Peter Schön — Caucasus

For a long time, I had dreamed of skiing a perfect line on a high peak in some remote corner of our planet. In August 2010, Anders Ödman and I traveled to the Kyrgyz Tien Shan. We climbed to the slopes of the remote Pik Pobeda East (6,762 m), moving through a world of mountains, overwhelming in scale and size.

I summited alone, with Anders waiting at the last camp. The subsequent ski descent down the NE ridge (up to 50°+) became the realization of a long-held dream—an almost perfect line on a truly big mountain, mostly unnoticed by the media. I had no GoPro, video, or drone—nothing to distract me from a deeply personal experience—just a Contax T3 and several rolls of film.

Looking through the negatives and prints from this adventure today is like reading a small storybook.

In June 2010, Boris Avdeev and I stood on top of Shkhara, a 5193 m high, challenging summit in the Caucasus. Shkhara is the highest point of the Bezengi Wall, a 12 km long mountain massif largely above 4500 m along the Georgian-Russian border. Shkhara also marks the eastern end of the wall and is either the last or first summit of the Bezengi traverse – a traverse of the entire massif over multiple 4500-5000 m summits and one of the greatest alpine challenges in the Caucasus and Europe. A few weeks later, Boris writes to me - “one day, we have to do the traverse”. This day will never come. Boris perishes in an avalanche in April of 2012. We were to climb Janga-Tau (5058 m), a remote peak seldom climbed in the central part of the Bezengi Wall, a few weeks later. After two months in a mental hole, full of doubt about the sense of going to the mountains, and filled with a lack of motivation and self-discipline, I travelled to Georgia again. On 22 June 2012, I summit Janga-Tau with Robert Koschitzki. As I sit on the summit and watch Robert coming up, I look to great Shkhara rising behind him, where Boris and I stood two years earlier, and then look behind me to the remaining summits of the Bezengi wall to the West. I wonder if I will ever make the traverse. Maybe, one day...