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 If successful, their ascent will also mark the
culmination of an era for the Poles, who pioneered winter
climbing on the world's highest mountains in the 1980s.
Krzysztof Wielicki, a small and wiry 67-year-old who will run
the 10-person expedition from its base camp, was the first to
scale the world's highest peak, Mount Everest, in the winter,
nearly four decades ago. It took him four attempts to climb K2
in the summer, each time with months of preparation.
"K2 has taken 12-14 months of my life," Wielicki told Reuters in
his home in southern Poland. "Actually, it gave me those months
because it is a wonderful thing to be near K2, to look at it. It
makes you happy."
First scaled by Italians in 1954, K2 is in the Karakorum
mountains along the border between China and Pakistan and is
notorious for high winds, especially steep and icy slopes and
high fatality rates among climbers. In winter months, scant
snowfall means the summit approach can turn into bare ice.
The Polish climbers - only the fourth team to ever tackle K2 in
winter - will spend two-three months painstakingly laying out
camps and ropes along the climb route, and storing supplies of
food and fuel. They will wait for a window of good weather,
maybe only a day long, to set out for the summit.
"The winds need to be below 50-60 km per hour, though even that
is strong," said Janusz Majer, 70, a veteran Himalayas climber
who is organizing the government-funded expedition.
Only the fifth person to climb all of the world's 14 highest
mountains, Wielicki says the era of big Himalayan conquests is
coming to an end.
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With most peaks already conquered, only the most daring and
dangerous approach routes are left to be explored.
"We were privileged, so much was to be achieved in the mountains,"
he said of his earlier climbing days.
"People have to weigh safety versus success now. Is it worth it to
sacrifice your life to cross serac that crumbles every third day?"
he said. Serac is a column or block of glacial ice.
"We are moving now from risk to recklessness," he warned.
High-altitude climbing gained popularity in Poland in the 1980s,
when a government crackdown on popular unrest ahead of the collapse
of Communism left many searching for fulfilment in professional
life.
"The Poles went to the Himalayas a bit later than other climbers, so
we missed the first ascents on top mountains," said Majer,
explaining why Poles pioneered the relatively unexplored skill of
winter climbing at the time.
"When people asked us why so many high-altitute climbers came from
Poland, which has few mountains, we said we are used to having
little oxygen. We come from polluted coal-mining regions," he
quipped.
(Additional reporting by Pawel Florkiewicz, Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk,
Anna Koper and Pawel Sobczak; editing by Mark Heinrich)
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