The Peril on a Path to Freedom

It’s an old question, and a simple one: Why do men climb mountains? The refrain is simple too: Because they are there. But there is sometimes more to the question. Why do men climb mountain — K2, where one of every four people does not make it back from the peak? And why try in winter? No one has done it. An expedition of 10 will try next winter. The Times’s Michael Powell described what they will face: Near-vertical slopes, falling ice hunks the size of cars. Hurricane-strength winds at the summit. Temperatures as low as minus- 60 Celsius. At base camp, he wrote, “climbers could wait two months in their tents, in hopes the gales relent for a few days. They have no margin for error.” So, again: Why? “Winter is the best season,” said Janusz Golab, one of the 10. “It’s more challenging.”

There is another explanation: They are Polish.

“This is the way of the Polish climbers, who for reasons of history and culture have earned reputations as the greatest climbers of the Himalayas in winter,” Mr. Powell wrote. “They are prisoners of their dreams.”

He dates those dreams to the Communist- controlled period after World War II. “The mountains offered freedom from all that,” he wrote. Poles flocked to the Tatra Mountains, and winter ascents became the measure by which climbers judged others. By the time the Poles got to Asia’s 8,000-meter peaks, those mountains had already been conquered. So, naturally, they made their mark in winter.

Kacper Tekieli is uncertain he will go, though he was once obsessed with K2. “I knew the Polish specialty is suffering,” he told The Times.

Marek Chmielarski has decided, and he will try it. “They think we are crazy,” he said. “They are right, of course.”

Few pursuits could be more dangerous. But the Isle of Man just finished its own brand of crazy, the Tourist Trophy, or TT, a motorcycle competition where speeds exceed 320 kilometers an hour and people die, almost every year. Four died in 2016. One died this month, bringing the count to 144 since the race started in 1907.

Back to that original question, so often posed to mountaineers. Adam McLean, 21, who just finished his first TT, has heard his own version.

“There’s people who would say, ‘Road racing’s mad,’ ” he told The Times. “‘What do you do that for?’ ” His answers flip as quickly as a bike: “I think you need to achieve something in life.” “Normal people, I think, are all boring.” “It’s just a buzz that you can’t get anywhere else.”

He does acknowledge fear, as do the climbers, but fear does not affect everyone the same. Consider Alex Honnold, a pre- eminent rock climber who just became the first person to “free solo” — climbing alone and without ropes — up El Capitan, the 900-meter sheer mecca in California. Experts think the climb should take about four days. Mr. Honnold did it in under four hours.

Daniel Duane wrote in The Times about fMRI tests showing that Mr. Honnold has something exceptional: an underactive amygdala, the part of the brain controlling fear.

To those asking the risk-takers “Why” in a voice of judgment, Mr. Duane offers this: Given Mr. Honnold’s gifts, perhaps his climb was not reckless, but was “a miraculous opportunity for the rest of us to experience what you might call the human sublime.”