CUKROVARÁK SPIRE
“I consider this climb one of the most difficult I’ve ever undertaken,” said Vladimír Samek. He recalled the daring feat when he and Jaroslav Löffelman became the first to reach the summit of Cukrovarák Spire in Adršpach in 1947… Read about one modern repeat.
“I’ve got an idea,” read an unassuming message I received in early September. The sender: Honza “Vorel” Obročník. I already have a pretty good idea of what’s coming next. Or maybe I don’t, because Vorel always manages to surprise me. “Houml is turning fifty, so I thought we could repeat the first ascent of Cukrovarák Spire in Adršpach,” came the reply immediately afterward. “Are you in?”
I’ve never climbed Cukrovarák (Sugar Factory Chimney, ed. notice). Whenever I walk by, I look at this slender tower with interest. I’ve heard that only serious slab routes lead to the top. So, on my list of Adršpach priorities, I’ve pushed it down to the bottom. “Sure, I’d love to!” I reply without really knowing what I’ve just signed up for…
The first ascent of the spire took place on August 2–3, 1947. “The climbing duo Jaroslav Löffelman and Vladimír Samek reached the summit using a special rope technique that they had thoroughly thought through and executed with great effort,” describes Pavel Lisák in the book Vysoká hra. It apparently wasn’t climbing in the true sense of the word. So what should one imagine when repeating their first ascent? You’ll read about it below.
ASCENT OF A NON-CLIMBING OBJECT
On September 12, 2025, the strike team gathers at the reopened Peňák Pub. The meeting lasts until the early hours of the morning, during which they work out the details of tomorrow’s operation. There are several ideas on how to approach the whole thing. And even though the opinions of those involved often differ greatly, in their minds everything runs like clockwork.
Contemporary archives are an important source of information. “Why strain our brains unnecessarily when everything essential has already been figured out?” is a phrase heard more than once during the all-night deliberations.
The basic strategy for climbing the roughly 15-meter-high and 10-meter-wide rock formation is clear. (The ascent takes place from the plateau side, which can be reached quite comfortably with a bit of scrambling and climbing. The entire tower measures an estimated 40 meters from the valley, ed.) “During their ascent, Samek and Löffelman first wrapped a rope around the Cukrovarák Spire. Each of them hooked onto it on one side of the tower, threw a second rope around the rock, pulled it tight above them into a secure loop, and transferred into it. They then untied the lower, lighter rope and pulled it tight above them again. In this way, they climbed all the way to the summit,” describes Pavel Lisák in his book Vysoká hra. (The first ascenders referred to the tower at the time as a “non-climbing object,” ed.)
Václav Hornych, Jaroslav Beran, and Josef Čepelka employed a similar tactic during their third ascent in 1957. They dropped a simple Lützner hemp rope down both sides of the tower, tied it together at the bottom on the hiking trail, and pulled the finished loop back up. “We tightened it firmly, and in a harness without belay on a single hemp rope, I circled the spire in it and used a long, forked stick to push the double Lützner rope over my head and, most importantly, over the valley overhang,” recalls Václav Hornych in Vysoká hra, adding: “After that, it was monotonous — Joska, being the lightest, sat in the rope above the valley; Jarda and I, each on one corner above the base; move the next double rope over our heads, clip it with more carabiners, pull hard, remove 2–3 carabiners, and on the command ‘now,’ we all simultaneously transferred to the higher rope, of course without further belaying.
The first ascent 78 years ago took two days, the subsequent ascent one day, and the aforementioned third repeat three hours. Armed with this information and driven by the ambition of a certain performance leap, the strike team is aiming for a total time under three hours. What could be so hard about that?
“With the ambition of making a significant improvement in performance, the lead group is aiming for a total time under three hours. What could be so hard about that?”
THE “YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW” KNOT
The technical background of the ascent is provided by Honza “Vorel” Obročník
Following the example of our predecessors and historical photographs, we all know how the climb should go—wrapping ropes around the tower, gradually moving up to higher points, and thus ascending toward the summit. Ambitiously, we add a plan not to use the auxiliary stick. However, since there are enough doubts, we pack the three-meter stick with a fork at the end just to be safe. Another question mark hangs over tightening the loop around the tower so the rope doesn’t sag too much. The macho idea of making two loops, pulling them tight, and clipping them together with a carabiner sounds great in the pub. Just to be safe, we have two carabiners with a pulley, connected by a three-meter rope to form a simple pulley system. Just in case, you know.
That evening in the pub before the event, it looks like getting into the strike team will be a fight. In the morning, just the two of us are looking at each other. We grab all the ropes lying around from last night and head toward the Cukrovák Spire. There are plenty of onlookers. Someone is bound to give in and join us. A small support team forms spontaneously at the base of the tower. With a little trickery, Luboš joins us too, and we send him to scout the valley wall. He’ll spend the next five hours there straight. (You can find Luboš’s perspective in the infobox below, ed.)
Technically, it starts with you throwing a rope from the left and right down to the belay station, where someone ties it off. You pull it up, and you’ve got your first loop. There’s no way to mess that up… An unnamed climber throws the first rope from the left without the slightest hesitation. But it doesn’t land. It gets caught halfway in a crevice. No problem, we have plenty of ropes. The second attempt, with a bit more thought, works. We pull a hidden ace out of our sleeve. We throw three ropes from the left. “We’ll pull them to the right and have three loops ready at once,” we agree as a group. Working title of the hack: “Fuckup Minus Two Hours.” Pulling the ropes tangles them completely, and creating three separate loops out of them is quite a struggle. After this warm-up, hungry for upward movement, we bring in the stick. Less than three hours after starting, with its help, we triumphantly place the first loop above our heads.
Our hopes for a technical move are gone, so we switch to “conquest” mode. We pull the first slings by hand. Two slings (lead slings, ed.), pull tight, clip the carabiner. Clip the belay and swing out over the edge. It sags like crazy. One careless move at the edge means dropping half a meter lower. This isn’t going to work. We set up the pulley system. Two slings a meter apart, pull them together with the pulleys, tie another sling right next to it, and clip in the carabiner. That works pretty well. As long as you tie those knots just the right distance apart. At first, we manage it on the second, sometimes third try.
As soon as we get off the ground, things start to click. There are three of us. Everyone in belays on the highest loop. A second belay as a backup on the lower loop. It can’t go wrong on both, after all. The support team hands us the rope; we pass it back and forth around the tower, tie two knots, pull it tight, clip in, and transfer. Even after pulling it tight with the pulleys, the dynamic creates a decent slack. If loaded carelessly near the edge, it can jump down twenty centimeters. Apart from all three of us getting a scare, nothing worse happens.
We leave the individual slings there because, after all, it’s a birthday climb, and we want our friends to eventually climb up there with snacks. Halfway through the climb, I get tired of adjusting the third sling to fit perfectly. I always pull the sling through the carabiner and thread it through the sling three times. When Houml notices this, he asks, “What kind of knot are you tying there?” Since the three of us are sitting in it “like a bunch of slackers,” I give it the working title “you-don’t‑want-to-know knot.”
THE FOURTH REPEAT
In high spirits, the trio of climbers finally makes their way to the summit. In these comfortable times, with plenty of rope to spare—unlike Löffelman and Samek—they don’t have to untie the ropes below them and pass them up. The tower is thus literally wrapped in an impressive amount of ropes of various colors and qualities. After tying the twelfth one, the group finally reaches the summit at 3:25 p.m. A total of six hours of effort and lots of fun.
Afterward, in addition to the support team, the Beverage Technician also climbs up using the loops left behind to ensure a fitting celebration of the group’s founding, which has now reached the aforementioned fiftieth anniversary (beer, wine, burčák, slivovice—a full 40-liter backpack). The successful completion of the event is forever recorded in the summit logbook under the name “KURVADRÁT 50!” It can likely be said with some certainty that this is the fourth ascent of the Conqueror’s Route, difficulty level I.
It is worth noting that doubts about the legitimacy of the ascent using this technique had already arisen in the 1960s. As Pavel Lisák writes in Vysoká hra, “První defilé states that the Cukrovarák Spire was climbed using artificial aids. However, in 1962, Vladimír Samek objected to this wording and asked the summit commission to change the description to ‘was climbed using rope techniques.’ He justified his request: ‘Not a single piton was used, nor was the rock face disturbed in any way by artificial steps or the like.’” In his defense, Samek added: “I consider this ascent one of the most difficult I have ever undertaken, and our exhaustion was so great that we did not repeat the ascent multiple times to place the summit logbook, which we had forgotten at the base of the formation during our first ascent.”
In Šmíd’s subsequent guidebook, the tower is no longer listed. A handwritten note by Jarda “Piskoř” Houser in the draft texts for the guide confirms this: “It would be appropriate to include it in the artistic guide (Homole isn’t listed either, so why include this one).”
As the details of the climb are being finalized the evening before the event, I’m sleeping on a table at Tošovák’s inn. So I end up participating in the climb entirely by chance. Unfortunately, my spot in the line below the start is exactly where it’s easiest to reach the valley face. So I’m handed a ladder and a couple of carabiners. “Rappel down along the ropes and throw them over the overhang,” are the terse instructions. There may have been more, but as soon as I reach the starting position, I forget everything.
It doesn’t look anything like I imagined it would. I have almost no solid foothold to brace myself against, and even the one I have left is taken away by the stern voice of a bystander from the opposite peak. “You’re not allowed to climb the rock; you can only use the prepared ropes,” he says uncompromisingly. But nothing is prepared here; I can’t move, and to top it all off, I’m completely losing contact with my partners. In this position, I can’t even take a leak, because a hiking trail runs right below me, with one stream of people after another walking along it.
Once I finally figure it out and understand what to do, it becomes a pretty routine task. So I reach out my hand and wait for the rope to fly toward it. I throw it over to the other side, hoping all the while that the rope won’t fall onto the only tree there and wrap itself around it again. Just clip into the new rope like a slave and reach out again. At the top, a real sense of accomplishment awaits, along with a bottle of Rohozec from my backpack. “Make sure to bring all the beer caps,” Majda calls out. But after five hours on the wall, my hands are shaking so much that the beer cap pops out and falls straight down the valley face onto the trail. I hope it didn’t kill anyone…
What worked well:
Throw one rope arount the tower at the start.
It’s better to use static ropes. (We only had three static ropes out of twelve.)
Without the wooden stick, the difficulty increases significantly.
Thorough preparation, even outside the pub, has its advantages.
A MEMORY OF HONZA “TATUŠ” ŽWAK
The once-famous climbers’ pub U Pěňáka has been closed for many years. Houml’s idea to reopen it for a single weekend in September as part of his 50th birthday celebration drew a large group of enthusiastic individuals who needed to be kept entertained even during the day. Conditions on the rocks didn’t allow for much serious climbing in Houml’s favorite cracks, so he came up with the idea of repeating the classic non-climbing wrap-around ascent of the Cukrovarák Spire.
Since this isn’t something you see every day—or rather, you only see it in black-and-white photographs—we couldn’t miss this spectacle, and equipped with a color camera, we took our places in the front rows of the audience on neighboring tower Karbaník. Within a few hours, Houml and his buddies, using caving and all sorts of tying techniques, bound the rock so perfectly that more than a few bondage enthusiasts among the tourists on the trail were drooling with excitement.
The poor spire could offer no resistance, and soon the entire group of conquerors appeared at the summit. After consuming the spirits they’d brought up while reading local fiction, they finally let themselves be persuaded to rappel down and retreat to the safety of the established base camp, where a detailed analysis of the ascent—and some of the participants—took place.
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