Veteran ‘Ice Warrior’ takes on K2 challenge
POLAND: A team of Polish climbers is preparing to attempt the last great challenge of Himalayan mountaineering: a winter ascent of K2, the world’s second-highest and seconddeadliest peak.
K2, which lies on the PakistanChina border, has earned the nickname the Savage Mountain for the terrible toll it has taken on the elite band of climbers who have attempted to conquer it. One in five who have set off for the forbidding 8611-metre summit have perished.
Polish climbers built a fearsome reputation in the 1980s for their daring Himalayan ascents, and a veteran of those so-called Ice Warriors has formed a new team to try to revive the country’s mountaineering golden days.
Krzysztof Wielicki, 67, was a member of the first team to scale Mt Everest in winter, in 1980, and will lead the Polish K2 attempt this northern winter, provided that fundraising meets the expedition costs.
‘‘It is waiting for us. I hope that we will set out this year in late autumn,’’ Wielicki said during a break in training in the Tatra Mountains in southern Poland.
As team leader, he will coordinate the climb and stay at base camp while a small group waits for a three-day break in the weather to head to the summit.
K2 provides an extreme test of physical and mental endurance, with hurricane-force winds on its daunting sheer slopes, the everpresent danger of ice falls, and temperatures so cold that exposed skin freezes instantly.
Wielicki’s lifetime of experience will be invaluable for his younger companions. He is a veteran of K2, and survived an avalanche there on his last descent.
While preparing for the first winter ascent of Everest, his friend, Jozek Koniak, was strangled by a rope while climbing South Annapurna, and two others, including the expedition leader, Jurek Pietkiewicz, were lost on the way down in an avalanche.
All the experience in the world could not take the risk out of K2, Wielicki warned. ‘‘You need luck. Everyone makes mistakes.’’
Adam Bielecki, 33, one of the candidates for the four-strong summit party among Wielicki’s team of up to 10 climbers, has also seen the cruel side of his sport.
In 2013, Bielecki joined an illfated winter expedition to Broad Peak, the world’s 12th-highest at 8051m, also on the China-Pakistan border. In the grip of fatigue and worsening weather, he was one of four climbers who decided to push for the top. Only two made it back alive, suffering badly from frostbite.
Bielecki is a protege of Artur Hajzer, a Pole who made the first winter ascent of Annapurna, in 1987, with compatriot Jerzy Kukuczka. Hajzer died in 2013 when he slipped and fell more than 500m while looking for a younger climbing partner on Gasherbrum I, the world’s 11th-highest peak.
The Ice Warriors’ astonishing place in climbing history has been attributed to the lure of the Tatras, which served as a training ground and escape during the years when Poland was under oppressive Communist rule. Once the Iron Curtain came down, the need to seek out extreme diversions from everyday life diminished. Together with the high death toll of the climbing greats, the tradition of Polish climbing waned.
The new expedition’s K2 route is not yet known but the most favoured approach is on the Kashmiri side, from the south or west, rather than the Chinese side.
One of the trickiest approaches, known as the Polish Route, was named after the successful ascent led by Kukuczka in 1986. It has been rejected by every team since then as ‘‘suicidal’’, because of its high avalanche risk. Kukuczka died on Lhotse, the world’s fourthhighest peak, in 1989.
– The Times