Wanda Rutkiewicz: The First Woman to Climb K2
On 23 June 1986, Wanda Rutkiewicz stood on the summit of K2, the second-highest mountain on Earth and by most accounts the hardest of the lot. She was the first woman ever to make the summit and come back alive. She'd done it without supplemental oxygen (an impressive feat even today) during a season that would go on to kill thirteen climbers. It was the kind of achievement that should have made her a household name. For decades, outside Poland, it barely did.
Her story deserves better than a footnote, so here's the fuller version.
A childhood marked by loss
Wanda was born in 1943 in Lithuania, and her family settled in Wrocław, in south-west Poland, once the war ended. Her early life was far from easy. When she was five, her older brother and his friends were killed by an unexploded bomb while playing among the ruins of the war-torn city. Some years later, her father was murdered. She would say she'd always been an anxious person, frightened of the dark and of being alone, and that these losses were part of the reason why.
At school she competed in multiple athletic disciplines, and was even picked for the Polish volleyball squad bound for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. This wasn't meant to be, as her physical talents soon found a different and all-consuming outlet.
Finding the mountains
It was whilst at university that Wanda was first introduced to the rocks of south-west Poland, and climbing hooked her like nothing else had. "I was totally possessed by climbing from that very first moment," she wrote. "The experience was like some inner explosion." She trained as an electronics engineer, one of very few women doing so at the time, but the mountains were where she was going to make her name.
She progressed fast, a natural born climber by all accounts. By her late twenties she was one of Poland's strongest climbers, at a time when Polish mountaineers, poor in money but rich in time and grit, were becoming some of the best high-altitude climbers in the world.
Photo credit: Archivio Rutkiewicz, Planet Mountain
Fighting for a fair contest
Wanda's early expedition experiences with mixed gender teams left her frustrated. Male climbers expected to lead, to choose the route, to make the calls, and she found herself losing all sense of agency over her own climbing. So she started building all-women teams instead, insisting they be judged on equal terms rather than escorted up a mountain by men who had already decided what women could and couldn't do.
In 1973 she led an all-female Polish team up the North Face of the Eiger, three days of waterfalls, hypothermia and frostbite. Two years later, she led an all-women expedition to Gasherbrum III in Pakistan's Karakoram, at 7,952m the highest first ascent ever made by a team of women. She wanted, in her own words, "equitable rules": a chance to prove women could climb as well as anyone, given the same shot.
At the time, technical clothing built for a woman's body barely existed. Few jackets cut for a female frame, no boots shaped for a woman's foot, no packs or harnesses designed around female proportions. Wanda and her teams climbed some of the most dangerous mountains on the planet in gear made for men, and they succeeded anyway.
Broken leg, unbroken resolve
In 1978 she became the third woman, and the first Pole of either gender, to summit Everest. In 1985 she led the first all-women ascent of Nanga Parbat, "the killer mountain", with no oxygen and no high-altitude porters.
Then came K2. During preparations on Mt Elbrus for her first attempt in 1982, another climber slipped and crashed into her, breaking her leg badly. Most people would have called it a season-ending injury. Wanda hauled herself the hundred-plus kilometres to K2 base camp anyway: eleven days, up to 5,000m, on crutches, splinted and running on painkillers, just to be with her team. That attempt failed. Four years later, on 23 June 1986, she went back and finished the job, becoming the first woman to stand on the summit of K2 and make it home.
The cost of the mountains
Despite her successes in the mountains, there were less positive impacts on Wanda's personal life. She married twice, and both marriages failed to survive her long absences and unpredictable lifestyle. She later admitted she had always been an anxious person, uneasy in the dark and wary of being alone.
K2 alone took two people close to her. Her climbing partner Halina Krüger-Syrokomska died suddenly at Camp II in 1982, and four years later, on the same mountain, Liliane and Maurice Barrard died on the descent after summiting alongside Wanda. In between, in 1985, her friend Barbara Kozłowska drowned crossing a glacial river during an attempt on Broad Peak. Wanda went back for her four years later, recovering her body so she could be properly buried. Fear, Wanda said, was necessary: "fearlessness is a kind of deficiency." She kept climbing regardless.
A caravan of dreams
By 1990 Wanda had climbed six of the world's fourteen mountains over 8,000m, and she set herself one final, audacious target: to climb the remaining eight within a single year. She called it her 'caravan of dreams'. She reached two of them, Cho Oyu and Annapurna, before turning to Kangchenjunga, the third-highest mountain on Earth, in 1992.
Wanda was last seen sheltering in a snow cave at around 8,300m, refusing to turn back from the summit with her climbing partner. She never returned to base camp. She was 49. Her body has never been found, and nobody knows for certain whether she reached the top on what would have been her ninth eight-thousander.
Wanda proved, over and over, that the mountains didn't care whether the gear fit or whether anyone thought a woman belonged there. She went anyway, and she very often got there first. First woman up K2. First Pole of either gender up Everest. Leader of some of the boldest all-women expeditions in mountaineering history, with achievements that still stand out today.
Her grit and determination stemmed from a life marked with tragedy from an early age, and a stubborn refusal to accept the status quo.
If you'd like to read more about Wanda and her Polish climbing peers, Bernadette McDonald's 'Freedom Climbers' is highly recommended. You may also enjoy Anna Fleming's "Herstory: Wanda Rutkiewicz and the battle for women's climbing" article on UKClimbing.