Voytek had already attempted the difficult Northeast Ridge in 1976, but it was the first time for Wanda and Jurek to view the magnificent peak. The effect on them was electrifying and overwhelming. For Jurek, the sight of this geological wonder—this near-perfect pyramid of rock and ice—produced a degree of anxiety that he had never before experienced. He knew the mountain’s propensity for killing without discrimination. Even martial law seemed mundane compared to the terror of this giant.
Wanda’s team began working its way up the Abruzzi Ridge. Jurek and Voytek needed to acclimatize before attempting their route and had promised to stay out of Wanda’s way, so they headed over to nearby Broad Peak. They had no intention of climbing to the summit, but, privately, they weren’t excluding the possibility. Their official reason for being on the mountain was to “take photos” for the women’s team.
With little fuss they made their way up the mountain—all the way to the top. Of course, this was illegal, since they had no permit for Broad Peak. The “stolen climb” brought Jurek a particularly sweet satisfaction; it felt like his own personal mountain, made more precious because he and Voytek couldn’t tell anyone about their illegal ascent.
But they did, if reluctantly, the very next day. Reinhold Messner was on his way up, and although he didn’t recognize Jurek from their previous meeting, he knew Voytek well enough to strike up a conversation. He asked where they had been. Voytek was careful in choosing his words in response, mentioning something about “acclimatization” and an area “near the summit.” Messner pressed harder. He wanted to know if they had climbed the peak. Voytek persisted with his vagueness about being “quite high.” Messner understood the subtext of the answer and nodded with a grin as he agreed offhandedly to Voytek’s request to keep the information to himself.
Back at K2, the pair made little progress on their East Face. They switched to the South Face. No luck there, either. Wanda’s team was struggling, too, perhaps because she was leading from below, her crutches never far away.
Krystyna Palmowska, a member of Wanda’s team, was irritated with her for pushing them too hard. Wanda’s leadership style, developed on Gasherbrum III, was landing her in trouble once again. She had set the bar unnaturally high by walking into base camp on crutches, and now her expectations of her teammates were enormous. She seemed to have the ability to distance herself from her body, regarding it as a tool with which to accomplish a task. She transferred this same philosophy to the people she managed, and her attitude incited defiance. “Nobody likes to be treated like an object that is there only to serve a purpose,” Krystyna complained.
Then tragedy struck when Halina Krüger died suddenly of heart failure at Camp II. After 69 days on the mountain the women finally gave up. Despite the tragedy, Wanda was almost defiant as they retreated. The world’s most beautiful mountain had mocked their dreams and ambitions. She would have to come back and settle the account.
Meanwhile, the larger and very experienced male Polish team, led by Janusz Kurczab, climbed their route until they reached its final step, which they tried to bypass on its northern side. This is where the trouble began. They collided with a Japanese team climbing on the North Buttress and were forced to negotiate a high-level agreement on how to divide the terrain. The Japanese traversed to the left and tagged the summit just before the weather broke. The Poles almost made it, but had to give up at 8200 metres.
All three defeated Polish teams headed back to Islamabad, only to discover that news of the Broad Peak climb had leaked. Disgruntled authorities grilled Wanda about the unauthorized ascent, but she stuck to her story: Voytek and Jurek were merely two photographers getting pictures of K2 from the lower flanks of Broad Peak. Her story seemed to satisfy the officials.
Before returning to Poland, they travelled from Islamabad to Delhi, where they unloaded some of the smuggled Polish goods and picked up clothing and coffee to bring back to Poland. It was in Delhi’s Polish Embassy that a young Polish climber, Artur Hajzer, met the K2 teams on the final leg of their homeward journey. Artur was impressed and even a little intimidated by the array of Polish stars before him: Kurczab, Wróż, Cichy, Wielicki, and Kurtyka. He was particularly struck by Voytek’s lean face and dark sunglasses and recalled that the elusive and already famous climber would spend entire days in silence, stuck to his beach chair, listening to jazz on his Walkman and sunbathing his obviously beautiful body.
When the sun went down and the climbers gathered around the dinner table, the famous climbers spoke. The rookies, Artur included, listened. It took little prodding, according to the young climber. “You didn’t have to convince Wielicki to talk about his expedition,” Artur said. “He felt the need to talk a lot about it.” Artur was curious about why the expedition had failed. They hadn’t lacked food or equipment. Their official reason for backing off K2 was bad weather, but Artur knew that the Japanese team, which was there at the same time in the same weather, had made it to the summit.
Krzysztof talked about being at a high camp with three other climbers, two teams of two. At this moment one of the climbers developed obvious signs of altitude sickness. He couldn’t build a coherent sentence and had a particular problem with verbs. “Shovel,” “Platform,” was the best that he could muster. By the next morning he was worse. They tried testing his cognitive ability with multiplication tables, but by now his head was pounding. He clearly needed to go down, yet nobody wanted to descend with him. They were poised for a summit attempt; leaving high camp would be the end of that. Krzysztof explained that, after some difficult and tense discussions, he finally offered to accompany the sick climber, even though he wasn’t his partner.
Krzysztof stopped talking and the room went quiet. The young climbers were puzzled by this selfless decision. Krzysztof’s story didn’t resonate with them. Surely he wouldn’t have given up the summit so easily.
After refilling his teacup, Krzysztof clarified that his offer to descend was perhaps not as generous as it seemed. He knew that this summit attempt had very little chance of success. The peak was too far away. Why waste his energy? He could go down now and save himself for another attempt, all the while appearing like a generous teammate ready to sacrifice himself for the cause. Krzysztof’s assessment of their chance at the top had been correct: while he was accompanying the sick climber down the mountain, the summit attempt failed. He had been right, but had he been honest?
Krzysztof continued his K2 stories, but Artur stopped listening, struggling with what he had just heard. He was confused and disappointed to learn that in the mountains it was possible for respected climbers to be dishonest. For years he had been taught quite the opposite, a loftier set of values about clean choices and behaviours while climbing. He already had a few years of climbing experience, and he thought he understood the ethics of climbing and the sense of brotherhood on the mountain. “Would it turn out that, on the highest mountains, everything changed,” Artur wondered? “Could theory and practice be so different?”21
7
TOGETHER OR ALONE
Mountains inspire our highest selves. When we encounter mountains in wild places we experience the peak of our own humility. Whether we are standing at the summit or paying respects from below, we are flushed with awe. Perhaps this is the beginning of religion.
—TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS, EXTREME LANDSCAPE
I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WALDEN
VOYTEK THOUGHT HE HAD FOUND the perfect climbing partner in Alex MacIntyre. Alex, with his wild mane of curly black hair and his round-faced charm, contrasted sharply with Voytek, who was lean like a knife. Their characters differed, too, for Alex, with the exception of his terror of rockfall, seemed more or less unflappable. Voytek was twitchy, nervous and full of angst.
He marvelled at Alex’s imagination in the mountains, as well as at his pre-climb strategy, which was to drink heavily the night before. Alex seemed to approach the great things i
n his life with a hangover. He reasoned that the mass destruction of brain cells prior to climbing at altitude actually left fewer of them to be destroyed by the absence of oxygen during the climb—an amusing theory that held just an ounce of logic.
Alex’s acclimatization strategy, described in an article for Mountain magazine, was even more preposterous. His first suggestion was to eat large amounts of garlic. Other possibilities included “making love for hours on end in a series of two-knuckle push-ups and hopping up big hills on one toe, to the strains of Wagner from your free, portable, lead-weighted Japanese microcassette.”22 Voytek and Alex stormed through the Himalaya with a landmark alpine-style ascent of Dhaulagiri’s East Face and two alpine-style attempts on the unclimbed West Face of the 8485-metre Makalu, the second attempt with Jurek in 1981.
Voytek had a new idea that he wanted to share with both of them—a traverse of Gasherbrum I and II in the Karakoram. It was a bold plan with a lot of unknowns, but these three were certainly the ones to pull it off. They agreed to give it a try. A week before they were to meet, Voytek was at the Polish Embassy in Delhi. A group of climbers just back from K2 arrived.
“Voytek, did you hear about Alex?” one of them asked.
“No. What about Alex?” Voytek answered. Dead silence. “What about Alex?” he repeated.
“Alex is dead, on Annapurna.”
Voytek had last seen Alex at the end of their Makalu trip, when they had agreed to launch their next adventure as soon as possible. He had written about Alex’s special qualities in Mountain magazine: “Will I ever see you again? Oh yes, in a week I’ll see Alex with all his dominating tranquility and confidence, which, when I look back through my mountains and even more through my anxious returns to the plains, I was always so lacking and longing for. I’ll see him again and he’ll make me believe for a while that I can seize this tranquility again.”23
Except that now he was dead.
Stunned, Voytek turned to Jurek as his partner for the Gasherbrums. Despite the loss of Alex, and their differences on Makalu, Jurek and Voytek formed an almost unstoppable duo. They had both moved steadily upward through the impossibly strong Polish climbing fraternity and had emerged on top. They were the best of the best, a microcosmic dream team, so in tune with each other that they hardly needed to talk. With completely different personalities, they managed to co-exist for weeks, almost like an old, comfortable couple. Other climbers watched them cohabiting small tents, cooking and eating together, managing the stress of altitude and danger, and somehow negotiating their way through difficult, emotionally charged route-finding decisions. All of this, despite their contrasting styles. Voytek was the “idea guy” and Jurek brought confidence and drive. Recognizing their individual strengths was the key to their success as a team.
Voytek laughed at their differences. “When I was in pain all over, I would notice Jurek showing some small signs of suffering. When I was already deeply afraid, Jurek still did not feel any fear for a long time. When I experienced dreadful fear, Jurek was only slightly worried.” Voytek’s meticulous planning and preparation balanced Jurek’s more intuitive and aggressive approach. Voytek’s slender frame and his greater technical climbing skills complemented Jurek’s incredible strength and power. “Jurek was the greatest psychological rhinoceros I’ve ever met among alpinists,” Voytek said, “unequalled in his ability to suffer and his lack of responsiveness to danger. At the same time, he possessed that quality most characteristic to anyone born under Aries—a blind inner compulsion to press ahead. Characters like that, when they meet an obstacle, strike against it until they either crush it or break their own necks.”24
For three years they dominated Himalayan climbing. They were as happy as they could possibly be, for they were living their dream. Krzysztof Wielicki described their partnership as “magical.”
To help finance the magic, Voytek and Jurek perfected the art of “international trade,” scraping together just enough money to pay for their adventures. Like many Polish climbers, they bought cheap goods in Poland and Russia—athletic shoes, titanium ice screws, down sleeping bags and Bohemian crystal—and took them to Asia along with their climbing equipment, selling the goods for hard currency. Upon their return to Poland, they brought back hard-to-find products to sell to their Polish customers, as well as pockets full of foreign cash. American climber Greg Child recalled being accosted by Polish climbers trying to relieve him of his high-tech American tent and equipment at absurdly low prices. Greg felt they were sometimes overly insistent—even rude—about the prices, trying to impose feelings of guilt: foreign climbers should feel obliged to cooperate since Westerners were rich and the Poles were poor.
Some Western climbers urged the Poles to defect. Why not? What did they have to lose? A lot more than was first apparent. The Poles had worked out an economic system within their dysfunctional country, and, although it seemed bizarre to foreigners, it worked for them. More important, they were Polish; Poland was their home. They joked about defecting, but very few did.
The large army-style truck convoys of climbers that headed to Asia were crammed with “equipment” ostensibly to be used on their climbs. But even the border agents knew what was going on, and the frontier shenanigans sometimes approached the absurd.
Wrocław climber Alek Lwow explained his preferred method of dealing with border guards: “We drank with them.” After a certain amount of imbibing, the customs agents would eventually hand over the all-important stamp to the soberest member of the group and tell him to certify the paperwork. Many climbers returned to Poland richer than when they left. Climbing wasn’t just a hobby. It wasn’t just a lifestyle: it was a living. They could buy food, clothing, cars, even houses with their illicit profits. A well-known story has it that one alpine smuggler allegedly left Poland with a pack of chewing gum, sold it in India and continued buying and selling goods back and forth across various Asian borders until he finally returned with enough money for a Mercedes Benz!
Smuggling had become a big and lucrative business for Polish climbers. But from time to time there were problems.
Jurek and Voytek arrived at the India–Pakistan border near Amritsar in the summer of 1983, their truck fully loaded with climbing equipment and food for their Gasherbrum expedition. But their barrels held more than equipment: a few had whisky. The normal routine was to arrive at the border, pass through Indian customs, drive through a 200-metre no-man’s-land, unload the trucks, reload the barrels into Pakistani trucks and, finally, pass through Pakistani customs.
This time was different. The Indian customs agents were suspicious and uncooperative. They ordered the pair to unload their trucks at Indian customs and then insisted on opening and inspecting every single barrel. Voytek protested. “Come on. We are leaving your country, not entering it.” The officer mumbled that he was just following orders. After a somewhat cursory glance into each barrel, he trundled off to his commanding officer and reported that all seemed okay. The officer snapped at him, accused him of shoddy work, and insisted on doing it all over again, this time together.
Barrel by barrel, they rooted through the contents, all the way to the bottom. Voytek and Jurek felt queasy. Whisky was not considered “necessary food provisions,” and it certainly didn’t qualify as climbing equipment. They had a lot of it. Jurek walked around the corner, sat down on the ground and lit a cigarette, resigned to the looming catastrophe.
He heard shouting. It was Voytek. “What are you looking for?” he screamed. Jurek could hear the anger and fear in Voytek’s voice. “You want to see everything? Fine. Be my guest!”
There were three barrels left. Each held several bottles of whisky, carefully and tightly swaddled in sleeping bags. Voytek had insisted on personally packing these barrels and had been irritatingly fussy about how they had been wrapped. He grabbed one of the guilty barrels and began tearing out its contents, including a sleeping-bag-clad bottle of whisky. Miraculously, the bundle remained intact and the bluff succeeded. The cust
oms agents had stopped to watch the tantrum and concluded that they were wasting their time. Surely this half-crazed climber had nothing to hide since he was ripping the barrels apart himself. They abandoned their search and let the two go.
Voytek and Jurek extricated themselves from the Indians and approached Pakistani customs. gether or Alone
“Do you have any alcohol?”
“No, sir, we do not.”
The wily pair retrieved their stamped documents and sped off, visions of Asian prisons fading away, glistening mountains slipping in to take their place.
But their problems were not yet over. When they arrived in Islamabad they had two important tasks. The first was to sell the whisky for enough cash to finance the trek to base camp. The second was to obtain and pay for the Gasherbrum permits.
Selling the whisky was easy. Voytek knew the where and how of that. It was even fun in a stealthy kind of way: the darkness of the early-morning hours brightened by the little lamps; a shot or two of vodka as they rummaged through the barrels; choosing the items to take to market that day. They toasted each other and laughed. They felt like pirates on the high seas.
Next, it was over to the Ministry of Tourism for their permits. Strangely, there was little talk of the Gasherbrums but rather an inordinate amount of interest in Broad Peak. Perhaps it was the Ramadan-enforced fast that made the official so grumpy, or maybe it was just the stifling heat.
“How was it, gentlemen, last year on Broad Peak? Did you get to the summit or not?”
Of course they had climbed Broad Peak in 1982, but without a permit—and without reporting it.
“What summit?” Voytek responded. Wanda had reported in after the expedition and had allegedly smoothed things over. Apparently not completely. Maybe it was Messner’s book about his Broad Peak climb that had leaked the story. The official insisted that the paperwork on Broad Peak was not complete and that he would appreciate it if Voytek and Jurek could do that—now.
Freedom Climbers (Legends and Lore) Page 12
