The sporting success of the expedition came at the highest price – in Camp III, Andrzej Czok, a friend of the conquerors from KW Gliwice, who climbed with Przemysław Piasecki, died of pulmonary edema.
— I don’t like to look back on this expedition and call it a success because we paid too great a price. I wonder now, after all these years, if we could have done something more to save Andrzej. At that time, our knowledge of mountain medicine was zero, and only a few doctors were specialists in this field. Andrzej had laryngeal problems, he coughed like all of us. He was in contact with a doctor at the base camp below the peak, who advised him to take various medications. None of us thought that symptoms similar to ours would turn into something more serious, that it would “translate” into the lungs and a tragedy would occur – told PAP Wielicki, the fifth man in the world to conquer the Crown of the Himalayas and the Karakoram, i.e. 14 eight-thousanders of the globe.
Kanchenjunga was one of three eight-thousanders, apart from Mount Everest (1980) and Lhotse (1988), that Wielicki climbed in winter. Yegor, Kukuczka’s partner, the second mountaineer (after Reinhold Messner) from the Crown of the Himalayas and the Karakoram, died on the south face of Lhotse in 1989. During the summit attack, Wielicki overtook Kukuczka and reached the top first, even though he had to take a break and warm up his frozen legs by beating his shoes with an ice ax.
— I had bad, plastic shoes, and it was 40 degrees below zero. At one point, I couldn’t feel my feet while climbing, so I sat down on a carved-out platform at an altitude of over 8,000 m and beat my legs with an ice ax in my inner shoes for 40 minutes to get the feeling back. The weather conditions were better than on winter Everest, because there was no hurricane wind, but we got a little lost on the top ridge, went too high on the traverses, and then had to go back. We had good acclimatization with Jurek, because we had previously climbed Lhotse and reached 8,000 m. We also checked the weather window, because we had no access to any weather forecasts – as it is now – at that time.
— I was the first to the top. I knew this was the place because there were traces of the last Japanese expedition. I admit that what I did was rude. I waited for Jurek for a while and when I saw that he was in the dome below the summit, 40 meters from me, I started descending without waiting for him to reach me, because I was frozen. We passed each other without shaking hands. On the descent, Jurek caught up with me and together we reached camp IV, he added.
In camp IV at an altitude of 7,700 m, from which they set out after 6 a.m., they saw that the Czok-Piasecki team, who were to attack the peak the next day, was not in the second tent. They thought that their friends had left because they gave up the attack. In the morning, when they connected with the base via radio, they learned that Andrzej Czok had died in the third camp.
— Maybe if there had been medical oxygen in the higher camps, he could have been saved? We knew our capabilities, we had extensive experience in high mountains, no one at that time thought about carrying medical oxygen cylinders higher, which is now standard – said the mountaineer.
On Kanchenjunga, which means “Five Treasures of the Great Snow” in Tibetan, Wanda Rutkiewicz, one of the world’s most outstanding mountain climbers, disappeared in May 1992.
In the history of the conquest of the third highest mountain in the world, an extremely vast massif even by Himalayan conditions, Poles played a significant role. In 1978, Eugeniusz Chrobak and Wojciech Wróż were the first to reach the peak of the then virgin South Kanchenjunga (8,494 m), and Wojciech Brański, Zygmunt Andrzej Heinrich and Kazimierz Olech reached the Central Mountain (8,482 m). On Yalung Kang, the western peak (8,505 m), a new route was established in 1984 by Tadeusz Karolczak and Wróż.
Apart from Wielicki and Kukuczka, the following people also climbed the main peak: Piotr Pustelnik (May 15, 2001, the 20th conqueror of the Crown of the Himalayas and the Karakoram in history), Kinga Baranowska (May 18, 2009), Waldemar Kowalewski (May 25, 2023), Oswald Rodrigo Pereira and Bartosz Ziemski (May 27 2024, the latter skied) and Dorota Rasińska-Samoćko with oxygen, with the help of Sherpas (May 12, 2022).
Information source: Polish Press Agency
