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Byelorussia's Snow Queen: A lonely night in the death zone
Oct 22, 2004 22: 51 EST
In a daily wrap-up October 7, the Norwegians on Cho Oyu reported that they had met a Russian lady climber coming down alone from the hill on October 6. They tried to get some words out of her but she was not too chatty.
Who was this lonely Russian woman? Our friends at RussianClimb just sent over an interview with her - Byelorussia's Snow Queen Irina Vjalenkova! In this two-part series, ExWeb presents the story of this daring lady climber, who was almost lost to the mountains on a horrible Dhaulagiri night.
"I'll climb, I'll risk..."
Byelorussia's Snow Queen Irina Vjalenkova has 9, 7000ers and 3, 8000ers. In October of 1995 Irina summited Dhaulagiri (8167 m) in extreme conditions. After a long battle, she descended alone from Dhaulagiri summit, and met the night at the altitude of 8000 meters - the death zone. At 1 am the cold reached -40 C/F and a strong wind whipped the mountain. Irina had no tent, no gas stove, no sleeping bag, and no cylinders with life-saving oxygen.
"I began to slide down..."
Visibility was zero and the steepness of the slope was about 45-50 degrees. Irina had no headlamp - an experienced climber later told her that it probably saved her life: "A lamp could have tempted you for a night descend - and a fall."
In the chaos, Irina had lost her own tracks: "When I tried to find them, the layer of snow suddenly broke away and I began to slide down..."
Alone on a tiny shelf
She self-arrested with her ice-axe, out of breath with the rush of adrenaline, her back soaked in sweat. But she had to do something! She found a tiny step on the fern-snow slope, and kicked out a small space with her crampons in the rock-hard ice. There, she waited for the morning to arrive.
Later she was told: "Your experience has expanded the horizons of mountaineering medicine in the terms of what is possible for the human body to endure".
An Alpine pedicure
The 13 hour "eternal night" would end in "a microsurgical serial" - 14 very complicated surgeries over two years in a Moscow clinic. After she had her toes and parts of her feet amputated, Irina complained to the docs: "You promised me a pedicure and now look what you did!" Their reply: "But look at those cute Geisha feet!"
She had to learn to walk again, and journalists reported from her hospital room that Irina would never come back. But that was all later, now - Irina was frozen solid to a tiny shelf high on Dhaulagiri, waiting for dawn to arrive.
A crazed rock-n-roll
"I stood on that tiny shell, and all I could do, were some exercises. I clinched to my ice-axe - my only safety - fearing it would slip from the ice any minute. I kept warm, danced a weird rock-and-roll, squatted and was angry with myself; that I had been so foolish, done tactical mistakes, not checking my time or calculated the speed of ascent...
When dawn finally arrived, I found myself standing in the middle of an ice-skating rink. My crampons would not hold me. But as the sun rose, I knew it was time to go. My friends in base camp probably thought I was dead, but soon I would be down to surprise them!"
Tomorrow: Part 2
Interview by Vyacheslav KLIMENKO, Svetlana BARTOSHEVICH, source www.vvv.ru, translation Elena Laletina RussianClimb.com/ExplorersWeb, image Mountain.ru, Image of Dhaulagiri courtesy of gnaromondinelli.it.
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