Janusz Golab is a long-limbed lion of a climber with curly hair that goes here and there like an ethereal nimbus. “Winter is the best season,” he says. “I’m not sure I need K2 in winter.”. She became the first woman to summit K2 and the first Polish person, male or female, to climb Mount Everest. He was 51. The Polish mountaineers will arrive in late December and will wait days and weeks and months in hopes that incessant winds do not rend their tents. Stay put until bodies accommodate to the thin air. Kacper Tekieli rigs the rappel in the Tatras. But his hunger for fame is a bonfire, and that worries the older man. A Polish mountaineering commission assailed Bielecki: You violated the brotherhood of the rope and deserted comrades. In 1986, two Polish expeditions climbed via two new routes, the Magic Line and the Polish Line (Jerzy Kukuczka and Tadeusz Piotrowski). For his mountaineering successes, Tadeusz Piotrowski became a four-time recipient of the highest sports medal in Poland, the Gold Medal for the Exceptional Sporting Achievements. He began to run and lost his pot belly. Soon after, Hajzer flew to the Himalayas intent on finding peace by climbing. K2, at 8,611 metres (28,251 ft) above sea level, is the second-highest mountain on Earth, after Mount Everest (at 8,848 metres (29,029 ft)). All is black and white and gray with periodic wild flashes of razor-blue sky and sun. It lies in the Karakoram range, in part in the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan-administered Kashmir and in part in a China-administered territory of the Kashmir region included in the Taxkorgan Tajik Autonomous County of Xinjiang. Bielecki sent a longer list. “Everyone wants to be the best, and that is how we die.”. In a display of stunning courage, skill and persistence, the Polish ski mountaineer put down the first-ever ski descent of the Karakorum giant known as K2. Polish climbers on Nanga Parbat in Pakistan on a 2006/2007 winter expedition. Reinhold Messner called K-2 the \"Mountain of Mountains\" after his ascent of K-2 in 1979. K2 from the South is about empty, but the Catalans remain attempting the Magic Line. He grew up in Gdansk, a shipyard city, and came to climbing as a philosophy student. That climber and a partner scaled K2 in summer along a route so dangerous, even suicidal — it passed beneath unstable ridges of ice — no one else has attempted it. This extremely picturesque peak rises single over 3000 m above the valley bottom at its base. Periodically these ice flows disgorge the bones of dead climbers. His wife is adept on cliffs, and he twitches as she moves up a rock face. Wielicki is the remaining master. The mountains offered freedom from all that. Piotr Tomala, a climber, toughens up on a stair-climbing machine wearing a weighted pack. “You need super luck to come from South America and find the weather to your liking,” he says. “Your list does not impress me at all,” Hajzer wrote back. He shrugs. Generational tensions bubbled. A scaffold, they said, costs more than your price. Their story, embedded in the urge of free spirits to slip the unsmiling bonds of a Cold-War communist government, offers our starting point. Their ranks produced Wanda Rutkiewicz, the first woman to summit K2, and the first man to scale three giant peaks in winter, Jerzy Kukuczka. It was first climbed in 1986 by a Polish-Slovak expedition. When the photographer Max Whittaker and I accompanied five Polish Himalayan climbers to the Tatras in January, snow piled swollen on steep mountainsides and the temperature hovered near zero. This pyramid of a mountain is right in the heart of the Karakoram Range and can be seen in its entirety from Concordia. 8.25 Andy Bargiel on top of K2! “I’m not sure I need K2 in winter.”. The Koreans have the rights to develop and export the K2 MBT. Finish your story’.”. Bielecki, the man-child with the otherworldly endurance near the summit, is another natural choice. No fancy equipment, no endorsements, no publicity; just freedom from the strictures of life in Poland. Międzynarodowa wyprawa na K2 w 1986 roku odbyła się pod kierownictwem Karla Herrlighoffera. The Polish line seemed more sensible now, John Porter and Al Rouse pushed the route on to about 24,000 ft when this good spell ended in late June. Pyramid-shaped, an austere link to eternity, K2 yields only to Everest in height and is deadlier. fingers crossed!!! “I was just a poor bored lecturer in Poland. Now the most difficult-to-exit combination of roads for annex. He could join the elite four who summit K2. We have not talked much about them, so a little background: Oscar Cadiach, Everest climber, has been to Everest 5 times, one of them with TVE's "Al filo de lo imposible". We talk as he stands in the darkened attic of a lodge in the Morskie Oko valley in Poland, looping purple rope in preparation for a training climb in the subzero of the Tatra Mountains. One night in January, I sit in the village home of Janusz Majer, 70, a burly climber who is working to obtain the $335,000 in government and private financing needed to underwrite the assault on K2. And then there is winter. Translated from, "AdventureStats Special: The unclimbed faces of K2" K2 Climb Net, ExplorersWeb Inc., undated, "K2's South Face - AAC Publications - Search The American Alpine Journal and Accidents". No one has ever reached K2’s summit in winter. “He could get angry really fast. The life of a vagabond climber seemed frivolous. Bielecki and his partner made it back to their tents, badly frostbitten. Wielicki, the leader of the upcoming expedition, was renowned for his solo ascents of Himalayan peaks. That can prove a frail shield in the high Himalayas. Kacper Tekieli is one of the climbers whom Max and I accompany to the Tatras. The summit team will pull up those ropes and sleep in those tents. Always they ask: ‘You go? No one can be certain how a body will react at the top of the world. It’s as if the dark imaginings of Hieronymus Bosch scamper through the cranium. He offers a thin smile. The only other known successful attempt to climb this route was accomplished by Jordi Corominas of Spain in 2004. He never said he was sorry, but he was fair,” Bielecki says of his teacher. Tadeusz Piotrowski (September 19, 1939 – July 10, 1986) was a Polish mountaineer and author of several books related to the subject. Four 8000m peaks sit within a radius of 13 miles from Concordia, making this the largest concentration of the highest peaks anywhere on earth. “All we need is three days of good weather and we will get to the top of K2,” he says. They fill backpacks with iron bars and work stair-climbers. Polish alpinists seem designed for winter expeditions. To listen to him is to wonder if he harbors doubts. Not many other alpinist in … “We climb here, and here, and here,” he recalls. When climbers reach the summit, their breathing will be a shallow, fast pant. I put the question of death’s allure to him and he shakes his head. Piotrowski began his career in the 1960s in Poland's Tatra Mountains, around the time when he was a student at the Szczecin University of Technology. It’s obvious it’s the best.”. We work Alpine-style, the climbers replied. Its walls are vertiginous no matter the approach. To sit now with the Polish mountaineers, old and young, is to hear voices rise and laughter roll in like ocean breakers. Then fly to Pakistan and trek quickly to base camp. There is Golab, the climber who was with us in the Tatras. He and Wielicki issued a manifesto: “Young, angry, ambitious” Polish climbers should embrace “positive suffering” and return to winter Himalayan climbing. Kacper Tekieli, at 32 a mountaineer of some repute, nears a summit in the Tatra Mountains in Poland, where many climbers build their skill. The younger generation of climbers view Bielecki’s strategy as a good gamble. They tell tales of supplies piled atop camels and flirtations with entrancing local women and negotiating with turbaned mechanics to eke a few more miles out of wizened vans. “There’s no pleasure to be found in Karakoram in winter. To scale K2 in winter is not such modest madness. I want to keep finding beautiful paths up mountains.” He pauses. They will vomit and suffer dehydration and begin to hallucinate. They have no margin for error; K2 routinely kills those trapped on its flanks. If Gorzkowska, a medal-winning runner who also became the youngest Polish woman ever to climb Mount Everest, makes it to the summit, she will have made history and silenced those who see her attempt as a social media stunt with no chance of success. Marek Chmielarski, 40, is one of the Tatra climbers and will join the K2 team. Janusz Majer in his library. On the mountain, climbers escape into concentration as pure as a monk’s repose. Janusz Golab is a force unto himself, climbing with precision and economy of motion, a strong-limbed cat. [6] The route Piotrowski and Kukuczka climbed remains unrepeated.[a]. I put the question to Bielecki. It was first climbed in 1986 by a Polish-Slovak expedition. He is pleased his children have not inherited his passions. There is a whack of the ice pick and another one, and one after that. “If I say, ‘No, come down’, they must listen,” he says. Italian Simone Moro hold the record for the most 8000 peak climbed in winter. (As expedition leaders must, he will remain at base camp during the ascent of K2.). He would go on to become one of the leading Polish mountaineers, known worldwide as a winter climbing specialist. “If you want to feel great emotion, you must write a story.”. The grand climbers perished at a frightful rate. “I knew the Polish specialty is suffering.”. “It’s more challenging. They do tortuous lifts and pull-ups. “It was Artur’s last lecture,” a climber said at his funeral in a grand cathedral in Katowice. He opened a chain of climbing and outdoor stores. Here and there, they will climb that fantastically steep mountain and lay rope lines on its sides. Tekieli is undecided on whether to join the K2 team.Credit...Max Whittaker for The New York Times. The climbers arrived acclimated, but a winter storm front descended and would not lift. The climbers could wait two months in their tents, in hopes the gales relent for a few days. A storm coiled like a snake around a mountain. There are ten routes to K2 Summit; Four on Chinese and six on Pakistani side . Ice forms thick on nostrils and goggles. The others disagreed. It was first attemptedby Duke of Abruzzi in1909.The famous features on this route include “House’s Chimney”, “Black Pyramid”, easily visible “Shoulder” and a … Why climb it? He paints oil platforms for a living from the North Sea to Azerbaijan. Atop K2’s near-vertical slopes, glacial icefalls dislodge car-size hunks of ice. The second batch (also around 100 examples) came off the production line between 2018 and 2019 – the final examples are being manufactured at the moment. Six Routes to K2 Summit on Pakistani Side . Why not? Many dozens of climbers each night talked mountains, life, and more mountains, and sang songs and drank vodka. Only the most experienced climbers attempt ascents, and for every four who crawl to its peak, one dies. He has climbed three Himalayan peaks in winter, including Everest, and has the bowlegged amble of a man with little left to prove. And last night, in the most impressive ascent of a remarkable season, Spanish … The only other known successful attempt to climb this route was accomplished by Jordi Corominas of Spain in 2004. “You’re making just $50 a month. 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. The universe narrows to a meter or two. “He is pursuing me, I. Bielecki courted Hajzer, emailing a list of his ascents, including climbs up 20,310-foot Denali in Alaska. Others were expeditionary geniuses who plotted climbs like military assaults. Over salamis and cheeses and a prodigious amount of wine, we talk of long-ago mountaineering adventures. Diagram. Le K2 (aussi connu sous les noms de Qogir Feng, Chogori, Ketu/Kechu et historiquement mont Godwin-Austen) est un sommet du massif du Karakoram (ou Karakorum) situé sur la frontière sino-pakistanaise dans la région autonome du Gilgit-Baltistan (district de Skardu). K2 doesn't really have a NW ridge after all (at least not in the upper part). K2 is the forbidding exception. Two more teams have completed ascents of K2, including the second ascent of the “Magic Line,” K2’s steep and technical South-Southwest Pillar. At 32, he has built a considerable mountaineering reputation, although he cannot afford to give up working as a barista in the old quarter of Krakow. He was accompanied by Andrzej Bieluń, who climbed at the head, and was lost, assumed dead near the top of the mountain. “People die in the mountains, even the best ones.”. The American team will attempt a route to its right (out of sight), then cross the ridge to finish on the upper West Face.Photo courtesy of Dodo Kopold. Janusz Majer, left, and Jerzy Dudala in the Tatras in the 1970s. Bielecki attempted that strategy during a winter ascent of Nanga Parbat, a 26,660-foot mountain in Pakistan that goes by the self-explanatory nickname Killer Mountain. But the great emotion of making history, of making an accomplishment no one else did, that is immense, almost spiritual.”. Tekieli is undecided on whether to join the K2 team. After more than two years of preparation, the team began ascending K2 in early January. Danger weighs on him as it did not decades ago. The mountain rises glistening from an encasement of glaciers in the far reaches of the Karakoram. Variant Messner / M / and line line / fragment of road kukuczka-Piotrowski /. He has children and at least one girlfriend, and he appears filled with a love for life. This winter, an elite team of Polish climbers is attempting to solve this problem. Those who stand within the shadow of that monolith in winter describe a sensation akin to having landed on an extraterrestrial world. Piotrowski began his career in the 1960s in Poland's Tatra Mountains, around the time when he was a student at the Szczecin University of Technology. Sometimes climbers go a day or two without food; sometimes they fail to notice. On Sunday, July 22, history was made when Polish ski mountaineer Andrzej Bargiel became the first person to successfully complete a full ski descent from the summit of K2. “It’s not just the problem of the people in the Katowice club, but of the people of Poland. Kacper Tekieli checks on morning conditions in the Tatras ahead of a day of climbing. Mountain deaths are dominoes; one precipitates another. He gives to ambition a nod of self-recognition. Water and power gels freeze solid. Consider bringing a thin line (4-5mm) for the Bottleneck, a 100-meter narrow couloir at 8300 meters that is 80-90 degrees. “You cannot rely on super luck.”. He paints oil platforms from the North Sea to Azerbaijan. “I will keep climbing, but I think I don’t know the result of that yet.”, And K2? “‘Now you have to do winter Tatra.’”. Boom. K2’s fastness is so complete, it acquired no dependable name from the Balti tribes, who for millenniums did not know of its existence. In search of money, they walked into factory offices in Katowice and pointed to towering industrial chimneys. Artur Hajzer was among the prematurely retired. K2 s Magic Line Completed. He carried the weight of too many deaths. K2 won't be summited in winter 2020 neither. Age 33, married with a toddler and another baby on the way, he began climbing as a teenager. Ten Polish climbers hope to make history by reaching the summit next winter. Hands, feet and arms go numb.