the pioneer mountaineer who brought feminism to eight thousand

At half past three in the morning on May 12, 1992, a woman accustomed to breaking down barriers, tenacious and persevering to the point of exhaustion, left her tent in the last high altitude camp with a single objective in mind: to reach the summit of the mountain. Kangchenjunga (8,586 meters), the third highest mountain on earth and her ninth notch in her quest to become the first woman to set foot on the fourteen eight-thousanders. the polish Wanda Rutkiewiczsurely the most brilliant mountaineer of the 20th century, was immersed in an ambitious challenge that she had announced three years before, “The caravan of dreams”, which she hoped would lead her to tread the eight summits of more than 8,000 meters in less than a year. that was missing to complete the most select list of mountaineering.

The Cho Oyu (8,201 meters) and the Annapurna (8,091 meters) had already fattened their eight-thousander record in just one month the fall of the previous year. After Kangchenjunga, Dhaulagiri, Manaslu, Makalu, Lhotse and Broad Peak awaited him. And after the last peak, glory. Wanda was about to turn 50 and she was already a celebrity of Polish mountaineering –first woman to summit K2 and third on Everest–, immersed in a dazzling generation of climbers who wrote their names on the shelves of winter Himalayanism.

Following the footprint of the Mexican Carlos CarsolioWanda faced the summit day with the same willpower that had accompanied her all her life. With the same dedication with which she trained by climbing ten floors with a backpack loaded with stones or with her determination that in 1982 she made him walk the approach route to the K2 base camp on crutches after having broken his leg twice.

“I knew we were saying goodbye forever”

But that day, Wanda soon understood that she could not keep up with her partner, who, after reaching the top and back at camp IV, found herself halfway, at about 8,200 meters, with the Polish climber sitting in a snow cave. trying to regain strength.

Carsolio suggested that he go down with her, but the word surrender was not in his vocabulary. He just needed to get some sleep to try it the next day. “I knew we were saying goodbye forever,” Carsolio would later admit. They did not see each other again. At some point on that May 12, or perhaps the next day – 31 years ago now – Wanda lost her life and entered history.

«I never seek death; but I don’t mind the idea of ​​dying in the mountains. For me, it would be an easy death (…) Most of my friends are there, in the mountains, waiting for me », she had written on some occasion, as Anna Kaminska reports in «La historia de Wanda Rutkiwitz» (Unevenness), the magnificent biography of the Polish mountaineer.

Accustomed to peeking into emotional abysses since she was little – her brother Jurek died when an artillery shell exploded while he was playing and her father, Zbigniew, who imprinted on her a nonconformist character and a good dose of Stakhanovism, was murdered – Wanda had made her life a goal. Determined to be the best, far from upsetting her purposes, the inevitable failures only spurred his ambition.

His mother’s warning

Ahead of her time, she earned not a few misgivings –especially among part of the community of Polish climbers of her generation, whom she came to obscure by anticipating the conquest of Everest– by promoting exclusively female ropes in barren times for visibility and climbing. empowerment. She also had a marked ecological conscience and it was not uncommon to see her fill her backpack with waste so as not to leave garbage in the great mountains.

Admired by some –Reinhold Messner She is among those who always defended her– and hated by others, she left no one indifferent.

But the Wanda Rutkiewicz who faced the Kangchenjunga about to double the half century was no longer the same mountaineer brimming with physical strength from that distant first expedition to the Himalayas in 1975, in the Gasherbrums. Her resistance was undermined by her physical mishaps and, perhaps saddened by so many absences (she had already lost dozens of companions in the mountains), she had everything in her favor to give up. But how to do it? «I would like to be one of those women who are at home and go with her husband and children to the park on Sundays… but I can’t give up the mountain”, he had confessed to his intimates on some occasion.

More than 30 years had passed since his first climbs in the Sokolik mountains and in the Tatras of his native Poland. And now, that January 12, 1992, barely 300 meters above the level of her ninth eight-thousander, sitting on the snow, she didn’t want to give up either.

Perhaps she simply stopped, remembering her mother’s warning, when Wanda was still a teenager, that if she ever went to the Himalayas, she should not climb to the top of Kangchenjunga, because in Sikkim a local legend says that on its top, so close to where she It remained forever, the gods dwell.