National Park Paklenica, Part II (Climbing Chronicles #4)

in #climbing7 years ago (edited)

Dear fellow climbers and Steemians,

I love the outdoors and climbing in particular. I want to share this passion with you and maybe I’m able to lure you in, who knows? Before we start with the fourth story of the Climbing Chronicles, let me tell you a little more about the concept.

First and foremost the Climbing Chronicles will be stories telling you about climbing experiences that I had. But they won’t stop there because there is more to it, the climbing lifestyle, the beautiful nature, and the people you meet.


Rest Day in Zadar

In part one we got down to National Park Paklenica and enjoyed the first days of climbing while getting used to limestone. The weather was beautiful and therefore we climbed straight for the first four days! Exhausted we decided to do a rest day in Zadar, about a 45 minutes drive from National Park Paklenica.

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Zadar is a harbor city with a beautiful ancient city center and a lot of great restaurants and cafes.

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The narrow alleys of Zadar are build by limestone stone and are polished, to the extent that they look like a mirror, by the thousands of people walking across them every day. Walking through those narrow alleys on a beautiful autumn day, you get reminded of the close neighborhood of Croatia to Italy. And this is not by chance, as Zadar was part of the Venetian empire from the 15th to the 18th century. Even the pizza here tastes amazing!

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Exhausted by all the walking we grabbed a beer and set down at the harbor beside the sea organ and listened to it. The sea organ is unique and one of the tourist attractions of Zadar. When the waves hit the harbor's wall they press water into a construction underneath which presses air up through organ pipes. When the waves now role along the harbor's wall you can hear the ocean sing! It's an incredible experience.

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When going back to the car I almost ruined the beautiful day we just had. When pulling out the car keys I didn't grab them right, so they fell out of my hand. Remember, we were just beside the harbor's wall! They slid and slid and ... stopped literally centimeters before the edge! My heartbeat stopped for a second and beat with relief even stronger afterward.

Getting some climbing done

Relaxed and recovered from the key shock we started climbing again the next day. In the morning we went to a sector called Olymp which is a thirty-minute scramble into a side arm of Velika Paklenica. On the way, I made one of the most beautiful pictures of the trip! Which I also chose as the opening picture for the first post.

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The arch is also a climbing sector called "Hram" but was not the goal today. We kept on going up and got to Olymp! It is basically a flat, vertical/slightly overhanging wall with ruff little structures and dominant cracks which remind of lightning. One line through was called Had (6a). A line using all the best holds of the cracks, about 25 meters long and really pumpy!

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Me leading the route 'Had'.
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My wife following top rope.

After a short lunch break, a friend and I teamed up to do a multi-pitch route called 'Danaja' (5b) at the right side of the so-called Stup of Anica Kuk. The route is 120 meters long and divided into three pitches.

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Here you can see our goal. If you look closely you can see the climber atop the Stup, this is where we want to go (from the other side though).

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The first pitch feels like proper alpine climbing: not to hard, scattered features and not to much protection. The second one was interesting face climbing and probably the hardest one (hard when you compare it to 5b sport climbing) with some weird moves. The third pitch was an almost 50-meter long pitch leading around a corner after the first 15 meters. This meant that I couldn't see or here my climbing partner and you are thrown back to your intuition what a pulling on the rope means.

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It went all right, so after one and a half hours of climbing we topped out, sitting on top of the Stup. What a feeling with the strong Bora wind blowing in your face and a 120-meter drop all around.

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If you look closely you can find the part of the picture I use for my blog. :-) As we started late and the sun was already down we had to hurry a little to get back down before it got completely dark. Walking down we realized that we were really hungry! Luckily just at the entrance of the National Park, there is a beautiful restaurant called Marasovic which serves some delicious seafood and an amazing carbonara! What an incredible day!!!

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Enough for today! The next time I take you climbing to a smaller crack outside of Velika Paklenica, called Vaganac and we will see the unbelievably beautiful gem of nature called Plitvice Lakes.

I wish you all a happy New Year!

Ps: If you think, National Park Paklenica is familiar to you, it might be that you get reminded of Winnetou! The films were shot there!!! :-)


If you haven't read part one you find it here.

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Very nice man! My grandfather was from Zadar so it's a special city for me and will always be.

And again, you got me thinking about climbing :D

Really? So then you must know the city pretty well! It is so beautiful...

:-) Perfect, if that is what my post provoke, then I achieved my goal!!! In my head it's always going like: 'Climbing! Climbing! Climbing!' ;-)

I hope you saw, that I replied to your comment in part one.

I actually don't know it so well. Or at least not as i would like to. Zadar grew in the last decade really fast. And it consumed a lot of the villages that used to be "in the country" some kilometers away from Zadar.

Hm, that is interesting. Of course, there is the contrast between the historic center and the rest of Zadar, but or me, it looked quite homogenous. This is how you can be deceived.

Great story @HaTo. One of the things I always tell people about why I love climbing so much is because I get a chance to see these beautiful landscapes, from am amazing perspective, with my favorite people -- the wind and 120m exposed ridge must have been breathtaking. I still remember how I felt, on my trip last summer, when I woke up to a sunrise view from my hammock and how the haze from the fires in the distance made the sky a deep orange colour. .

Thanks for sharing these -- I think you just blew my mind and made me shift my perspective on how to tell my stories as well.

Friends, nature, adventure, fun, fun, and fun. That's what it's about! :-)

Standing there on top was such an amazing feeling. You just live in the moment! These memories are burnt into your mind. They help keep up the spirit while training hard or when you're sitting in the office for too long. ;-)

If I can touch you with my stories, I'm more than happy. Shifting your perspectives is more than I hoped for.

Hey man. I'm looking into steemauto.com and some of the curation trails that are around. is climbing-trail listed on there? I'd love to start supporting the climbing community more. I took a quick peek last night but I didn't see it... I was pretty sleep though.

Hey man, I'd love any support. :-) I set up a trail via streemian.com. There is a nice “how to”-post by @scrooger. I'll check out steemauto.com and set up a trail there as well. Another possibility https://autosteem.learnthis.ca/ by @unipsycho. After login in, you can go to setup, vote filters, smart vote copying and follow the @Climbing-Trail.

At the moment, it seems that all those services are facing issues because there are some changes to nodes, APIs or whatever. I don't fully understand it up to this point.

You can also share the introducemyself-post by the @Climbing-Trail with interested people to tell them what is done.

Ich war vor vielen Jahren in Zadar. Fand die Stadt sehr schön. Klettern war ich allerdings nicht 😉

Kann ich dich mal fragen:
Ich gebe auch die Steemworld Map Daten unter meinen Posts ein. Wird auch eingetragen. Bei mir steht aber der Code dann unter meinem Post, bei dir z.B. und auch bei anderen nicht. Wie machst du den Code unsichtbar? 😄

Ja, die Stadt ist toll. Wenn du dort nicht klettern warst, dann wird es Zeit. ;-)

Ich erzeuge die Daten direkt auf der Website steemitworldmap.com. Dort einfach den Schalter 'Explore' umlegen auf 'Code'. Den gewünschten Namen eingeben und in deinen Post einfügen. Der dort enthaltene Präfix [ \ \ ]: (ohne Leerzeichen) versteckt dann den Code.

Looks like a great place to go climbing :)
Noted for potential upcoming trips!

You should definitely go there. The place is so beautiful, the climbing is abundant, easily accessible and just prefect, the people are friendly, the food is delicious and finding a nice place to stay easy. :-)

Great photography. I'd love to visit that place sometimes soon

Thank you! You really should. Dalmatia is so beautiful and Zadar, as well as National Park Paklenica, are only a few of the possibilities to visit!

Zadar was What I really wanted to stop by while traveling. but couldn't. It's awesome!!

Thank you. So you have a reason to come back to Croatia. :-)

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Hey, I noticed this one didn't show up in the post, I think it may be because of the brackets in the description, can you try removing them and see if that fixes it?

As this is an amazing post and it would be a waste not to have it on the map, haha!

Removed them, seems to work now. Could you give me a short notice? Thanks :-)

Works indeed! I'll also add it to the list of fixes we need to make, haha!

Thank you. And thank you for the feature on the map. :-) The @steemitworldmap is amazing!!!

Very cool! Looks awesome.

Thanks :-) It is absolutely amazing!

I love here. Where the mountains meet the sea I did a lot of walking around here but I had no climbing gear unfortunately.

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