Adam Ondra 8c first ascent

Adam Ondra has made the first ascent of Vymena Manzelek 11- (F8c) at Moravsky Kras in the Czech Republic.

PlanetMountain

September 2006

There seems no stopping Adam Ondra. After travelling across Europe for some swift hard repeats in Germany's Frankenjura at the start of September (such as Sundance Kid, Glocke 11-) Ondra now checks in with the first ascent of "Vymena Manzelek" 11- (F8c) at his local Moravsky Kras in the Czech Republic.

The 20m route is in fact a completely natural and logical combination of two existing routes, VyvolenÃ (10+ UIAA) and Big Brother (10 UIAA) and the interesting thing about this climb is that it is, to our knowledge, far and away the hardest first ascent by a 13 year-old ever.

Seeing that the Czech Republic seems to produce a never-ending list of high quality climbers (read Tomas Mrazek, Adam Ondra, Martin Stranik and Ondra Benes, to name just a few) we decided to ask Jiri Siki of Czechclimbing.com to give us some more info about their limestone potential:

"Basically we have two main limestone areas in the Czech Republic. One lies circa 28 km SE of Prague and is called Srbsko. The walls are spread along a lazy river with many different sectors, each with a very different character. It is one of the most popular and largest limestone crags in the Czech Republic, and offers many hard routes as well as routes for beginners. It's definitely worth a visit and had 500+ routes. The second, larger area is located near Brno, in the east. It's called Moravsky Kras and it's quite a large area with nine sub areas and perhaps 1000 routes. The limestone here, unlike the Frankenjura, has more edges then pockets and the climbing is very technical. Climbing has a long tradition here and unsurprisingly the rock is slightly polished in the more popular areas."

photo: Adam Ondra making the first ascent of Vymena Manzelek 8c at Moravsky Kras, Czech Republic