Wanda Rutkiewicz
The first woman to climb K2, who kept going into the Himalaya until the mountains kept her
Wanda Rutkiewicz was born in Lithuania during the Second World War and grew up in Wrocław in communist Poland. Her early life was hard: her younger brother was killed by an unexploded grenade, and years later her father was murdered. She was a strong athlete, played volleyball for her university, and only began climbing at eighteen when a friend took her to the rocks outside the city.
She qualified as an electronic engineer and climbed on weekends and holidays, in an era when Polish climbers had almost no hard currency and made much of their own kit. Through the 1970s she led women's expeditions to the Pamirs and the Alps, and on 16 October 1978, the day Karol Wojtyła was elected Pope, she became the first Polish person and only the third woman to reach the summit of Everest.
In 1986 she stood on top of K2, the first woman to do so; that summer thirteen climbers died on the mountain. She had already broken her leg badly on Bhagirathi and walked into base camp on K2 on crutches during an earlier attempt.
By 1991 she had climbed eight of the fourteen 8,000-metre peaks and announced a plan to climb the rest in rapid succession. In May 1992, high on Kangchenjunga, she was last seen by a Mexican climber, sheltering in a snow hollow without a tent, saying she would rest and continue to the top. Her body was never found.