Despite her awareness of her own mortality, however, Wanda ultimately knew that she was addicted to adventure and danger. “I can’t live without them,” she wrote in a letter to Marion.
13
FALLEN GIANT
The summit of the mountain, the thunder of the sky, the rhythm of the sea, speaks to me...And my heart soars.
—CHIEF DAN GEORGE, MY HEART SOARS
KRZYSZTOF HAD ALREADY TRIED THE magnificent South Face of Lhotse twice before he finally climbed the mountain on the last day of 1988 by its regular route. In fact, the South Face had become a kind of “Polish problem,” just as Everest had been for the British and Nanga Parbat for the Germans. Back in 1985, Krzysztof, together with Mirosław “Falco” Dąsal, Walenty Fiut, and Artur Hajzer, had climbed the Lhotse face up to 8250 metres before they were turned back. Two years later he and Artur inched a little higher, to about 8300 metres. They spent one night in a snow cave but then fled from the winds that battered them, rappelling three long, tedious kilometres down the face.
When Krzysztof returned to Lhotse in 1988, he was suffering from a climbing accident on Bhagirathi in India’s Garhwal region. The doctor’s report was clear: lung trauma of the chest with compression of the eighth thoracic vertebra, a condition in which the patient has to be immobilized to prevent further spinal cord trauma. No more mountaineering.
The doctor didn’t know his patient. When Krzysztof received an invitation to climb Lhotse in winter, he responded with a yes, and then wedged himself into a special corset to stiffen his spine. The invitation came from a Belgian team that included his close friend Ingrid Bayens. Knowing the Polish talent for winter climbs, the Belgians invited Krzysztof, Andrzej Zawada, and Leszek Cichy to help them with the task. Four climbers headed up at the end of December and reached 6400 metres in the Western Cwm, between Lhotse and Everest.
Illness defeated all but one—Krzysztof. The only chance to claim the summit was to go alone, so the day before New Year’s Eve he laced up his corset and got underway. Camp III had been unoccupied for a couple of weeks, and the howling winter winds had destroyed the tents. He huddled in the ruins of one and waited out the night. The next morning he continued on up the regular route and reached the summit.
It was the first winter ascent of Lhotse, and it was solo.
Going down was much harder than going up. Downclimbing exacerbated his back injury, which was now excruciatingly painful. Twenty steps at a time were all he could manage. He would then lie down on the slope to relieve the pain, a precarious manoeuvre on the steep, icy slope. Even worse, he kept falling asleep. Looking back, Krzysztof shook his head in disbelief at his actions on Lhotse. “Four months after my accident. Alone, in winter, and in a corset! But I did it.” When his doctor read about the climb in the newspaper, he declared Krzysztof “stupid.” Krzysztof was inclined to agree.
Krzysztof and Artur went back to the South Face of Lhotse one more time, in 1989. Reinhold Messner had pulled together an international dream team for the attempt, but the expedition lacked a cohesive approach. Each climber wanted the prize for himself, and they never jelled as a team. The expedition failed.
At the same time, a major tragedy was rolling out on the West Ridge of Everest. An 18-member international expedition led by Genek Chrobak from Poland put two Polish climbers on the summit; of the 10 Poles on the trip, however, only five returned. The mountains had been killing Polish climbers steadily each year, but usually only one or two at a time. Not this time.
Elizabeth Hawley’s fall report summed it up: “Too many Poles had died.”
When Jurek completed his 14 8000ers, Celina was relieved. She doubted he would leave expedition life forever, but maybe now he would take a break, at least for a while. The Olympic Committee had awarded him an honorary medal to sit alongside all the other gold medals from the Polish government. He had been named “Man of the Year” in Poland, and most people thought Jurek would retire from Himalayan climbing. But for Jurek, the race had been just that—a race. It hadn’t destroyed his love for the high mountains or his lofty ambitions for interesting and challenging routes. One route in particular held his interest.
Jurek was consumed by his nemesis—the South Face of Lhotse. Some climbers were calling it the most important face in the Himalaya. After his defeat on the face, Messner would declare that it would be impossible to climb in the 20th century—possibly in the 21st. Jurek thought otherwise.
He had been thinking about this face ever since he first saw a photograph in a calendar, 12 years before. Back then it was completely beyond his comprehension as a climbing objective. But in 1981, Voytek had suggested it, and Jurek had agreed that it might be possible; he trusted Voytek’s judgement. Instead, they went to Makalu. Jurek had already made a couple of serious attempts, but when he heard that Messner had given up, he became excited. His competitive juices were still very much alive. He immediately applied for a permit, confident that he would have no problem finding good climbers for his team.
Jurek was in Italy, packing up his clothes at a friend’s apartment near Rome when the landlady summoned him for a phone call. The news was devastating. Five of Poland’s best climbers dead on Everest. “Everything changed at that moment,” he said. “The faces of my partners flashed in front of me. The weirdest feeling came over me as if I wanted to take a step back, erase everything. Irrationally I felt responsible. I just wanted to hide. To be alone.”51
He caught the next train to northern Italy, shut the door to his compartment, slumped down in his seat and held his head in his hands. His team was gone. His friends were dead.
As he pondered the situation, the rational side of his brain urged him to slow down. Take it easy. Take a break. For the next two weeks he waged a private debate about Lhotse. He even constructed graphs, with for and against columns. Finally he decided to do things the way he always did—by instinct. His inner voice was clear about Lhotse’s South Face: it was now or never. Messner had tagged him correctly when he described him as the most intuitive of Poland’s great climbers.
In June Jurek told the Katowice club that he was going back to the South Face of Lhotse that autumn and was looking for good partners. Artur and Krzysztof were back from their third attempt on the face, but, although they were confident they could finish the route, they were frustrated with Lhotse and had promised to give it a rest for a year or two. Artur had also been involved in the heroic Everest rescue effort and was burned out. Both declined Jurek’s invitation and tried to convince him to postpone his plan. They wanted to climb it with him. Such an ascent would be the best revenge on this mountain that kept sending them home empty-handed. But not now. After the Everest tragedy, Janusz was fed up, too. Everyone yearned for the comforts of home and flat ground for awhile. Even Jurek’s sponsors pressed for a delay until 1990.
But Jurek was in no mood to wait. His protégé, Artur, had announced that spring that he was going to try to climb all the 8000ers in a year. Jurek was slightly irritated, for this audacious plan would upstage his own accomplishments. Artur and his team were in the process of raising the million dollars they thought it would cost, when they received a blunt refusal from the Pakistani authorities for the permits they needed for the five Karakoram peaks. End of plan.
The removal of that particular irritant, plus Messner’s insistence that the South Face of Lhotse was unclimbable, only fuelled Jurek more. Now was his chance. He knew the face; he knew a good part of the route; and he thought he knew how to finish it. But he couldn’t do it alone.
Jurek was frustrated that he couldn’t convince his favourite partners to join him. He was impatient, calling climbers from all over Poland. “I would either have to take young angry ones or really old veterans,” he said. “I chose the latter.”52 Shortly before leaving, Ryszard Pawlowski agreed to be Jurek’s partner on Lhotse.
Ryszard was from the Katowice club, but he and Jurek had only roped up together once before in the Himalaya, coincidently on the South Face of Lhotse. Tall
and lean, with a deeply lined face radiating determination, Ryszard didn’t have Jurek’s vast experience, but he had a respectable climbing résumé, with ascents in North and South America, the Alps, the Caucasus, the Pamirs, and the Tien Shan, and a climb of Broad Peak.
Ryszard had moved to Katowice from Northern Silesia at the age of 14 when his parents decided that his best chance for a decent life was to attend mining school. There, he received free food, accommodation, and an education that included theoretical and practical training in coal mining. He worked 10 long years in the coal mines as a result of that training and considered himself lucky to have had any job at all. Even during Poland’s worst years, the Soviet Union’s appetite for Polish coal was insatiable.
Ryszard showed a natural aptitude for sports. At first it was judo. Next he turned to climbing. He joined the Katowice club and soon knew all the other regulars, including Jurek. For most climbers, the club was the next most important thing to family. Since Ryszard had no family nearby, the club meant everything to him. He soon began working on the rope-access jobs, painting and cleaning smokestacks along with the other Katowice climbers. Finally he quit the coal mines altogether, combining his rope-access work with stints as a climbing instructor at the local crags.
Celina recalled that Jurek’s normal pre-expedition routine was a little different this time. The last days before he and Ryszard left for Lhotse were even more chaotic than usual. Jurek usually took a lot of equipment and food from Poland on his expeditions. Barrels and barrels of food! But this time he took almost nothing. Just one pack.
Celina came to the railroad station to say goodbye. She remembers it clearly: Jurek standing there, with just his small rucksack. There were so many people jostling about, attending to last bits of business with Jurek, that she never had a chance to say a proper goodbye. At one moment there was a crowd of people; the next moment the train had left. “I had no choice, so I just walked to the car and went home,” she said.
Jurek kept a journal on the climb.
His September 6 entry was all about practical matters: who was fixing lines, who was putting in the camps, the weather. He didn’t write about personal issues, just the desire to keep moving, perhaps a little more quickly.
By October 17 he appeared stressed. “All night there was a huge wind...coming down the valley. Air pressure is jumping all over the place....What’s going on? We are frustrated. I feel like we have lost the first round. We are racing towards the time when the fall winds will come. Now we have to make quick decisions and we are going back down. At 10 we are at base camp.”
Ryszard recalled that Jurek didn’t seem all that happy. He was jumpy. They were both frustrated with the weather, although they agreed that the route was superb. They wanted it badly. Maybe too badly. Would they somehow be different when they got to the top? Would they be closer to the people they envisioned themselves to be?
Before they left for their summit attempt, Jurek wrote his plan for the next few days in his journal:
23rd and 24th—descent
26th—caravan back to Kathmandu
3rd November—Kathmandu
20th November—meeting in Italy
2nd December—back to Katowice
By October 24, Jurek and Ryszard were in the high camp. They left at 8 a.m. The weather was perfect.
Their last bivouac was between 8200 and 8300 metres. The good weather held. For days they had been battling with the cold and their private demons of weakness and fear. Now they felt a small ray of hope. Ryszard was calm, absorbing the wonderful silence. He began to think that they might just climb this face. Their long multi-month battle was nearing its end. The South Face was finally giving them a chance. He felt like one of the chosen ones who, if they succeeded, would enter into the history books of Himalayan mountaineering.
They neared the summit ridge, just a few metres from the col where Krzysztof and Artur had spent a night in a snow hole in 1987, so close to the top. There remained just one difficult stretch—a rock slab on which a light skiff of snow rested. They had a single 80-metre, sevenmillimetre rope.53 It was abnormally thin, but they had chosen this diameter, as well as dispensing with the usual second rope, in order to save weight and increase their speed.
Ryszard looped two slings over a rocky outcrop for a belay. As Jurek led out on the single line, he pounded in a piton after about 20 metres. Ryszard watched his every move. “I was belaying him and giving him all of my good thoughts,” he said. “Jurek climbed on with confidence, not slowing perceptibly when he reached the snowy slab.”
Celina was in Katowice with their eldest son, Maciek, while their youngest, Wojtek, was staying at the Istebna cottage with his grandmother. In the early-morning hours of October 24, Wojtek had a nightmare. He was with his dad going up and down in an elevator. Up and down. Up and down. The motion was sickening. He wanted out. It wouldn’t stop. Even Jurek was helpless to make it stop. Wojtek became frightened and awoke, screaming for his grandmother. It was 4 a.m.
Still at his belay, Ryszard watched as Jurek inched his way up the snow-covered slab. There were only a few metres left on the face. He could see Jurek’s profile etched clearly against the dark blue sky. Where the wall ended, a snowy ridge went up toward the summit. Jurek plastered himself against the wall. Ryszard caught his breath. With his hands, Jurek groped for better holds. His crampons scratched about on the smooth surface.
Time slowed for Ryszard during those moments. “‘Jurek, watch out,’ I whispered in my mind. All of a sudden my partner started to slide slowly along with a layer of snow.” Jurek’s crampon had slipped. He clawed with his axes and flailed with his feet but he had lost his balance. Ryszard watched from the belay as Jurek fell. “I was helpless,” he said. “He got greater and greater speed. He started to bounce off the rock. My fears grew. I went inside myself and prayed. I could do nothing except hold the rope. Ping. The piton pulled out. He continued falling. Is this the end? My God!”
Ryszard clenched the rope in his hands, ready for a sharp tug. Jurek’s weight on the end of the rope threw him against the rocks. For a moment Ryszard panicked when he feared his belay might pull out, but it held. Everything seemed as if in slow motion, but it was done in a flash. “Just for a moment I heard the sound of the ice axe hitting the rocks. I saw Jurek’s red mitten fall slowly.”
Then Ryszard’s world stood still. There was complete silence. He craned his neck, looking down for Jurek. He should be just below. But no, the piton that came out would mean the fall was significantly farther. Maybe he was injured. It was then that Ryszard noticed the thin, worthless rope in his hand. “There was no weight on it. I lifted it easily. Up and down. Up and down.”
He pulled the rope toward him. There was only a two-metre length of line left. The end was frayed. It had broken against some sharp rocks from the force of Jurek’s fall.
The time was 9 a.m.—about 4 a.m. in Poland.
Ryszard had no idea how far Jurek had fallen. Jurek had been carrying the radio, so Ryszard was unable to call base camp, and their location on the mountain was out of sight from camp. Nobody but Ryszard had seen the accident.
“My partner—the greatest climber in Poland, my friend—had just fallen in front of my eyes. I had to do something.”
Continuing up never entered his mind. He thought of only two things: find Jurek and get off this mountain alive. He downclimbed as carefully as he could for a few metres until he came to a section of old, sun-bleached fixed ropes. He pulled at the tangled nest until he found a decent length of not too badly decomposed rope. He concentrated intensely as he cut the old ropes to construct a makeshift rappel. He started down the South Face, rappelling the steepest sections and downclimbing the easier bits, headed for the tent, which he recalled was at 7900 metres.
Hour after hour he continued. His mind raced. The fall flashed in front of him over and over although he struggled to wipe the image from his mind. Concentrate. No mistakes. As daylight receded his world became murky. Finally it w
as completely dark. He knew he had to stop for fear of making a fatal error, but where was the tent? He was sure he must be near it, so he rummaged around in his pack for his headlamp. His hands were clumsy, and his brain was jumbled. He couldn’t make the headlamp work. Then he dropped it. There was no way to avoid it: a second bivouac at 8000 metres.
The next morning Ryszard passed his tent in disgust. It was about 100 metres from where he had bivouacked. He continued down, and at midday he saw his friends from base camp coming up toward him. They were worried about Ryszard and Jurek since they had heard nothing for two days. Ryszard explained what had happened, and they could see he was shattered from the experience. They helped him down to Camp III at 7000 metres, and the following day they reached base camp and began a full-scale search effort. They looked for Jurek everywhere in the massive, complex maze of rock and ice, gullies and gendarmes. Their efforts were futile.
As Celina went about her morning chores, Wojtek’s grandmother called her about his nightmare. Celina listened to the story and comforted Wojtek as best she could, assuring him that it was just a dream. She continued with her day.
Later that morning, there was a knock on Celina’s door. She walked over and looked out the glass door that opened into the hallway. There stood Janusz Majer and his wife, Zosia. “My stomach dropped,” she said.
Ewa Matuszewska remembered the day the doorbell rang and there was Wanda, standing on the step, a devastated look on her face and a bottle of vodka in her hand. She stormed into the kitchen and demanded a couple of glasses.
Freedom Climbers (Legends and Lore) Page 23
