Polished Limestone | chossclimbers.com

Go back to Europe.

Sokolica.

Family.

A weeklong outing to Poland with the goal of having a family get together with my Auntie who lives there, my Mom who has been staying with her for a while, and my brother who’s on an extended Euro sabbatical. We were looking to toss in some climbing and found it pretty shocking just how few multi-pitch opportunities there were in the country. We discounted the Tatra Mountains thinking it was too early in the season to have reliably dry rock; not to mention that full day alpine outings were not really compatible with spending time with the family. We finally zeroed in on a region called the Polish Jura – a line of limestone outcrops stretching some 100+ kilometers northwest of Krakow in the south of the country. The three-volume guidebook revealed that there was very little of interest to us: overwhelmingly single pitch, sport routes. The one exception was a formation called Sokolica in the Bedkowska Valley. The 60-80 meter tall, limestone crag is hailed as the largest cliff in Poland between the Tatra Mountains and the Baltic Sea.

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Sokolica.

Ogrodzieniec Castle.

Although Europe climbing trips are not typically terribly exciting, this one featured a couple of annoyances. First, two weeks prior to departure, we both caught mild colds. If it were not for the upcoming trip we would not have given those a second thought. Given that we were about to go and that we needed to test negative to be able to come back home (fucking insane!), we took a couple of home rona tests and those came back with a suboptimal result. Long after our runny noses had cleared up, Shirley kept testing positive. Despite their insanely fanatical approach early on in the pandemic, Europeans have since gotten a bit more realistic and waived their Coivd test requirements for arriving tourists. Nevertheless, we needed a negative test at the end of our weeklong stay to be able to come home to our dogs (and jobs). And so the stupid game of home testing continued. In fact, Shirley got her first negative result only 36 hours before our departure. Second, having preached for years that the International Driver’s Permit was a total waste of 20 bucks – racket by the AAA – we got a rude surprise while trying to pick up our rental car at Wroclaw airport. Fortunately, my brother had one and was thus instantly promoted to be our chauffeur.