? This was really difficult. The approach went by pretty quickly for me but I really started to feel it when the ice climbing started. I was incredibly cold for the entirety of the ice pitches. I remember the temperature being -36C with windchill factored in. My hands really stung from banging them into the ice while trying to get my axe in quickly. We kept trying to move around at the belay spots because we'd lost a lot of feeling in our digits. This is the route where Luke got frostbite in his big toe. I think this might be the most uncomfortable I've ever been in my life. I think we still had pretty high spirits relative to the situation. After the peak my blood sugar dropped really low for the walk out and I was walking like a zombie, stumbling and sliding on loose rocks. Quite dangerous. My altitude sickness had also come back which was giving me a throbbing headache. Winter mountaineering is hard. We got a massive serving of this delicious Russian desert when we got back. Wow that was yum. This experience has given me an enormous amount of respect for the pain tolerance of elite mountaineers.