Many other Himalayan climbers have had similar experiences with hallucinations, including Carlos Carsolio, who cherished them. Carlos learned that, after the first time, they became easier to induce. He was convinced that such illusions were proof of a channel opening within him. “I looked for such moments,” he said. “It was a kind of spiritual addiction.”
Krzysztof later admitted that, on this climb, he went beyond the “thin red line.” Despite the “failure” to reach the summit a second time, his climb was widely considered an outstanding achievement and an indication of the future.
Above all, Krzysztof was fast. That was Wanda’s problem: lack of speed and time. After her failed attempt on Dhaulagiri, the timeline for her Caravan of Dreams plan was now at risk. It would be impossible to finish off the six remaining peaks in the next year. Some people close to her thought—and hoped—that she might abandon the plan altogether. But that was not to be. Instead, she extended it by just one season.
15
LAST CLIMB
I never seek death, but I don’t mind the idea of dying on the mountains. It would be an easy death for me. After all that I’ve experienced, I’m familiar with it. And most of my friends are there in the mountains, waiting for me . . .
—WANDA RUTKIEWICZ, A CARAVAN OF DREAMS
BEFORE EACH EXPEDITION, WANDA HAD a ritual. She would return home to receive her mother’s blessing. After talking about the coming trip, Maria would make the sign of the cross on Wanda’s forehead. They would embrace and Wanda would leave, emotionally prepared to climb.
Wanda was almost 50 years old when she returned to Kangchenjunga, the third-highest mountain in the world. This would be her third attempt to climb it. When Wanda visited her mother for the pre-expedition tradition, Maria sensed a shift. Wanda looked like she was made of stone, as if she wasn’t really there. After a brief conversation she backed away from her mother; it was time to go. Maria ran after her daughter, calling, “Wanda, wait. You haven’t said goodbye! And the cross . . .” Wanda stopped, staring straight ahead as her mother blessed her. But it was clear to Maria that her mind was already on the mountain.
Carlos Carsolio was leading the six-person expedition, hoping to tick off his fifth 8000er. Wanda knew the handsome dark-haired climber from previous climbs. Although she had a chest infection, her leg hurt, and she was tired from her last two expeditions, she nevertheless felt good about this trip; she was among friends. Carlos knew she had plenty of problems back home, but here in the mountains she was relaxed and motivated. Her eyes were shining with happiness. The 30-year-old Carlos adored and admired Wanda’s willpower and her particularly sensuous style of toughness. They would make a good team on the North Face: her experience and his youthful strength.
Dear Marion, 26 March 1992
I got to base camp a couple of weeks ago. Tomorrow Carlos and I are going up to Camp I and on to the end of the fixed ropes at 6900 metres, below the north col, where we are going to set up Camp II. It’s a hard climb...there are dangerous potential avalanches and very strong winds....I didn’t get off to a very good start on this expedition....Time is rushing by...I’m sitting at the ends of the earth, cut off from all the things that are important elsewhere, but enjoying the isolation. As I lie in my tent at base camp I have a vivid picture of you and I feel that you’re not really far away....I send you all my best thoughts and my fondest words. So far removed from you, I wish I could make them more expressive. I need you and I bless the good fortune that brought our ways together. All my love, Wanda.
The climb didn’t go well. The sacred massif of Kangchenjunga, with its five separate peaks, seemed to be repelling them. The weather was wild. Two climbers on the expedition became ill from eating too many canned mangoes and had to descend to base camp. Two more suffered from serious frostbite and fled the expedition. In the end, only Carlos and Wanda remained high on the mountain.
Dear Marion, 2 May 1992
Nothing is going according to plan. We’ve been foiled by the weather. Snowstorms and thunderstorms all at the same time....I’m a little stressed because the route isn’t all that easy....And I’m worried because I feel alone. I don’t know what you’re doing right now and where you are. I’m sending my best thoughts and lots of love . . . from this faraway place. And I am really thankful that we have met. I need you. Love, Wanda.
Mirosław “Falco” Dąsal on guitar and Artur Hajzer on harmonica at base camp of the South Face of Lhotse
Memorial plaque at the base of the South Face of Lhotse, commemorating three Polish climbers who lost their lives on the face
Alpinist of 45th Anniversary former Polish People’s Republic
1. Helmet: looks like everybody else’s. [Coal miner’s helmet; KWK Kleofas is the name of a coal mine factory in Katowice.]
2. Welder’s glasses. [Please note that Krzysztof Wielicki used this type of glasses during his winter ascent of Mount Everest.]
3. Nylon shell [anorak] sewn by my cousin Lusie.
4. Backpack, Waciak type. [This was made by leather worker Mr. Waciak from Krakow, who made packs for all the Polish climbers.]
5. Mammut rope, cut during a climb on Les Droites.
6. Reserve [stock] of canned meat or fish for 30 days of climbing.
7. Stubai axe found at the base of the Eiger.
8. Lightweight carabiners and pitons from many sources [usually found abandoned on climbing routes in the Alps].
9. Wool pants made from an old overcoat.
10. One sock, from Mrs. Rubinowska. [She was a climber who hand-knitted woolen socks for all her climber friends.]
11. Second sock, knitted by an ex-girlfriend.
12. Zawraty leather boots, full of water and frostbitten feet.
13. Waterproofing shoe polish, available on the Slovakian side of the Tatras.
14. Crampons. Left one has 10 points and was borrowed from the Club storehouse. Right one with 12 points was found at the base of the Matterhorn.
15. The place by the table. [An important and very specific place in the Morskie Oko mountaineering hut in the Polish Tatras. It held a place of great emotional and spiritual significance for Polish climbers.]
1996 cover of Góry Alpinizm, a Polish climbing magazine. This 29th issue, featuring Mariusz Kubielas, caused a scandal, for Kubielas was a city councilman at the time.
1987 Polish route on the South Face of Lhotse, showing camps and high point reached just below the summit
Sculpture of Jerzy Kukuczka at Reinhold Messner’s mountain museum in Italy
Voytek Kurtyka on Trango Tower
Voytek Kurtyka and Erhard Loretan at base of Trango Tower
Voytek Kurtyka and Erhard Loretan on Trango Tower
Trango Tower East Face with Kurtyka/Loretan route
Members of Krzysztof Wielicki’s Gasherbrum expedition: Carlos Carsolio, Ed Viesturs, Krzysztof Wielicki, and Jacek Berbeka
Krysztof Wielicki on top of Gasherbrum I
Krzysztof Wielicki paying the porters at GI base camp
Approach march to K2
North Face of K2
From the summit of Kangchenjunga after a storm
Krzysztof Wielicki, greeted by Manam, after his solo climb of Nanga Parbat, his 14th 8000er
Darek Załuski climbing the most difficult section during the 1997–98 winter attempt of Nanga Parbat. This was the last expedition led by Andrzej Zawada.
Voytek Kurtyka, 2003
Wanda and Carlos began their summit attempt on May 7. Two days later they left Camp I and made good progress upward. By Camp III, however, the snow became deeper, and their progress slowed. Carlos pushed on to Camp IV, but Wanda became bogged down along the way, so she decided to bivouac at 11 p.m. Carlos climbed through the night and arrived at the ice cave at Camp IV at 6:30 a.m. Since the next day was extremely stormy, Carlos rested alone in camp. Wanda finally appeared at 7 p.m., weary from her efforts in the blowing snow. Her stove no longer worked, and they used Carlos’s stove and their last supplies of fuel t
o melt snow and rehydrate.
The morning of May 12 dawned clear, so at 3:30 a.m. they crawled out of their tent and headed up toward the summit. Planning to climb quickly, they left almost all of their bivouac gear behind. The younger and more powerful Carlos pulled ahead, plowing through the deep snow while Wanda lagged behind. She was climbing extremely slowly. Carlos reached the summit at 5 p.m., alone.
Three hours into his descent, at about 8300 metres, he came upon Wanda. She had dug a little snow cave under an overhanging rock and was crouched there, trying to stay warm. The night was cold and clear, with a light wind.
“Wanda, are you okay?” Carlos asked as he shone his headlamp on her half-hidden face.
“Yes, yes, I am just resting. I’m going slowly, so I will rest here a bit and go up tomorrow. All I need is some water. Do you have some?”
As Carlos crouched down beside her he could see the determination in her eyes. Still, he urged her to reconsider.
“You should come down. It’s still a long way—hours—to the top. Listen, the snow is deep and the ridge is not easy and I drank all my water hours ago. I’m sorry. Please come down with me.”
“No,” she insisted. “I’m staying. I’ll just wait for the sun and then I’ll go. I can do this.” Carlos could see that she was shivering inside her bivouac sack. “I don’t want to come back to this mountain again. But I’m cold. Can I have your down pants? Just for tonight?”
Moved by her plea, he could do little but try to convince her to descend the mountain. “I’m sorry, I have nothing else. I need them. I’m near the end. Come down with me. We can go together to Camp IV and then tomorrow to Camp III. There we can drink something.”
She refused him. “I just need you to tell me about the ridge.”
Defeated and almost delirious, Carlos explained every detail he could remember. He urged her one more time to come down, but he didn’t push. After all, this was the great Wanda Rutkiewicz; she must know her own limits. He could see that her mind was very clear, but she looked pathetically small and cold in her cave.
“Don’t worry,” she said, reading his concern. “We’ll see each other below. I’m just going to have a little rest, and then I’ll get going for the summit...”
After 10 minutes Carlos continued down, stumbling in the night, his limbs almost frozen and his thoughts running wild. He was worn out from the day’s effort, and the exchange with Wanda had further depleted him emotionally. His headlamp threw just a small orb of light that twisted and writhed with each movement of his head. He knew he was on the edge, and it frightened him. Focus. Down. Live. He couldn’t think of Wanda.
Up in her snow cave, Wanda struggled to get comfortable. She had no tent, no sleeping bag, no stove, and no water. Just her bivouac sack, a headlamp, 20 metres of rope, extra gloves, extra goggles, and a few candies. A slight breeze had picked up and now snuck around the edge of her cave and into her thin bivy bag, draining her body core of warmth.
She had been alone on mountains before, even abandoned at altitude. But this was different. The decision to stay and climb was hers alone. There was only Carlos on the mountain now, and with each passing moment the distance between them grew.
Although nobody can know exactly what she was thinking, she surely rehearsed the route in her mind. Ahead of her lay endless snowy slopes, then the pinnacles where she would need to traverse over the ridge to the south side of the mountain, then finally the climb up the summit ridge. Hours of struggle remained. She looked at her watch. Only 17 minutes had passed since Carlos had left.
Fear nibbled at her resolve. Daylight promised bravery and hope, but night on a mountain brings only darkness and death.
Carlos waited three days at Camp II, but Wanda never appeared. He left a fully equipped tent for her, knowing it was useless. On the way to Camp II he had a powerful sensation that she was dying. “She said goodbye to me,” he said. “I was very focused, but suddenly my mind was filled with her presence, her femininity. I felt it very strongly.”
Emotionally and physically destroyed, he left Camp II to continue down. On a short section between fixed ropes he lost his concentration and fell, catching hold of the rope at just the last moment. “Don’t worry. I will take care of you,” he heard Wanda’s voice in his head. Sobbing, and racked with guilt, he continued on to base camp. There were no climbers left on Kangchenjunga to mount a rescue attempt. On May 21 another storm moved in and Carlos left the mountain.
The tent at Camp II was soon buried by snow. All that was left on Kangchenjunga’s five peaks were the wind and the snow and the cold. Reuters ran a story about her disappearance as soon as word reached Poland. The next Saturday evening, Ewa was home alone. She went to bed early and fell asleep almost immediately. Around 3 a.m. the phone rang. She answered it and heard Wanda’s voice.
Dear Marion, 27 May 1992
I want to share my grief at Wanda’s death with you...as Arek told you, there was nothing we could have done. I waited for her at 8000 meters, and again at Camp II, until I was certain she couldn’t still be alive....I couldn’t dissuade her, even though she was very tired and had no sleeping bag, no cooker, no water and no food. We don’t know whether she died in her bivouac cave or on her way up to the summit or on her way down; all we know is that she is gone for ever. We loved Wanda. Carlos.
“Ewa...”
“My God, Wanda, where are you? We are all tearing out our hair.”
“I am really cold. But please don’t cry.”
“Why aren’t you coming back?”
“I can’t right now...”
Ewa woke up and realized she had been in the middle of a terrifying nightmare. She glanced at her night table and was horrified to see that the handset was off the phone.
The next morning, she called Wanda’s mother to tell her the strange story. In a calm voice, Wanda’s mother expressed little surprise, adding that one of her friends had run into Wanda, walking down the streets of Wrocław. She had been dressed in white and was very, very cold.
When Wanda first announced her Caravan of Dreams project, she stated that “living means risking, means daring; not to dare is not to live.” She insisted she did not go to the mountains for life-threatening thrills but to experience “exceptional achievement.” “Stuff your rucksack with no more than your needs for the next few days and head for the summit,” she said. “Do in a few weeks ...what would take an expedition several months.”55 What she hadn’t taken into account was the recovery time needed between these exhausting climbs. Acclimatization was one thing, but physical stamina was altogether different. Because of this, most people assumed that Wanda simply ran out of strength on the mountain.
Or did she?
Three Italians climbing Kangchenjunga in 1995 spotted what they first thought was a tent lying on the snow on the mountain’s southwest face. They looked more closely and saw that the pink and yellow tent had legs. Upon closer examination, they saw that the body was missing a leg and was nearly decapitated. Who could it be? Then they realized it was a woman. Only a handful of women had been on the mountain up to this time, including Wanda and a Bulgarian woman, Iordanka Dimitrova, who had disappeared on the mountain in 1994. They concluded it must be Wanda.
The location of the body was intriguing. When Carlos left her she was hunkered down on the Northwest Ridge. Everyone assumed that she had succumbed to the elements in her bivouac. The broken body found on the Southwest Face suggested she might have died not resting but climbing. Despite the cold and her lack of food and water, it was possible—though unlikely—that Wanda had pushed herself once again, this time beyond her limits, to somewhere around 8450 metres on the summit ridge. And then she had fallen.
When the Italians revealed their gruesome find back in Europe, they were met with skepticism. Wanda’s former climbing partner Anna Czerwińska scoffed at the idea, saying that the colour of the suit was wrong. “Wanda was too vain,” she said. “Wanda would never be caught dead in pink!” Carlos couldn’t remember wh
at colour her suit was on the climb, yet everyone agreed that Wanda had indeed owned a pink and yellow Valendré suit. But a small packet of medicine with a Bulgarian label that was found in one of the pockets pointed more toward the Bulgarian woman, and it was this conclusion that was drawn by many, including Elizabeth Hawley.
Because no body was recovered, and because her mother refused to believe she was dead, the official report of Wanda’s death in Poland was confused and muted. Her brother Michael tried unsuccessfully to launch an expedition to locate her body. There were problems with the insurance, and the entire affair was handled in an inconclusive manner.
Wanda’s tragic death hit the climbing community hard. There had already been so many Polish fatalities, starting long ago in the Hindu Kush, then continuing year after year in the Himalaya: the horrendous loss of Poles on Everest, Jurek on the South Face of Lhotse, and now Wanda. It was beginning to look like a war with the mountains, and the Poles appeared to be losing.
Climbers were conflicted about the cause of Wanda’s death. Her decision to stay on the mountain rather than descend with Carlos was considered rash by many. Surely she must have known she was ill-equipped to spend yet another night at altitude. There were real technical difficulties ahead of her, and she was already worn out. She still faced an entire day’s climb—and then the descent. Many felt that Wanda had broken all the rules on Kangchenjunga, perhaps because she knew she was running out of time.
Freedom Climbers (Legends and Lore) Page 26
