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I Climbed The Tallest Chimney In Europe (360M)

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A lone climber scales Europe’s tallest smokestack with nothing but his hands and a GoPro.

There’s no rope in this video. No harness, no fall-arrest gear, no safety net of any kind — just a 360-meter reinforced-concrete tube disappearing into the clouds and a man willing to climb it anyway. That’s the premise of “Climbing The Tallest Chimney In Europe 360m (1181 feet) | 4K,” a solo urban-exploration film from OJ Adventures documenting an illegal free-solo ascent of the Trbovlje Chimney in Slovenia.

• The Trbovlje Chimney stands 360 meters (1,181 feet) tall at the decommissioned Trbovlje Power Station and is recognized as the tallest chimney in Europe.
• Climber Oliver “OJ” ascends the structure’s external maintenance ladder completely free solo, with no ropes, harness, or fall-arrest equipment of any kind.
• The entire climb was filmed in 4K on action cameras and was conducted as an unauthorized entry onto the closed industrial site.

The Structure Itself

The Trbovlje Chimney was built to serve the coal-fired Trbovlje Power Station in the town of Trbovlje, Slovenia, a facility long central to the country’s coal-mining region. At 360 meters, the reinforced-concrete flue dwarfs almost every other industrial chimney on the continent, and its scale is really only obvious once a human being is dangling somewhere on its side for a sense of proportion. By the time of this climb, the plant had already been decommissioned, leaving the chimney standing largely unused and, for explorers like OJ, unguarded enough to sneak into.

The Climb, Rung by Rung

OJ’s route follows the chimney’s external maintenance ladder, the same steel rungs presumably once used by plant workers for inspections. There are no ropes clipped in anywhere in the footage — this is a genuine free solo, meaning one slip at any point on the 360-meter climb would be fatal. He stops periodically on the narrow platforms that ring the chimney at intervals, using them to rest and shoot footage before pushing on toward the top.

Weather adds another layer of danger. Partway up, the climb pushes into dense, low-hanging cloud cover, cutting visibility and turning the wet concrete and metal into a more treacherous surface than a clear-sky ascent would present. It’s the kind of section that would end most climbers’ day entirely — for OJ, it’s just another few hundred rungs to go.

No ropes. No harness. Just 1,181 feet of steel rungs and open air.

The Summit and the Descent

At the top, OJ reaches the metal observation rim circling the chimney’s mouth, the same vantage point plant engineers would once have used to check the flue itself. The 4K cameras capture sweeping, vertigo-inducing views over the Slovenian countryside — the kind of payoff shot that’s become the calling card of the free-solo urban-exploration genre. After taking in the view, he makes the equally unprotected descent back down the same ladder to ground level, completing the round trip without incident.

Viewers who like this brand of nerve-shredding, no-net footage may also want to check out CLIMBING GONE WRONG fails for a reminder of exactly what’s at stake when a climb like this goes sideways, or Hiking 70 Miles Alone on the Sawtooth Loop Trail in Idaho for another solo endurance test, minus the 360-meter drop.

OJ Adventures built this channel on exactly this kind of stunt — abandoned structures, illegal access, zero safety margin — and the Trbovlje climb is about as extreme a version of that formula as exists in Europe. There isn’t a taller chimney to top it with on the continent, which makes you wonder what’s left on the list once you’ve already free-soloed the biggest one there is.