trip reports
Paklenica, Croatia
April 2008 | Report by: Bryan Rynne
Present:
- Bryan Rynne
- Patrick Winter
For our usual Easter(ish) climbing trip Patrick and I decided to try Paklenica Gorge, in the Paklenica national park on the Adriatic coast in Croatia. We had read various good reports on this, and Francis Winter and Dave Amos went last year and raved about it. We flew to Zagreb airport, which is about 280K from Paklenica, but there is a motorway almost all the way which was virtually empty when we were on it, and so the drive only took about 3 hours (there are nearer airports, but none that combined price and timing so well at that time). Patrick found a very pleasant apartment in Paklenica village, but despite having a kitchen we ate out every night. Although not many places were open at the time of year, the food was good, mainly fish (at least for me, Patrick's vegetarian options were a bit more limited).
The climbing was excellent. We climbed exclusively on the Anica Kuk face, the most spectacular venue in the gorge (see photo), containing some tremendous climbing on tough, steep, 350m routes (if you like that sort of thing). The only drawback was that there were rather too many off-width cracks and corners for my taste - Patrick usually got assigned these to lead, and an excellent job he did with them (my `technique' was more along the lines of wedging a fat bit of my body in the crack, letting my legs dangle in mid-air, and proceeding to grumble bitterly about the lack of holds). The walk in to Anica Kuk is about 45 minutes, along a good path (well surfaced for the large number of walkers heading up the gorge), and there is also a fairly good descent path from the summit - about 1.5 hours back to the car. The weather was fairly good, although the locals kept telling us how much better it usually is at that time of year. We got a few mid-afternoon showers, which usually didn't last long or amount to much, but could be a bit worrying when you are 6 or 7 pitches up, with the crux still to come.
All in all, a very good venue. A slight word of warning though, the climbs are ludicrously undergraded, and although the routes are bolted, on the `easier' bits the bolts can be a long way apart. We carried a light rack, and used it. To do most of the routes we did you need to be comfortable leading HVS 5a at least, and there are lots of much harder bits than that.