Reading Bernadette McDonald’s “Winter 8000”
There are too many names and facts to fully process in Bernadette McDonald’s Winter 8000. By the end of the first couple of chapters, my head was dizzy trying to keep it all straight. But regardless of the climbers’ names, or the 8000-meter peak they climbed, there is a recurring theme throughout the book: climbing in the Himalayan mountains is seriously dangerous and you need to have a little crazy in you to attempt them.
And the craziest bastards of them all may be from Poland. Before this reading, I didn’t know much about the climbing that went on in the Himalayas in the ’70s and ’80s, but it was fascinating to learn about the Polish climbers. Barred from travel since WW2 because they were living under the communist bloc, Polish mountaineers had to watch the rest of the world—Italians, Frenchmen, and Englishmen in particular—break record after record on Everest and other mountains while they were stuck at home.
But as the Soviet bloc eased, and Polish climbers were released from their chains, these incredible people decided that in order to lay claim to the world’s largest mountains, they would need to make the first ascents of them in the wintertime. It was an astonishing idea, born from years of frustration at being told where they could and couldn’t go, and from the knowledge that the expertise of Polish climbers was being overlooked. McDonald indicates that the ego played a big part as well.
A Nod to Polish Mountaineering
There are plenty of other climbers discussed in the book—Italians, Russians, Americans, French—but as a collective group, the Polish climbers are the most well-represented. Krzysztof Wielicki, Andrej Zawada, Artur Hajzer, and Jerzy Kukuczka, probably get mentioned the most. At the time of this writing, Wielicki is the only one who is still alive. Two of them—Hajzer and Kukuczka—died in the mountains they loved; reminders that even the best climbers aren’t immune to the dangers of mountaineering.
Regarding those dangers, it is clear there are many to be concerned about in the Himalayas, all of which are consistently present on every mountain. Everyone knows of the dangers of Everest and K2, but before this book I knew very little of Kangchenjunga, Lhotse, Makalu, Cho Oyu, Dhaulagiri, Manaslu, Nanga Parbat, Annapurna, Gasherbrum I, Broad Peak, Gasherbrum II, and Shishapangma. In fact, if I’m being honest, I’m not sure I really heard of or paid attention to any of them besides Lhotse before. But I will now, because climbing them sounds like hell.
The reality of what these climbers went through is hard to fathom. Battling temperatures of -40 degrees Celsius or worse, these men and women suffered through unbelievable circumstances for the chance at climbing history. Some of them lost their toes. Some lost their minds. And some paid the ultimate price, falling victim to an avalanche or exhaustion, their bodies never to be recovered. It’s mouth-dropping stuff.
At War With the Mountains
As a mountain lover, and one who enjoys the spiritual aspect of experiencing a mountain, what I didn’t find much of in the pages of Winter 8000 was a reverence for the mountains beyond an earthly plane. It felt more like what these climbers were about was testing the human spirit, and the 8000-meter peaks were the training ground to prove to themselves, and the world, what they were capable of. It was a war, McDonald notes, and that rings true.
While I’ve never climbed an 8000-meter peak, I know on my biggest climbs I’ve felt like I was in a battle of wills, and that I’d be damned if the mountain would break me. On some climbs, there comes a point when the effort required to keep going makes you forget your love of nature and turns your mind towards beating the mountain. Sometimes it’s all you can think of. It just happens.
But to do that again and again, in the dark, with hardly anyone else around, battling storms and freezing temperatures? Whatever you think of their quests, or the methods by which some of them went about it, there’s no debating that their efforts are inspiring. If these climbers can take on 8000-meter peaks in the middle of winter, and live to tell the tale, well then, I can certainly take on more than I did yesterday.
Worth checking out. It might be a little fact-heavy for the layman, but it gives you the straight scoop on what the most extreme climbers put themselves through “up there.”