Rock/Ice Climbing In Slovenia - Climbing Lessons from the School of Tomaz Humar

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Outside Magazine June 2002

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Climbing Lessons from the School of Tomaz Humar
#1 You must merge with the living energy of the mountain. #2 That nagging headache may be the result of an avalanche that has just crushed your tent. #3 In order to endure the most dire physical suffering at 25,000 feet, you must inhabit other dimensions free from pain. (Note: Pain returns upon reentry into the body.) #4 You will be compelled to ascend the most harrowing face in the Himalayas, alone. #5 Go home, break both of your legs, and start all over again.

By Peter Maass


	Humar through a frosted window in the Julian Alps, December 2001 (Antonin Kratochvil)

MY CHAKRAS ARE SHOT. I know because Tomaz Humar has just checked them.

We're getting ready for a hike in Slovenia's Kamnik-Savinja Alps, sitting in Tomaz's Volkswagen Golf in a patch of forest below the limestone face of 6,014-foot Mount Rzenik, where Tomaz first learned to climb. He pulls a tear-shaped pendant from his pocket and swings it over a small, colorful chart shaped like a dartboard and overlaid with numbers. When he checks my chakras, the pendant hovers at the low thirties. Tomaz checks his own: sixties. He considers the results.

"We don't have much time," he says, "but I'll cleanse you."

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See more of Antonin Kratochvil's photos of Tomaz Homar and images of Humar's climbs here.

For an exclusive guide to adventure travel in Tomaz Humar's stomping ground, click here.

Before embarking on any venture with Tomaz Humar, your chakras should be in overdrive. With more than 1,200 ascents to his credit and 60 solos of new routes, the 33-year-old Slovenian has earned a reputation as the best—or maybe just the craziest—high-altitude climber in the world. Tomaz takes risks no other climber would consider; he endures suffering best classified as biblical. At mountaineering conferences where he gives his slide show and lecture, you can hear the collective gasp of the world's top alpinists when they look at what he's done in the planet's toughest ranges, particularly the Himalayas.

Here's Tomaz on 26,504-foot Annapurna I in Nepal in 1995, summiting alone in a blizzard as his expedition leader yells over the radio for him to turn back. Here he is in 1997, downclimbing the west face of another Nepalese peak, 25,770-foot Nuptse, in the dark, after his partner was blown off the summit (and before Tomaz accidentally set his own tent on fire). Here he is on his American vacation in 1998, scaling Reticent Wall, one of El Capitan's hardest routes, on his first big-wall climb. Here is the suicidal route he took up Dhaulagiri's south face in



	Map by Equator Graphics

1999—equipped with just three camming devices, four ice screws, five pitons, and a single 148-foot rope. Here he is midclimb on Dhaulagiri, prying the filling out of an infected tooth with his Swiss Army knife.

The south face of Nepal's 26,810-foot Dhaulagiri is among the longest and highest faces in the world, a concave nightmare of loose granite and overhanging seracs that starts at 13,123 feet and rises another 13,000 terrifying feet to the summit. Two Eastern European teams had made ascents of the face: a Yugoslavian group in 1981 and a Polish expedition in 1986. Tomaz soloed it, on a new route, climbing long stretches without any protection at all. The mountaineering world was stunned. A Slovenian kid on his eighth Himalayan expedition had pulled off the most audacious achievement in a decade.

In Slovenia, a tiny Eastern European nation whose two million citizens love adventure sports, Tomaz became a god. He wrote a popular coffee-table memoir, No Impossible Ways; was named 1999 athlete of the year; and received the Honorary Emblem of Freedom from President Milan Kucan. Today, if you send a postcard to "Tomaz Humar, Slovenia," he'll receive it.

Nearly a year after Dhaulagiri, however, Tomaz suffered an accident that almost killed him. On the evening of October 30, 2000, less than two weeks before he was due to give the keynote address at the annual meeting of the American Alpine Club in Denver, the man who'd just established climbing's new benchmark stumbled into a ten-foot construction pit.

Tomaz was building a house in Kamnik for his family—his wife, Sergeja, their ten-year-old daughter, Ursa, and six-year-old son, Tomaz. In the early-evening darkness, Tomaz was taking care of last-minute chores with the construction foreman and didn't notice his future basement until he fell into it. When he came to, at the bottom of the pit, he felt something heavy lying on him. It was his own right leg. His left heel and right femur were shattered. He almost died from blood loss. The surgeons who operated on him thought he might never walk again. As for climbing—forget it.



	The climber back home in Slovenia (Antonin Kratochvil)

Now, a year and six operations later, Tomaz stands at the base of Rzenik, his shattered bones fused by titanium rods and plates, looking not at all like a great climber. His face is not weatherbeaten; he is neither lanky nor muscular. What he mostly looks like is a Wal-Mart assistant manager. Still, there's no mistaking his drive. He only recently traded his wheelchair for crutches, but their rubber tips are already worn down from manic and punishing use; Humar's crutches need crutches. It is with these that he intends to hobble up the rockfall below Reznik's face.

But first there's my chakra problem.

"Don't move," Tomaz says.

He traces his right hand over my body, an inch or two above my flesh. He flicks his hand, as though shaking water from it. Then he repeats the routine with his left hand—without the flicking, because this time he's putting good mojo in. His mojo.

He measures me again: My chakras are in the forties. "That's better," he says. "If we had more time I could do more, but it takes a lot of energy from me, and we should get going."

We head through the forest, Tomaz leading. His lurching gait is painful to watch, a cross between Frankenstein and a penguin. This is his first walk in the mountains since his fall. He has not told his doctors or his wife, because if he slips he goes straight back into the wheelchair.

"Look," Tomaz says. "Look at that rock!"

He points a crutch at a chunk of quartz jutting out of the ground. He bends down and places a hand on the stone.

"It has a lot of energy," he says. "I can feel it."

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Peter Maass is the author of Love Thy Neighbor, a memoir of covering the war in Bosnia.

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