The Last Problem of the Himalaya

The mountain is the rhythm of the world as it both emerges from and continues to motivate human projects. 

 
On March 5, 2013, a team of four Polish mountaineers completed the first winter ascent of Broad Peak, one of the 14 peaks over 8,000 meters high that make up the Crown of the Himalaya. Maciej Berbeka, Adam Bielecki, Tomasz Kowalski, and Artur Małek had been at Base Camp since January, terminating multiple summit bids due to high winds. Berbeka had had Broad Peak in his sights since his first failed winter ascent in 1988, when he was sure he’d summited, alone because his partner had turned back due to exhaustion, and only later, seeing photographs, realized the wind had shifted the snow and confused him visually. He’d waited all these years for a second chance, and this time, the 59-year-old Berbeka was successful.

He and the 27-year-old, much less experienced and much more fatigued Tomasz Kowalski separated from their teammates and summited a bit late in the day. The other two, Bielecki and Małek, would later be bitterly criticized by the climbing community for breaking with protocol by losing the visual on the slower pair while each team summited at its own pace. On the descent, Kowalski had serious trouble breathing, and fell and broke a crampon. He had to remove his gloves in order to fix it. The pair decided to bivouac, camping without proper equipment at 7,900 meters while the others slept at Camp IV. The next day, as Bielecki and Małek made it back to Base Camp, a storm closed in. A lone figure, probably Berbeka, was sighted one last time, still at 7,900 meters, in the storm. Slow, lost. Two days later, expedition leader Krzysztof Wielicki called off the search and Berbeka and Kowalski were declared dead. Their winter ascent of Broad Peak remains on the books, coldly impervious to the details.

 

There’s no one reason that K2 is often considered the most difficult mountain to climb. It’s not the world’s tallest mountain. It doesn’t have the highest fatality rate. It’s known for its steepness and for the unusually long distance climbers must trek just to get to its base, with no villages to stop at and restock supplies. But those factors alone don’t explain K2’s nickname, “Savage Mountain,” or its reputation as deadly and ineffable, or the power that this reputation holds over the human imagination. As Reinhold Messner puts it, “an artist has made this mountain.”

First summited in 1954, K2 remains uniquely unconquerable. In Himalayan mountaineering, there are three major categories of firsts: the first ascent, the first ascent without supplemental oxygen, and the first ascent in winter, when conditions are at their worst. All of the eight-thousanders have been climbed with and without supplemental oxygen. And until January 2021, all had been summitted in winter, too—except for one.

During the winter climbing season of 2017-18, the then 68-year-old Wielicki led a new all-Polish K2 expedition. After more than two years of preparation, the team began ascending K2 in early January. The week of March 5th, still quite far from the summit, Wielicki ordered a retreat because conditions were too dangerous. Their journey sought to extend a long national tradition: Until 2005, exclusively Polish teams had made every winter ascent of an eight-thousander. National Geographic had nicknamed them “Ice Warriors.” Even the international team that broke this long run had a Pole in it (Piotr Morawski, climbing with Simone Moro).

Three previous attempts at K2 in winter by international teams, two of which included Wielicki, had failed. Given what he learned from those attempts, this team’s combined experience, and the outpouring of support from fans on social media, there was a good chance they would make history. That the team ultimately withdrew from the climb is beside the point, since they quickly announced their plans for another summit bid, via a different route in 2020-21. When it finally happens, the first winter ascent will also be a last, completing a certain version of the story of human victory over mountains. And that introduces a whole new problem for climbers, as well as their fans, to contend with: What happens once the world’s most savage mountain is “done?”

The history of Everest offers some insights. In contrast to K2, which only serious climbers attempt, Everest is the Himalayan peak crawling with amateur adventurers, whose bank accounts often exceed their mountaineering experience.

The commercialization of Everest came to public attention after Ueli Steck’s 2013 altercation with Sherpas on the mountain’s notoriously difficult Lhotse Face. Steck and Simone Moro found themselves face-to-face with a mob of masked men wielding rocks and ice picks and yelling “No!” Following the incident, Moro chalked up the Sherpas’ anger to jealousy of the pros’ climbing speed, and to professional competition: “Sometimes people like us, who are not clients, are considered not good for business.” But Steck had a more nuanced view of the tensions on Everest. “You have to look at how the whole system works,” he told Outside.

More than simply matters of economic inequality or human psychology, the problems on the mountain reflect massive shifts, over time, in both climbing culture and the ways climbing reflects culture at large. This “whole system” extends well beyond Everest. Such tectonic shifts were visible by 2002, when six winter ascents still remained besides K2. Wielicki was already a climbing legend, with the first winter ascent of Everest on his record. He issued a “Winter Manifesto,” enticing young Polish climbers to complete the project. “We have done one-half of the job,” the manifesto declares. “Now it’s your turn to finish it: you, the young, angry, and ambitious.”

There are good reasons to be wary of the manifesto’s nationalistic undertones: the history of mountaineering is rife with big displays of national pride, from Hillary and Norgay’s Everest, which coincided with Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, to Wanda Rutkiewicz, the first Pole on Everest, summiting on the same day her countryman, Karol Wojtyła, was declared Pope John Paul II. And to many, the extraordinary level of Himalayan climbing by Poles has always played a leading role in the country’s theater of nation. The first Polish expedition to the Himalaya—when Jakub Bujak and Janusz Klarner stood on the summit of Nanda Devi East on July 2, 1939—took place just a couple of months before Germany invaded Poland in World War II.

Gestures that combine national pride with the act of climbing still continue in many countries, and seem especially popular in Poland. For instance, the project Polish Himalaya 2018—a combined supermarathon through the streets of Kathmandu, followed by a trek to Everest Base Camp, culminating in an all-Polish, massive group Everest ascent, all under the title “Everyone Can Have Their Everest”—was scheduled to coincide with the centennial of Poland’s independence in 2018. Given that on this same date in 2017 over 60,000 nationalists and fascists from across Europe marched through the streets of Warsaw, the nationalistic tones of contemporary mountaineering are no mere detail.

Upon closer examination, however, Wielicki’s text isn’t properly nationalistic in the least. His references to Poland are almost incidental and he never actually calls for commitment to one’s nation. The point rather is that something extraordinary and unique has happened in alpinism, a notoriously individualistic and international sport: one nation had suddenly, unexpectedly emerged as dominant to this degree, as arguably the strongest and most audacious climbers in the history of the sport. Jerzy Kukuczka was the second man to ascend all 14 eight- thousanders, after Messner, but it took Kukuczka exactly half the time. His speed record for all 14 peaks remained intact for 32 years, until it was beaten in 2019 by Nepali climber Nirmal Purja. Wanda Rutkiewicz, still routinely considered the world’s greatest woman climber, was the first woman to summit K2. Wielicki himself was not only on the teams that had made first winter ascents of Everest, Kangchenjunga, and Lhotse; he had also once “run” Broad Peak solo, and still remains the only person to climb it from base to summit and back in 24 hours.

With the new generation, Wielicki complains, that hunger for adventure has been lost. “No one dreams of climbing the great walls of the Himalayas [sic], of new routes, traverses,” he writes.  Anyone can “climb Mt. Everest if you have cash.”

The Poles never did “finish it,” at least not as triumphantly as Wielicki had wished. On January 16, 2021, a team of ten Nepali Sherpa climbers achieved the first winter K2 summit. Among them was the superstar Purja, who wrote on Instagram, “History made for mankind. History made for Nepal!” But far more troubling than this “upset” (from the perspective of many Poles) is the fact that today’s bids for the last important summits take place in a time when the failures of creativity and imagination that Wielicki feared are even more pervasive.

Steck’s take on “the whole system” of Himalayan mountaineering was that it involved “so much bullshit.” In a video shot before he fell to his death while training for another Everest ascent, he reminds his fans that Everest is the highest mountain in the world, as if everyone watching didn’t already know that. Perhaps he feels the need to prove that the bullshit hasn’t compromised Everest’s height. Almost a century after Mallory’s “because it’s there,” Steck seems to present Everest’s thereness to his audience precisely because it no longer goes without saying.

In contrast, philosopher and pro climber Heidi Howkins Lockwood, who has attempted K2 multiple times, talks about K2 in almost mystical terms:

It lives up to its name—it’s absolutely relentless… Not just the gradient, but the whole aura of the mountain wears on you. It’s a mountain that you walk away from with a certain sense of awe and humility, whether you have managed to summit or not.

In his essay “Mountains,” Flusser describes the mountain as “an ungraspable rhythm despite all knowledge.” But the rhythm’s ungraspability is not the end of the story, because “if knowledge did not exist, such an essence would not have revealed itself.” If this rhythm is ungraspable, this is not due to being a static feature of this ineffable thing, the mountain, but because it is dynamic and thus impossible to conclusively pin down. In fact, it may be the essence of dynamism itself, as that which moves between the recalcitrant ground and the realm of fallibility and desire that we call human knowledge. The mountain is the rhythm of the world as it both emerges from and continues to motivate human projects.

In this respect, K2 is the last mountain. Its aura—and our awe—depends on it remaining unclimbable. Even prior to this climb, The New York Times feature about the team described the mountain in awestruck tones, as “the most hostile tip of the planet… a northern loner… mythical and moody and deadly…. K2 is the forbidding exception…. Its walls are vertiginous no matter the approach…. K2 routinely kills those trapped on its flanks…. Those who stand within the shadow of that monolith in winter describe a sensation akin to having landed on an extraterrestrial world. All is black and white and gray with periodic wild flashes of razor-blue sky and sun…. K2’s fastness is so complete, it acquired no dependable name from the Balti tribes, who for millenniums did not know of its existence…. And yet, God, that mountain.”

Stories from the last Polish expedition include Adam Bielecki and Denis Urubko’s heroic rescue of Elizabeth Revol from Nanga Parbat, for which they received a prestigious Climbing Award from the American Alpine Club, and Urubko’s decision to break away and attempt to summit solo, in open defiance of Wielicki, for which he was unceremoniously expelled from the team and sent home/. The final decision to turn back only heightens the overall suspense, in which the fulfillment of a certain dominant fantasy of mountaineering is this close, just one ascent away. And just a couple of months after, in July 2018, Andrzej Bargiel made the first solo ski descent of K2, continuing the tradition of unstoppable Poles in the Himalaya. All of these feats simply invite other Poles to continue the tradition.

The cover of Dariusz Jaroń’s 2019 book about that 1939 Polish Nanda Devi East first ascent showcases a blurb by Bielecki, which lauds the author’s colorful account of “the fates of people who don’t hesitate to dream and have the courage and endurance to make their dreams come true.” Inside, Jaroń writes: “In the beginning was the mountain.” For climbing culture, the mountain is coextensive with the dream, with dreaming and imagination itself—and K2 is the only “the mountain” still standing.

The drama of the Nepali team’s historic accomplishment hangs on the fact that this is precisely a final frontier. Writers, climbers, and climbing writers trumpet K2’s remoteness and indifference, its immovability, its wilderness precisely because those features are endangered. Those are the features that, on some level, preserved the imagination that once motivated mountaineering. The winter ascent of K2 will change that. This is probably why some of the climbers with the most skin in the game have already started questioning the validity of this ascent, on the grounds that the climbers used oxygen. Like all frontiers, this one will be stretched out for a little while longer.

To borrow a description of the once-insurmountable north face of Switzerland’s Eiger—“the last problem of the Alps”—K2, in winter, remains the last problem of the Himalaya. But all frontiers eventually fade. And along with the exhaustion of mountains, our own is on the horizon.

What would a Winter Manifesto for the present look like? It might take the form of an open letter to every team going for the final frontier ascents, asking them to consider withdrawing. Not because they can’t do it, but precisely because they can. But such a request might seem to disrespect all the enormous achievements and sacrifices of mountaineers—often in the form of their lives. Perhaps the letter would instead ask them to summit in secret and not post it on Instagram, or even mention it to anyone. But such a request might seem to forget the elements of climbing that continue to inspire courage and curiosity.

Among these is the exhilarating truth that the problem of the Himalaya, opened by Europeans a century ago, is unmistakably being closed by Nepalis.

Climbing itself is clearly in no danger of ending. But if mountains are to continue to inspire great sacrifices, climbing them might also require completely different kinds of sacrifices than climbers have made until now.

It all depends on what humans want from this pursuit.