Who is Peter Valušiak

Peter Valušiak was born on 4th of February 1967 in Spišská Sobota, below the High Tatra Mountains. Later, his family moved to Bratislava and the first sport to which Peter devoted himself was volleyball. During his holidays at his grandparents, his relation to nature slowly became stronger when he eventually decided to follow his father and began studying geology at the Faculty of Natural Science of Comenius University in Bratislava. In 1992, he graduated from the university, being already an experienced expeditionist. Following his expeditions to various places, such as Ťan-Šan, Altaj and the Eastern Sajan-Mountains, Lake Baikal and the Caucasus, during July to August 1990 he happened to take part in a polar expedition and the Russian islands in Franz Joseph Land attracted him so much than he returned to them half a year later to also relish their beauty in winter. In 1991 there followed another expedition to Kamchatka and a year later, he led the Asia 92 expedition to Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Sikkim and Western Bengal. After that, he tried to reach both of the poles. At first, he conquered the North Pole in 1993 as a member of the 1st Slovak expedition to those regions and then two years later during a training expedition. He is only unhappy about the end of his journey to the South Pole at the turn of 1995/96, when the people responsible for the safety of expeditions to Antarctica untimely took him and his two Russian colleagues - Vladimir Cukov and Ivan Kuželivský, to the pole by airplane, interrupting their journey 250 kilometres before the target destination. There, at the pole, they had to stay in vain and wait for their next transport during a long period of good weather ... In April of the following year, he trained in the region of the polar Ural Mountains and the Kara Sea for his most-significant transarctic expedition. During the period from 23rd February to 20 June 1998, the well-tried team from Antarctica, extended by another Russian Valer Kochanov, managed a dream-category achievement when they independently, by foot and on skis, crossed the Arctic as the first people in history to do so, starting at the shore of Russia through the North Pole to the shore of Canada! A film about this expedition called “118 Days in the Captivity of Ice” made by the film director Pavol Barabáš received 18 awards, including 5 Grand Prizes, in festivals around the world. Together with Pavol Barabáš, Peter has also participated in other films, such as “OMO - A Journey to the Primeval Age”, where Peter was a member of the second team in the world team that managed to raft the River OMO. At the end of last year, Peter Valušiak, together with Pavol Barabáš and the Czechs Zdeňek Hrubý, Vladimír Nosek and Rudolf Švaříček managed to be the first people in history to cross Antarctica from the coast to Mt. Vinson, the highest peak in Antarctica (5140 m), which was first conquered by Hrubý and Nosek and, one day later, on the 5th of December, also by Valušiak. On the same day, his daughter Terezka was born in Bratislava. His idea to continue in a solo crossing from beneath Mt. Vinson to the South Pole had in the end to be cancelled due to a lack of time. This expedition is captured in the film “UNKNOWN ANTARCTICA”.