Hi there, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Cloud Base Mayhem. Got a really special one for you today. My guests are Chrigel Maurer and Peter Von Cannell, who just completed, quite a bit ahead of schedule, their X-Peaks challenge. Many of you, I'm sure, followed that on the social medias. I did every day. It was just amazing. But they set out from their hometown in Frutigen, the north side of the Rhone Valley near Interlaken, and summited all 82 4,000-meter peaks in the Alps, and they did it with incredible style. Their style was to do all of this via foot or paraglider, and all of it connected.
And so they were allowed to go home in periods of really bad weather, but only use public transport, and wherever they started that journey back home was where they would start when they came back to the project. In all, it took 51 days. They were only able to top land nine of the peaks and only fly off 14, so there was quite a bit of mountaineering involved. There was lots and lots of bad weather. And in the podcast, we get to hear some of their adventure. Obviously, it would take hours and hours and hours to hear, all of it, but we heard about how the project was, how it became a dream and how it was, how Peter kind of imagined it and then reached out to Chrigel, his friend,
and how they put it together over the last year in kind of preparation, both from the mountaineering side and the flying side. We hear about their gear, the trials and tribulations, and the magic moves and the scary times and the food, the all-important food. It's just great. It's a great story and a very legendary trip. This is quite inspiring and a lot of fun to watch from afar and a lot more fun to hear kind of the more intimate side from these two. They were together in this, so we'll release this now as an audio podcast, as I always do, but I have the video as well. So at some point here, we'll release the video portion as well so you can see.
The two of them and all the smiling that went into this talk. So without further delay, please enjoy this talk with Chrigel and Peter about their X-Peaks expedition in the Alps this summer. Cheers.
Guys, Peter, Chrigel, thank you for taking the time to talk with us about your epic adventure, the X-Peaks 82 summits. Chrigel, you and I had a chance to talk about this just before you set off, at the World Cup in Interlaken and in Grindelwald, and you seemed less optimistic then that you would be able to get this done in this period of time, but you guys did it in less time than you originally thought. I was following very closely on the social media. What an epic adventure. It just looked amazing.
Yeah, thanks to you, Kevin, to speak about. And yeah, in preparation time, I was a bit unsure, especially about the snow conditions in the Alps this year. But when we start, we saw it's possible to do some peaks and then we go step by step. And finally, it was fast because we got really good weather, especially in the end, and then it was good fun.
It was interesting. I was just out in Turkey last week for the World Cup and everybody was talking about how bad the weather has been in Europe for flying this summer, this season. And I just read Tarquin's article that's not out yet, but he was kind enough to show that to me. It sounded like you had a lot of bad weather, but what was kind of interesting is that you were able to often be above the weather. In other words, above where we typically fly, you were above cloud base because you were so tall and that allowed you to do things that maybe you hadn't anticipated.
Maybe you have to ask some of us to know where we have to answer. Yeah. But yeah. And the weather was really special for us as a paragliding pilot because below the conditions was not too good to fly big distances in cross country. But above to fly from peak to peak, it was often quite good and it was not really too windy and it was not too cloudy. We had no thunderstorms, so conditions was okay.
Peter, I understand this was your concept to begin with. How did this all... come together? How did it happen in your mind? Well, sometimes I ask myself, what can I do actually? What I am good at? And looking back on my life, there's not so much. It's like two things. I'm a good paragliding pilot and I'm a competent alpinist. So I tried to find some way to combine those two disciplines. And so first I started thinking a bit smaller. I aimed for the 48 peaks in Switzerland.
And then I asked myself, what would be the maximum, the full blast of such a plan? And I came up with the 82 peaks. Next, I asked myself, what would be the most elegant way, the most adventurous way to do that project? And I thought, well, if we could do it autonomously, so without external support, and just carrying all the gear with us, this would be very cool. But I didn't have a clue whether this would be realistic at all. And so I dared to write a text to Krigel and asked him if we could.
He would be interested in doing something like that this year. And I... I literally ran in open doors with Krigel because he had similar thoughts about mountaineering and combining with paragliding. And so this was our starting point. And from there on, we just started defining cool rules for our project. And Krigel, when Peter reached out, you were still kind of in the throes of your Lyme disease issue this winter, as I understand. Was that still just, ah, I'll get over this. We'll make it work. This is something I have to do. Or did you feel pretty positive that you would be healthy by then?
Yeah. The time he asked me, it was July 3rd. And it was just before I got sick. So I said yes before. And while I was sick, the planning for competitions was really difficult. So I canceled all the competitions. I was in the World Cup since 2024 except with the World Cup. And the project for me was a good motivation to at least get healthy and get ready, but not that much on the road as I normally train for. And it was a good combination and for me the best way to recover.
Peter, you've got quite a history in paragliding. Obviously, no slouch in World Cups.
You've got a lot of history there and then it sounds like you did a big switch to mountaineering in kind of the early 2000s or late 90s, as I understand. But reaching out to the best of the best, was it intimidating for you? Was it scary to take on this project with the Eagle? Well, we know each other for quite a long time and honestly, I didn't think so. I think as for, I just asked myself with who I would like to do this project. And Krigel was about the first coming in my mind. So I didn't think much further and just asked him whether he would be interested.
And for me also saw a big chance to get back into the paragliding business a lot, thanks to Krigel's support. So this was. A slightly egoistic motive, maybe. And on the other hand, I knew that in alpinism, in climbing, it would be more on my side to manage this thing. What kind of training went into this, if any, before the project started? You know, Krigel, I know you and I discussed it at the World Cup, the decision on the wings using the Theta instead of the Omegle. But, and we could talk about more about gear here.
I really want to talk about clothing and cold and how you guys manage the various altitudes. But Peter, was there, was there a lot of intense flying and training in that regard? Or, and was there, were there, were there training days before you actually set, I know you set out on a training day and then that actually became the start of the expedition, but was there, was there a lot of time spent together? Yeah. Before the project started? Definitely. Yes. We did a lot of preparation. In 2023, Krigel gave me his X-Alps Omega glider. And I experienced something like a second spring in paragliding of my life.
Cause the last 20 years, my paragliding was just doing hike and fly in tandem flights. So I really had to invest a lot to get back. And to a thermal and cross country flying with a state of the art paraglider again. And I really did a lot of flying from summer 23, when we decided to go for the project until the start of the project. And I did a lot of takeoffs and landings in the Alpine terrain. The only thing looking back, I could have invested more. Yeah. It was the strong wind taking off there.
I did have indeed some weaknesses and I was really glad for Krigel to support me on the, on those exposed high Alpine takeoffs because we did have quite a few times, a lot of wind and challenging conditions, and this made me nervous and well, so I was really dependent on Krigel's support. He held my glider. He held my glider and explained to me exactly in detail how to handle it. So yeah, this is about how I prepared myself on for the paragliding part.
And Krigel, did you also spend a lot of time working with Peter with glacial travel and rope team travel and things that maybe weren't in so much in your wheelhouse or did you feel pretty prepared from that side of things?
First of all, we, we spend a lot of time in the gym two to three weeks, two to three times in a week. We train in the gym and try to keep our body ready and for sure I was training climbing and we, we did some training tours, but it was finally not so many as we wish because of the weather and snow conditions. I think it was three, three or four. Yeah. So we had some training tours, we did together, but I know a little bit how mountaineering works. So it was not completely new for sure. I just was not really experienced. So we had, we had trainings that we got a good feeling and especially we trained the combination with flying from home.
I mean, I can fly from home to the mountain, do a climb or a tour and flying back. And already. This. This experience was for us really interesting and beautiful. And we thought if we're not going to do the project to the end, for sure the preparation time was already good for us.
Tell me a little bit about the gear, you know, it was obviously very Alpine style, super lightweight. You weren't supported, you weren't putting in base camps, you weren't doing anything like that. Only using public transport. So I imagine weight was the, the big factor here. And then that always means you're less comfortable.
What, what was the, how were you deciding as you went along, what came, what didn't?
Yeah, the, the goal for us was to leave our home by foot and then fly by paraglider from mountain to mountain, and then do mountaineering to the peaks and back. And for that, for that, we, we decided for the advanced gear, the Theta and the Whiteless harness. Light rescue. Um, similar that, that I know from, from the X-Alps. So already this was a compromise because the equipment it's seven kilo and the backpack it's quite fragile. So mountaineering needs normally good heavy, uh, clothing and, and we, we always, always have to be really careful with our equipment in the Alps.
For climbing equipment, we got a lot of information from friends. Um, on which mountain we need, how much, uh, safety gear and, and how long the rope have to be. But in the end we, we was always, um, yeah, with the minimalistic equipment on the, on the way.
Yeah. I understand. For example, you, you, you cut the rope, uh, to, um, um, a less, you know, less than a standard rope because you, you don't really need to, you weren't planning on rappelling very much. You, you need it for ascending and then hopefully you can fly off in the end. Did the gear equipment.
Did it all, obviously it worked, but what are the, were there things where you would have, ah, we really should have changed this. This was made it too scary or too difficult. Yeah, it's of course we knew from people smiling, we, we knew from beginning that it would be a compromise regarding the Alpine gear and the stuff we take for protection. And it is a bit like that. When you are. In an act. Actual difficult route, you would wish more protection, but on the other hand, you know that most of the time you carry all the gear in the rucksack and it's just ballast. So we did really think a lot. We spent times with the day we spent days and we had a lot of discussions with, uh, other people about what to bring and what not to, to bring to the mountain.
And looking back. I think we found a very good compromise regarding our gear. So finally we took five totems, rather small sizes. Those are canning devices for rock protection. I would have preferred seven for some, for some routes, but, uh, I knew that I could do with five, um, then five screw beaners, five quick draws. And they're like, I don't know. Two or three slings. And that was it more or less regarding technical gear, light access, light, um, light crampons with the crampons.
We did quite a lot of testing because we intended also to bring light shoes and the combination between light shoes and light crampons might not ideally work in all circumstances, but we, and we did not bring the lightest gear on the market. We just brought the gear that we thought would be suitable for our purpose. The lighter, the better, but we didn't pick the lightest gear, uh, available. We just picked the gear. We were convinced that it would work. And regarding rope, we decided to go with the 40 meters, uh, opera rope, this is the lightest single rope.
On the market.
And we, in addition, we brought a so-called X caper for upselling. You can upsell the whole 40 meters and pull down the rope after upselling.
And after the difficult peaks, we cut the rope back to 30 meters. So this involved, we knew that this would involve a lot of down climbing then because the rope would be too short for both to upsell. And finally this worked quite well. So what were the, what was the total weight of each of your packs approximately? And I mean, I, I know that changed, you started off on skis that, that changed, so we could talk about that, but what was the average?
The backpack finally was between, I would say 14 and 16 kilos, depends on how much food. We also bring some snowshoes and carbon plates. Um, yeah. And with the full wood. Wood, water and, and food, it was until 16, I would say. Up to 16. Yes. So I, I really look forward to, for the X-Alps next year because the backpack then will be maximum eight kilos.
It'd be nothing. It's nothing. It's been a feather.
But what we saw is that the, the light backpack for paraglider was working for, I would say 14 kilos. It was okay. But for 16, it starts to be really uncomfortable for the long hikes. And for the X-Alps, less than 10 kilos, it's perfect. I
think I glossed over, I was so excited that I, we haven't really talked about the actual mission. Did you just summarize what, what you set off to do and, uh, in the time that you had and the style? Yeah, I can try to summarize our mission. Looking back, it's, we do not need a lot of words to explain it. We basically wanted to link all the 82, 4,000 meter peaks of the Alps with a continuous track. And we just moved on foot or by paraglider.
And in order to handle bad weather, we decided to allow the possibility to go back from, from a village. For example, we can land somewhere in a valley and travel back home and go to the exact same place to pick up the, the project and to keep a continuous track.
And we decided that in our view, this does not reduce the value of, of the project, because if we do it, we waste precious days. Yeah. When we stay at home. But finally, this really paid off a lot because we did have bad weather, real bad weather with huge storms that destroyed the infrastructure in the villages. We were, and looking back, this was quite a good and useful strategy and it still allowed us to experience a pure adventure.
And the, the start is. In the end is obvious it's, it's your home, it's fruit again, but how do you, how did you decide on the link? Was that more logistics and just makes sense to kind of go in a certain circle or was it more, way more driven by weather and spontaneity? Initially, we wanted to start in the Mont Blanc area because there is a non-flying zone for paragliders during July and August. So. Always during summertime, you're not allowed to fly in the Mont Blanc area. So we wanted to go on June that we would have the option to fly. This was the original plan.
And then we did have to adapt according to the conditions and the weather. And we postponed our, the trip to Mont Blanc area and we decided to start with the skis and with very. Basic harness for flying that we can carry the skis and so looking back, we did change our plans very often. Even several times during a day, usually we changed the plans we adapted whenever we had time, we checked the weather and the weather forecast, and we constantly continuously thought about.
What would be the most efficient to do. So this, we were really driven by the conditions and the whole planning didn't work as expected.
I gather from both of your smiles that that ended up being maybe part of the fun. It was that the things didn't work out. Was, was that a, you're both really smiling. It was either really funny or a real pain in the ass. No, it was really funny. Big fun. This was what I was looking for. Actually, I did not, I was not looking for to do all the 82 peaks, not in first order. My goal was to experience an adventure. And my goal was to improvise and to adapt to the conditions. And this was what we were actually looking for. And looking back. I think we can stay.
This was very self intensive. And we didn't, most look we didn't even actually, not we, just we realized that the best moves we did when we had the knife on our throat, for example, when we wanted to do two days of mountaineering from Sanvvie and we realized that we would only have one day with good weather. The other day that weather would turn bad. This, this forced us to. do quite creative moves magic moves as we call them at least when they work and those were the funniest and most interesting moments in this project Chrigel one of the things i learned uh going into the 2015 race beforehand i sat down with Tom Payne and he said the most important thing for your team is to have some way to resolve conflict you things are going to happen that you don't anticipate mistakes whatever and you need to have a way to move forward and we just decided on our team that okay we would do it with humor we would laugh we would okay this is a mistake that's funny let's move on and it for us for me it worked really well but how did you two decide to i know there's a lot of weight on decisions in these kinds of projects let's take this route let's summit this peak now let's go this way way how did you two decide on who would make the decision and if if it was the wrong decision how did you move forward i
know this from from the team races as well but um in general we was really lucky that peter it's the the expert in in mountaineering and i'm a bit more in flying and so there was the focus um set but we was also um free to ask the other um if some other thoughts are around so we had always conversations during during the day and for taking the next decisions and interesting was that while walking and climbing we was able to stop and to to have discussions about next steps while flying it's it's an unstoppable thing so in before a flight we had to discuss really good and exact what we do and how we do we was able to talk by phone in the air but it was not not always easy so we know before the project that we will do mistakes and if if we make mistakes that we have to to move on and uh yeah finally we say that nobody of us do a mistakes um because he is not happy for example you um and then mistakes can happen so we we have to to watch above and uh and and go ahead and and finally we was really i think we was lucky that that we was working together uh really well all the 50 days and we never had stress or maybe we had some but we not speak about and we was always uh motivated when we came back in the hut in the evening and we had food and after i slept well and we was motivated again so there was never a problem and i think it's uh it depends with with which person you do a a competition or a project like this and sometimes it works better sometimes less and finally we was lucky that it was really well i
i uh i could relate to there were many pictures and stories as you guys went along about food there's lots of big smiles and this was the big smile and i was like oh my god i'm so happy i'm so happy i'm so happy i'm so happy surprised i can relate to that a lot with the alaska expedition as we spent a lot of time on that trip starving uh tell me about the food and the weight loss i read in tarquin's article you both had quite a bit of weight loss at least early and
for me i really like to eat a lot and i not lost so many kilos but for peter it was it was a challenge uh he lost in the first 10 days more or less seven kilo and i tried to explain him how to eat a lot and how to eat
a lot and he's like oh my god i'm gonna need 10 more days i'm gonna need 10 more days
fast and how to eat calories and um and until the end he was he had good practices but tell
more yeah we realized at one point that we do not eat enough when you get a good breakfast and you move for like 12 hours and you get a good dinner it's just not enough to compensate for the loss of of calories so whenever we had the possibility we went shopping when we have been on in a valley for instance we went shopping in a supermarket and we got a very nice food like pringles and mayonnaise and cheese and ham and stuff like that and there was always some time for when we waited for thermals for instance and we tended to use this
this time to fuel up again and from this time on we managed to keep our body weight yeah you need fat yeah finally lots and lots of fat
finally this is a bit different when when i do a race and and with support the support can can bring every time bars and and jails and also the the drink i do a lot of carbohydrates in in the water so i i get i got always a good good energy and in in mountaineering it's not possible to bring everything with us so we we was uh focused on the huts and and the normal shops in the valleys and to organize the food already takes time for example in a restaurant you always have to wait until the food is on table and sometimes we was really hungry and yeah in the end it's part of the project to manage all days
with uh with the food with the speed you take and with the difficulties and um yeah for us it was clear that we have this problem and we was watching out and finally yeah in the end it was okay but at the beginning it was a bit uh yeah we lost weight and this was yeah okay
we did have to find the good rhythm you know not only with food but also with recovery we did have a hard and long days but you cannot do one and hard long day after the other you just at one point you just cannot do it anymore so we did invest quite a lot in in in resting and eating and recovering and keeping up the good mood and memory i'm also convinced that that we do the bed the better
so we did we were very careful with our resources and with our energy because that was another basic concept we did not want to do the project with brute force but we we were always looking to do it in an elegant way and i think thinking about it and thinking about it and thinking about it is the key for moving elegantly it's much more than just um well going for very tough and long and hard tours we did have our share with tough mountaineering and long days also with a lot of hiking but there was always a purpose we knew that we have to go further in order to get to a good
place for the next day to keep going for instance but whenever we did have the opportunity we were we tried to to stay lazy and to save energy looking back i think this was one of the key factors of the success of our project i love this word elegant uh the other one that seems to pop up is is fun you you had this rule of one of you had to be having fun is that so do i have that right
i have to tell you that in flying often it's me that have fun because peter was a bit stressed when it was rough so but on the other side on the ridge on the mountain it was me they they was stressed often but on the end on the i think it was gross horas there was the hardest ridge we climbed and we found out that if at least one of the team is in comfortable and have fun it's enough so he can he can push the other but sometimes it was switching often in the day but uh yeah as long one of the team is ready and and the fun is there then then it's okay
when we was really hungry or when it was raining or when we had to walk on the road and both of us was not not really funny and then we had to do a break and to eat something
i think it tells something about us as a team we we have decided or we have learned very early in our preparation that we have to take back our egos and to to put the team in first place so and as long as one has fun and the other is out of his comfort zone the one having fun can still support the other and he can still do it and he can still do it and he can still do it check for safety and for possible dangers and so on i think it also has to do with with the safety concept we did have and we did discuss a lot about the things in the beginning and i was aware from the very beginning for example that crickle is the best pilot in the world so it's not me by definition and when for crickle some something just still works in very rough conditions for instance i need to think for myself if it still works for me too so it has to do a lot with self-responsibility and i knew that it's a realistic scenario that crickle turns up for instance and i have to chicken out because the thermal is too strong or i cannot properly center the thermal and just bail out and have to go landing and crickle has to come down to me this was a scenario we have discussed from beginning on and we decided to not apologize on the other so when i do a mistake
or when i just don't have the level to cope with flying conditions and i have to bail out and go landing and crickle has to come to me and we cannot do the planned magic move for instance then this is not a reason to apologize because i did i gave my best and it was just not enough and it's just the fact that the team is only as good as the weaker one so we we carried each other and we helped and supported each other for supporting the team and to do the moves so this was something that also helped me to be able to do the moves and to be able to do the moves and to do the moves also removed a lot of pressure from from me i knew that it's okay when i when i have to chicken out for good reason because i'm scared or something and
this took a lot of pressure from me and it it it opened me it opened the possibility for me to not do a move and to take a safe decision for example and not to push it too hard crickle was there did you find that having to be in charge in a sense for the flying side for peter did it change how you approached flying were there times where for example maybe you would have flown if it was just you but because peter it was there i don't think we should do this or did you
just talk about that a bit was there i would imagine there was some weight on you in terms of the safety aspect in both in both those instances the flying instance with you and also from the mountaineering from peter yeah
yeah for us it was clear that on the mountain we are on the rope so we we can help each other directly and in the air everyone have to fly by self and this is a big difference but in the air i was able to push um in the direction and try to do something and peter was watching from behind and if it works he can follow if not i come back maybe or we try another direction so i was always a bit trying to to get the solution for the next um crossing and when we think about landing or top landing often we was close together to to speak to each other to to have a solution or to make the decision together because on the glacier we always landed together to walk together on the rope and especially on on the takeoff we had time to to think about solutions and
talking about the risk and then um yeah i was also able to help um when it was windy for example so we managed it really together but for me it was not the big pressure to to fly in uh in front but i realized that it's a big different to to a competition like the Red Bull X-Alps when i fly alone and often it was difficult to to fly together to wait to each other sometimes i bomb out and peter continue and i try to catch up and sometimes um they are we landed together to to have uh the safety on the bro on the glacier for example
peter uh just speaking from how i would personally feel about it if i had an opportunity to do what you did and spend so much intimate time with with Chrigel in in the mountains in the big mountains and doing what he does best i imagine it's it's an incredible learning opportunity that you must be very grateful for and but also quite intimidating just talk about that actually i did not think about this too much this way Chrigel is no well Chrigel is more like a friend and not my idol or or something we are just partners in a project and it's just the fact that he's a very good instructor and he's a very good and competent pilot but i i i think it does it did not influence me very very strongly or it did not intimidate me in in any way it was just like well
useful to have such a competent partner in in flying and i i used to do a lot of paragliding myself many years ago and this helped me to handle rough conditions for example and in regular conditions we were more like flying together and when the conditions really got harsh i run out of resource to besides controlling the glider to to do elaborate tactical decisions for example and then i was really happy just to follow Chrigel and i tried to position myself a little bit higher and a little bit behind so i could see how Chrigel does in when we flew through a big lee or through some wash machine and i could it helped me a lot to to observe and just to to follow him but this was really only in very harsh conditions and with regular flying conditions we just well we just flew together and had fun Chrigel
briefly tell me a little bit about how you got into flying and how you got into flying and how you got into flying and tell me about the decision of the the wing yeah i understand that was that was something especially at the end you were both very grateful you made that decision we talked a little bit about it in in switzerland you and i but that was that was uh interesting yes
finally i know from from the races um that in a PWC for example you need full performance and the flying time and the resources it's not that high so it's um it's easier to control uh a difficult wing in the adventure races like the X-Alps you you push more in every condition you your days are long and every day you have to to compete so it makes sense to have an easy wing a light glider to carry for sure and i i realized for the high alpism alpinism flying it's even more important to have an easy wing and because it was a project and not a competition we we also have had no pressure to to have or to bring high performance and and finally we we was a lot comparing the gliders i mean the the omega and the theta and and we are we realized that the biggest difference is the top speed it's less from the from the easier wing for sure but the performance it's it's really similar and the the easiness and the the controlling it's much more a benefit for the for the takeoff and the landings in high mountains and on the end we saw that we we often had or we daily had takeoffs and landings which was really difficult and it helps us uh with the easier glider and the performance was good enough to cover big distances and we had no um not hard wind conditions that we flew backwards so the top speed was in the end not really um a problem and we often flew full speed so it's a good speed to cover big distances and in the end it was it was the perfect gear
peter the the first day which was not the first day you you told the you told the journalist to not come with you it seemed to really set the tone tell me about that first day and and it it seemed like that was ah what a surprise let's keep going but tell us about the first day when i got up in it was still raining a little bit the cloud base was really deep very really low and i was honestly quite pessimistic but i we knew that the weather would improve during the day but i didn't expect well you know from frutigen it's quite a distance to to get the first four thousander inside it's not that you can just turn up once or twice and you are on a on your first four thousander you have to do a cross country flight and you have to do a cross country flight and you have to do a to to get in the area and in my view the chance was really small this first day to manage somehow to to get in a region with four thousanders especially also with the simple harness and the skis the performance of the glider is a bit reduced so you have to take this into consideration also and the journalist this was a bit unlucky but it set the tone of of the project and i think for
us it was a super fun project with a lot of uncertainties and a lot of taking decisions but for the people surrounding us it was very difficult it was nearly impossible to catch up with us so we went up after in the afternoon above frutigen and we took off with a quite low cloud base and the thermals were weak and it really didn't look well for this first day and finally we managed to to fly to the end of the kandertal and enter the go further direction lurch and pass and land there and walk up and i still thought well okay we do a glide down to the train station and go home most probably and
then we had a little bit of a struggle to get to the end of the kandertal but we managed to get to the end of the kandertal and we were already like a thousand meters above the cloud base but it was scattered so no cover no no real compact mass of clouds you always saw down in the valley and we had wind and we took off and in a miraculous way which i still don't completely understand we managed to get to the end of the kandertal we managed to get over the hockenhorn on roughly 3 500 meters and suddenly we were really like 1800 meters above the cloud base soaring up and we saw that in lurchental the conditions would be much better with the cloud base of around 3 800 meters
and then it was clear to both of us that we would start the project and go for it wow that must have been really special special and that's uh personal to you as well because that's where you came over the past to fly into frutigen in last year's race it's the same zone yeah
it's the same same um it was turn point in frutigen and we we flew the opposite way and i remember well the area but uh our plan for this day was to fly direction grindelwald and then climbing direction munch from the from the north and and on the on the afternoon when we was flying a little bit in frutigen i realized that it's no chance to fly to grindelwald but the chance can be big to fly towards lurching pass and climb a little bit to fly over the lurching pass direction alexhorn and this is exactly the interesting part of the of the project that you have to start to see how it works without starting just without just with the forecast and the map you not see the solution so you never got a solution to continue and while making a first step you see where you can do the second and then if you do this a day you are on the mountain finally what
were you using for forecasting other than your eyeballs we
used only the mobile phone and with different apps but it's burn that app and some others where we can
we used um swiss metro swiss app for for wind and cloud and rain um forecast but for us it was really difficult to to work with them at all in general because the weather forecast change calculation it's every three hour new and it changed really a lot so to make a good plan with the forecast was almost impossible or only on the good days in the bad days when it was raining it was really difficult to find the best window to move and on the end we we made different plans for different weather so uh doesn't matter how the the weather will be we had a good solution
peter what was the what was the most elegant day of the expedition we had quite a few actually so the first day was really really it blew my mind i barely couldn't believe it that being on 3080 meters starting below a cloud cloud base of about 17 to 1800 meters so this was really something very special to me and this blew my mind quite a lot and there were quite a few more moves like that and to me the
other i can i can tell like half a dozen i just need to choose to choose one i just need one of them go for it this is a podcast the longer the better
and anything that stands out yeah let's hear yeah really one that was really standing up out for me was the one in the mont blanc area when we went for the south summit of the mo bla area we took off above modra after eating a lot by the way and we had a beautiful flight on the italian side of the Mobla area we could thermal up to a bit more than 4000 meters and cruise around and we passed in front of the Aiguille Noire de Potere and I know all those summits there very well from mountaineering so a lot of memories popped up and finally we managed to land on the Col de Potere this was like a dream we did discuss this scenario but I rather mention this as a joke so I was not really serious when I proposed to go landing on the Col de Potere and I thought well this would most probably be like a dream but it's always good to dream big and as Krigel said before it's good to work in scenarios and to be prepared for different scenarios and to stay flexible and take what you can get and finally we really managed to land on the Col de Potere with ideal conditions like 15 km per hour updraft and we put the gliders and we climbed the Aiguille Blanche de Potere and I think two hours or something later we were airborne again and normally to climb the Aiguille Blanche de Potere it's like a three day project of mountaineering and we just went up we just took the summit we took off again and we flew to the Aigle bivouac and
we landed and we really celebrated the nice day but suddenly we realized that we would only have another day of good weather and the next day the day after the weather would turn bad so I think it's also a bit the emotions that goes like a rollercoaster the emotions go high up and then you realize oh shit we only have one more day and we need two days for our mountaineering that we have planned so the emotions go down again like in the cellar and we discussed a lot about how to handle this situation we knew that we only have food for two days and gas for two days
that's what we took with us because we were really limited in the amount of weight we carry and we were really surprised to see that the day after the weather would turn bad and bad weather in the south peaks of Mont Blanc area is not really the good thing to do mountaineering if there is a place in the Swiss Alps you don't want to be with bad weather it's this area so at 10 in the evening we had a plan, a rough plan we decided to leave the gliders in the bivouac and to climb the Brouillard ridge and
from the Pointe Louis-Amede there is a first decision point you can follow the ridge to the Mont Blanc de Courmayeur and the dream would have been or the top plan would have been to down climb from Mont Blanc de Courmayeur to Grand Pied d 'Angle and to go back to Col de Potere and return to the bivy so we at midnight we went up and at 12.30 or something we started and we really had a flow like I didn't have often before we had super light backpacks, we only brought some food and some clothes and technical gear and then we just really went for it and we climbed the Brouillard ridge and the conditions were not easy everywhere but manageable and so we were on the Pointe Louis-Amede around sunrise which was quite good and we managed to climb to the Mont Blanc de Courmayeur in quite a short period of time and so we were still good to down climb to Grand Pied d 'Angle and to return to the bivy and so we did in a 12 hours trip we did two long days of mountaineering but
we didn't have time to celebrate in the bivy because the cloud base was descending and we had to hurry to take off near the bivy and to fly out in between the clouds to the Valveni and then we went via
Col Ferre to Bourg Saint-Pierre it's in Switzerland again we chose this location tactically because we travelled back from there by public transportation and it was an ideal spot to pick up again the adventure because we realised that the bad weather would last for more than one day so we just finished this tour so this was a double match in my view the first day we had an excellent flight amazing flight up to Col de Potere that allowed us to go very easily to Aiguille Blanche de Potere and the next day we had an exploit in mountaineering and the flow I think it's mainly the flow we felt during this tour everything just worked and we were in excellent shape and this is really a memory to last forever for me
Crígel, do you have a memory maybe a flying memory that will stick with you on the project?
finally we know that there are three peaks which are quite difficult to reach because they are far away this is Gran Paradiso in Italy and then Bar de Secre in the south and Piz Bernina in the east in Engadin and we know that we need flyable conditions and we need flyable conditions and we made Gran Paradiso in a bad weather period because in Gran Paradiso it's not allowed to fly anyway so we walked the road in bad weather and it was ok and then Bar de Secre we flew in some days and back to to the Swiss Alps and then in the end we know that we have to do the Pernina and we saw that when we were finished with the mountain with the summits in Zermatt in the Swiss Alps
we will have flyable conditions for the east and then it was Friday and we were in Andermatt far away from Bernina it was 95 km in the morning and the forecast they say the cloud base will increase in Engadin to 4000 m in the afternoon between 4 and 5 so I was calculating a little bit 100 km with an average speed of 20 it needs 5 hours and for these 100 km and we took off at 11 and it was just possible to fly well and when we saw the Pernina from far we saw that the peak is in cloud and it's not possible to top land
and we was coming closer and closer and then it was exactly 4 o 'clock the cloud base was really increasing and we was top landing just behind the peak the summit on a glacier where we know a friend of mine was sending me a message that he will take off in the morning with a tandem with his client and it was brilliant it was 15 minutes hike or climbing from the landing field to the summit and 10 minutes back so 30 minutes after landing we took off again and flew back
and it was unbelievable after a 5 hour flight we top landed on 3950 m and had a 10 15 minutes walk, an easy walk to the Piz Pernina which is normally a serious mountaineering day and then the day wasn't over we flew another 3 hours back to Chur to Flims which was a perfect place for climbing the next day to fly back to home and it was unbelievable that we felt to be on the right time on the right place because the forecast show us in the morning that it will be possible to fly high but late in the afternoon and after 5 the cloud base will drop down and we will not have the possibility to top land high and after 100 km of flying we just was on the place
to land at 4 and this was unbelievable
how about maybe the opposite of elegant sometimes scary can be elegant too any really scary situations that maybe left a mark for either of you maybe I can tell something from my flying that really scared me we landed on Bar des Egres in the Lee also just below the summit and there there is a relatively flat piece of glacier where you can easily top land in the Lee and the landing went very well and we climbed the two summits in a relatively short time and we were aware that we are in the Lee and that but we thought it's manageable we had gusts of like maybe 70 km per hour when we climbed the summit so we thought okay
this should be manageable and I took off
and I really had a hard time I flew 2 km and I lost 900 m in those 2 km and I had a few real serious collapses so my main job during those 2 km of flying was to keep open the glider or to keep the glider flying and to recover the big collapses and by the way in this opportunity I was really happy to fly the Theta and not just the Omega as usual and so I had to go down and land on a flat glacier underneath and Chrigel he also took off a bit later and he found a little bit of a better line and he would have had managed to fly over the glacier plateau but he spiraled down and landed on my spot and then we walked
a few hundred meters where the glacier gets steep again and we took off again and it was the same shit we were still in this lee wind and we had strong sinking and very rough flying conditions and I saw the camping on the foot of the Badesecra closer than I would have liked but finally we managed we caught a very strong and a bit brutal thermal that carried us up again on 4000 meters and this was really a bit of limit flying for me for
me as well finally it was on the snow and it was really efficient and as soon as we were back up on the base it was manageable well to fly back north to Mont
Blanc yes and we did a long flight back we covered a lot of distance and we finally landed not far from Bote Saint Bernard and I think it's a skill to manage fearsome situations and to still perform afterwards and to
get back in the right mental state to perform and to handle all of it but I was a bit shaky after the flight honestly during the flight I managed well and after the flight I was really impressed by by this violent turbulence as we have experienced after taking off from Bote Saint Bernard
Chrigel you and I have spoken in past shows and also just personally how difficult it can be to accomplish projects like this it's wonderful to accomplish them there's a real sense of pride and confidence and excitement but it's also you're living a very wonderful experience and life for a period of time and then suddenly it's done you finished the project it's over you and Peter don't get to spend that intimate time together because life
where
you both now mentally how do you end something like this maybe in an elegant way
finally we were back earlier than we thought and I was lucky to spend some days holiday with my boys with my kids I was happy to make some mountaineering with my girlfriend and make some tandem flights with clients so back in life it's good to have challenges as well also I do some training for the next competitions like Dolomiti's fly Dolomitenmann and finally we got a lot of pictures and we celebrated myself almost every day to watch a picture check the video we did we plan to do some presentations
and yeah it's all day a lot to do
just stay busy not
really super busy it's nice to complete a project like this and to celebrate it but to have daily challenges and work it's good to have especially my family it's here for me it's going on I got some experience 10 years ago with the X-Alps after arriving in Monaco I was really unmotivated I thought now life is over but during the last 10 years I was always focusing on next steps after projects so this time it was not a problem I am
still doing a lot of thinking because during the project I didn't have enough time to digest what I've just experienced so I had postponed this stuff and I took notes on my phone I wrote like a diary and coming home I dived deep into those notes and I am writing a book about this experience and this allows me to digest the whole thing and to relive the situations together with the pictures this is a great way I found for me to get along with
the experience and I enjoy a lot all the pleasures we did not have like going down to the fridge and eat something just stuff like that so I get along well very happy very proud of what we did and to me this is definitely a dream came true a lifetime dream and something of the biggest
experience I'm very grateful for this experience this is to last forever for me one
thing maybe that is important to me is the risk management part we did a lot of discussion about risk management and we did not go all in in our project I think that's important we defined from the very beginning that we would take
that we would take risk we would put on the rope in the high mountains that we would choose simple forgiving glider and that we would just work properly so we really wanted to experience a great adventure while keeping the risk in in a reasonable on a reasonable level that is fine for the two of us and we did also regularly discuss in the evenings whether we had the risk under control or not or if we pushed too far and what to change in the future and I think this was in my view this was a real good style and that appealed a lot to me so we did not dare too much we took risks of course
at the time but we did not go all in we always had a certain amount of reserve
what was the post view or the post the talk after the flight you discussed from the Ekrens when it was really really rowdy was that deemed afterwards would you have done that again we underestimated the turbulence we felt the wind on the ridge
we thought it's easily manageable it will be rough to fly out but we before the project we flew in rough conditions also and we were really confident that it would be rough flying but ok but when I flew out and when I got hit by the wash machine I was really surprised so it was not it was an inaccurate judgement of what we expected regarding turbulence and this can happen and you know we still had some reserve but not much anymore I could still fly the glider I could still control the glider I just didn't feel comfortable anymore but so the margin was just reduced but we did still have margin in this situation
we got close to the upper limit of risk but we did not get into the red area for example maybe I can give you another example Monterosa when we started from Monterosa hut we knew that the weather would turn bad this day and our plan was to climb four of the highest mountains of the Alps but we just kept going and we just had we just checked the risk permanently during the whole day and when the storm hit us we decided to keep going carefully and just to continuously check what we are doing but we were fully aware for instance and no rescue would come for us if we would get a problem and those moments are very intense but you can really handle them
you start moving very carefully and you start feeling very much alive in these moments also and you really need to think what you are doing and you know that you are that you don't have so much margin anymore but on the other hand you know what you are able to do what you are capable of doing and then you can bring it home
Chrigel were there times during the expedition especially when you were it sounds like you had a lot of flying kind of above where we normally fly you are above the cloud base you had so many videos and pictures of flying well above the clouds I imagine it would be hard to think that you weren't building some amazing tools for future races was that going through your mind that wow this is a great way obviously it's physical training it's obviously being in the mountains but I imagine also some fantastic training for what you do as an athlete
really difficult to say because we were focused to fly from mountain to mountain and sometimes to connect different summits and it was not a really efficient flying style like I do in a race so it was different and mostly it was also the question about
do we have an option to take off or not on the summit do we bring the glider on the summit or not and climbing with the summit or not and yeah it's really difficult to say what it brings but it was a new experience it was a new challenge we saw many different things and to play with this I mean with the forecast with the conditions we find with the takeoff and landing fields we have to manage ourselves and to respect the nature and the conditions it was just unbelievable and I think we were learning a lot about this to manage ourselves and to make something extreme as safe as possible Peter
do you think this experience has it ignited more passion for future flying projects do you see yourself being more focused on flying than you have been in the last 20 years or still more focused on mountaineering I definitely started loving flying again I really
missed it during the last 20 years when I focused on mountaineering and indeed I love flying I went flying today for example and I really love flying also with the new gear and with the new knowledge I gathered during this project I'm really motivated also to learn new things I saw quite a few weak spots in my skills that I want to work on that I can improve and this is really a nice thing and a nice perspective to me to
focus more on flying and I think there's a lot of potential in the combination between alpinism and flying we are more on the beginning of this and we will see much more I'm really convinced about that also one real important point I have learned during this project this is playing with uncertainty and I learned that we did our best moves when it got difficult so use the difficulty I think this is more than just a phrase it really becomes a lifestyle for me more and more and whenever I run into a difficulty I see a chance in proving
myself that I can do something out of it it's always a big chance to do some move or some unexpected
well something unexpected you can it's really fascinating to me to see where it leads when you let in the uncertainty and you start playing with it and you bear the uncertainty
and you see where this path leads there's two sayings that come to mind one is remove the challenge remove the man and the other is it's not an adventure until something goes wrong
I like that it seemed that you both really embraced the uncertainty and that was where the magic happens that line between certainty and uncertainty the more you push into the unknown the more special it gets and what another interesting thing I have observed is the intuition
sometimes we took decisions without discussing but it was just clear to the two of us it was really interesting it was a little bit like magic but we didn't have to discuss certain things sometimes we just saw a possibility for a magic move and
doing a lot of discussion it was clear to both of us that we give it a try and seeking for those unexpected chances those doors that suddenly open somewhere and provide you with a huge advantage of what you're doing this is really like magic in my view this is what we were finally really looking for and those caused us some of the best moments of our project in the Alaska project deciding on going to a launch or just walking was a really monumental
decision because the terrain when we were on the south side of the range was really quite brutal it required crawling and getting through thickets of alder it would take hours and you know if you made the wrong decision there was a lot of weight and
we had the rule there was never any blame but we often didn't agree if it was my decision let's try to go or let's not try to go there was so much weight on it as the project went along we became more intuitive or more in the flow it's so much better when you're not thinking too much you can really get bogged down and thinking too much I think it also depends a lot on the goal or on the focus you have when you focus on achieving a goal I think it blocks you it does not help to stay
well to stay relaxed and to do the good moves
quite a few times we discussed about scenarios about best case scenarios that were probably not very realistic and we decided to go for a try to give it a try and we were not forced to bring the bacon home you know there was no pressure to succeed but we knew when we do it we will have it's guaranteed that we will have a great adventure so the success was unsure but the adventure was almost sure all the time and this was what we were looking for we were really looking for the good moves and for the adventures and not achieving the goal was not a problem or bailing out when the conditions were really too harsh this was not like losing to us it was more like an interesting experience and it's something we can be proud of because we managed the situation properly and did a proper risk check
so the 82 peaks that's just a bonus you don't stay focused on that you stay focused on the next step I think we can state that and this this paved the way to our success finally looking back we
just spent or we planned these 72 days holidays for us in the summer and we had the 82 summits as a goal and we want to see how far we can go and have the adventure and have the challenge every day and finally we were back 20 days too early
to finish the project but it's also bad to be back too early
because
you're having so much fun love it perfect place to end thank you both for dreaming big and bringing this project to all of us you guys are great and I know you're busy so I appreciate your time and so do the listeners they're going to be thrilled nobody knows I'm doing this with you
I really appreciate it have a wonderful evening and thanks for sharing your time same to you
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