Last summer, when competition-starved endurance athletes were setting Fastest Known Times on their local trails, a Swiss pair blitzed the Monte Rosa Traverse in their home mountains. They beat the late Ueli Steck’s speed enchainment by almost an hour. A year later, the video of their astounding feat has just been released.
Beginning at 11 pm on July 8, 2020, Nico Hojac and Adrian Zurbrügg set out to do the well-known Spaghetti Tour, which that usually takes at least four days. They finished in 13 hours and 39 minutes. It included 29 horizontal kilometres and almost 4,500m of altitude.
Photo: Graham Longford
As the film makes clear, these weren’t mere walk-ups. Although you don’t see a rope in the footage, they carried one and used it occasionally.
In 2015, Andreas Steindl and the late Ueli Steck covered the same route in 14 hours and 35 minutes, as part of Steck’s 82 Summits project.
