Challenge Days cannot pass without hearing the stories of one of the most active Bulgarian mountaineers, a man who loves mountains and challenges - Boyan Petrov - Sunny.
By profession, Boyan Petrov is a zoologist and mountaineer working at the National Museum of Natural History in Sofia. His passion for challenges leads him to the eight-thousanders around the world, which he climbs without oxygen and does not stop setting records for Bulgarian and world mountaineering. Despite the fact that he is diabetic, in 2014. Boyan climbed three eight-thousanders in less than 100 days, including the world's second highest peak K2 (8611m), the world's third highest peak Kangchendzonga (8586m) and Broad Peak (8047m). Also, quite incidentally as it seems, Sunny set a world record by climbing Broad Peak and K2 twice in 8 days.
This year, the quest for a challenge took him to the summit of Manaslu (8163 m), which Boyan Petrov managed to climb on September 30, in less than a month expedition. Manaslu is the eighth highest peak in the world and although lower than Kanchenjunga and with fewer incidents than K2, it proves inaccessible to many climbers due to bad weather and deep snow. This was the reason Boyan Petrov spent several weeks at its base in September, waiting for a window of suitable weather.
About what happened in the days before the ascent, about the camps below the summit, the snow, the winds, the deaths, the motivation, the effort, the patience, the ascent of Manaslu and the descent, Boyan Petrov told himself in his “almost last” part of the diary of the expedition “Manaslu 2015”, which you can read here.
At the festival he will talk about what the expedition to Manaslu looks like two months later, how to climb eight-thousanders, what challenges he has faced and what his future plans are.
The story is forthcoming.
Boyan Petrov has conquered a total of five eight-thousanders - Manaslu (8163 m), Broad Peak (8047 m), the famous for its difficulty K2 (8611 m), Kanchendzonga (8586 m) and Gasherbrum I (8080 m). The only eight-thousander unconquered by a Bulgarian remains Shisha Pangma (8 013 m), which is currently closed for climbing, but at the first opportunity, Bojan would head for it.
Listen to Sunny's account of climbing two of the deadliest peaks on the planet, K2 (8611m, Chogori, Pakistan) and Kanchenjunga (8586m, Himalayas, Nepal), plus Broad Peak (8047m), without an oxygen mask, without expeditions and with a drive to succeed.