Wanda Rutkiewicz

A stalled motorcycle kick-started one of the most extraordinary careers in mountaineering history. Wanda Rutkiewicz was eighteen years old in 1961, a promising athlete who had attracted the attention of Poland’s Olympic volleyball coaches. Then her old Junak ran out of gas. One of the men who stopped to assist was a climber, and Rutkiewicz accepted his invitation to climb in the nearby Góry Sokole hills.

“I adored the physical movement, the fresh air, the camaraderie, and the excitement,” she wrote in her diary. Volleyball didn’t stand a chance. Rutkiewicz rose quickly through the ranks of Polish alpinism. Though she confessed her early climbs were made with “much emotion but bad style,” by the mid-1960s she was undertaking difficult routes in the Tatras, the Alps, and in Norway, where she made the first female ascent of the Trollryggen’s challenging East Face.

In 1970, she joined a high-powered expedition in the Soviet Pamirs led by Andrzej Zawada, a pioneering alpinist whom Mountain