‘Now we are two. And now we will all die. We are very sorry. We tried but we could not… Please forgive us. We love you. Goodbye.’
Those were the last recorded words of Galina Perekhodyuk, delivered in barely-audible gasps over a radio receiver at the summit of Lenin Peak in a subfreezing blizzard.
She was one of the eight Russian women who died on their descent from the 7,000m peak on the border of what are now Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan in the fateful summer of 1974.
The group couldn’t have accounted for the disastrous and unusual weather that plagued Lenin Peak during that August, consisting of heavy snow, multiple earthquakes that triggered avalanches, and the worst storm seen in the region in 25 years.
The all-female team were taking part in an international camp which involved hundreds of climbers from a range of countries, including Germany, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Japan and the US – marking the first time a major American expedition had been granted access to the Soviet Union.
The leader of the Soviet group was Elvira Shatayeva, 36, a steely-eyed professional athlete who had assembled a squad of seasoned climbers – four of whom had scaled the peak before – to combat prejudice against women in the alpine sport.
She had the unique ambition of conquering the mountain by climbing it from the eastern side and descending it via its western ridge, aiming for her crew to complete the peak’s first-ever traverse.
But the climb of summer 1974 would mark Shatayeva’s last ascent, with her body later discovered lying still in the snow among destroyed tents, rucksacks ravaged by the snow storm and the remains of her fellow teammates.
From left to right: Tatyana Bardashova, Nina Vasilyeva, Irina Lyubimtseva, Lyudmila Manzharova, Ilsiyar Mukhamedova, Galina Perekhodyuk, Valentina Fateeva, Elvira Shatayeva. Credit: Sputnik / Vladimir Shatayev ‘Degrees of Difficulty’
Mount Lenin – on the border of what are now Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan – is not considered especially technical, but it is towering and subject to extreme weather conditions
The bodies of all eight women were discovered at the top of Peak Lenin. Credit: Sputnik / Vladimir Shatayev Degrees of Difficulty
Even before their ascent, the mountain had been plagued with tragedy in that peculiarly cold summer: five had already died, including three Estonians, 23-year-old Swiss photographer Eva Isenschmid and American airline pilot Jon Gary Ullin, 31, whose tent became a graveyard in the crushing whiteout.
Lenin Peak is not considered especially technical, but it is towering and subject to extreme weather conditions, with sections of steep ice on the Lipkin route which the women were endeavouring.
Christopher Wren, a climber and Moscow correspondent for the New York Times at the time, participated in the ascent as one of 19 members of the American expedition, and jotted down his experiences in a battered brown notebook, which he wrapped in plastic in the bottom of his climbing bag.
He first met Shatayeva at base camp weeks before the climb, in mid-July, and would later describe her in his book, ‘The End of the Line’, documenting his years in Russia and China.
‘A striking blonde with high cheekbones and cat-like blue eyes, she had come there to lead a team of the Soviet Union’s best women climbers in an assault on Lenin Peak,’ he wrote.
Conversing with her over tea, he could feel a ‘steel core’ beneath her facade.
Shatayeva arrived at the camp with a deserved air of confidence, being already a celebrated Russian mountaineer who earned the prestigious accolade of Master of Sport in 1970.
She was the third woman to ascend 24,590‐foot Ismoil Somani Peak, the highest in the Soviet Union, and in 1972 became the first Soviet woman to head an all-female ascent of a summit above 7,000 meters when she lead a team up Ozodi Peak in Tajikistan.
She graduated from the Moscow Art School and worked briefly in an art cooperative before becoming entirely obsessed with the mountains, even signing her letters ‘Mountain Maiden Elvira’.
After leaving base camp with her team on July 30, all seemed to be going exceedingly well for the women.
Approaching the main ridge of the mountain on August 2, Shatayeva had radioed her husband – Vladimir Shatayev, stationed a base camp – with good news: ‘Everything so far is so good that we’re disappointed in the route.’
But in a grim twist of fate, it was perhaps Shatayeva’s unbending desire for her squad to complete Lenin Peak unaided by anyone – especially men – that contributed to the eventual disaster.
After a successful few days of climbing, she made the intriguing decision of ordering her team to take a rest day on August 3.
It just so happened that three squads of Soviet men, one of which summitted August 4, were fast approaching, clearly coordinated to provide aid to the women if required.
Vladimir later speculated in his memoir, ‘Degrees of Difficulty’, about his wife’s odd decision: ‘The possibility cannot be ruled out that it was precisely for this reason that the women were dragging out the climb, trying to break loose from the guardianship.’
Had the women reached the top one day earlier – as they were on track to do – they would have been lower when the storm hit.
The leader of the Soviet group was Elvira Shatayeva, 36, a steely-eyed professional athlete who had assembled a squad of seasoned climbers. Credit: Sputnik / Vladimir Shatayev Degrees of Difficulty
On August 3, the day Shatayeva’s team was resting, there were signs the weather was taking a turn for the worse.
An American climber behind the Russian women reported: ‘Cloudy weather today and we have route-finding problems getting over to Camp III in whiteout conditions.’
A day later, British biomedical scientist Richard Alan North bumped into the women on his descent from the peak, climbing together in a line about 400 feet below the summit.
‘They are moving slowly up but in high spirit,’ he later wrote in Summit magazine.
‘“You get a bit short of breath up there,” I remark jokingly. But the humour is lost on them. “Ah! We are strong. We are women,” they reply.’
That day, a major storm was forecast, and organisers began sending out an urgent message to climbers.
‘A storm is predicted. Do not try to climb,’ was the clear instruction, but not all the mountaineers received the warning.
The Soviet women’s team reached the summit late afternoon on August 5, weighed down by carrying full loads of equipment (climbers not on a traverse can leave some gear below).
At 5pm, they radioed base camp with growing concerns about deteriorating visibility, preventing them from being able to see their descent route down the mountain.
In response to the whiteout, they decided to set up their tents and wait for the weather conditions to improve.
‘I do not really know how many days we are there, isolated from the world by a storm that seems to grow only worse,’ American journalist Wren – who was at this point behind the women – scribbled in his journal.
‘The wind builds to such force that one morning before dawn it snaps the aluminium tent pole. We manage makeshift repairs, but from then on we sleep, in our boots and parkas, in case the tent is ripped out from over us.
‘We make an attempt to move up the ridge, but within 100 feet raw winds turn us around.’
But while the Americans had nylon tents with zippers and aluminium poles to protect them, the Russian women had only cotton tents with toggle closures and wooden poles that bent and deformed in the violent winds of the night.
The morning of August 6 heralded violent gusts of 80 mph, five inches of snow at base, and higher up the mountain, a foot.
More radio messages were delivered, of Shatayeva reporting increasingly alarming news: the women now had zero visibility, and two of her teammates were ill, with one deteriorating rapidly.
Peak Lenin in the Pamir Mountains in Tajikistan
They were told to descend immediately, but only managed a few hundred feet.
Base camp was adamant that if the very sick woman was unable to move and adequate shelter was impossible, they must leave her for good at the top of the mountain and save themselves by descending without her.
As the women embarked on their journey, one teammate – Irina Lyubimtseva – died, apparently freezing to death while grasping a safety rope for others.
Unable to dig caves in the firm, granular snow, the remaining women managed to erect two tents on a ridge only several hundred feet below the summit.
Soon, hurricane-force winds pummeled them, exploding the tents and blowing away their rucksacks, stoves and warm clothes – the only barrier separating them from the extreme frost.
The two ill women, Nina Vasilyeva and Valentina Fateeva, soon perished, as the five others huddled together in a tent without poles, the wind having ripped its fabric to shreds.
Four Japanese climbers, bivouacked in a tent at 6,500 metres on the Lipkin side and possessing a strong radio, received panicked transmissions in Russian and realised there was an emergency.
The climbers attempted to help the women, but the strong gusts of wind blew them off their feet and forced them back.
Then came a litany of emergency messages to base camp from Shatayeva’s surviving team members, letting everyone know that they were in mortal danger.
Robert ‘Bob’ Craig, deputy leader for the American team and author of the subsequent expedition book, ‘Storm and Sorrow’, was stationed at the base and recorded the women’s final correspondences on August 7.
At 8am, base camp questioned Shatayeva as to whether the women were trying to descend the mountain.
‘Three more are sick; now there are only two of us who are functioning, and we are getting weaker,’ was her response.
‘We cannot, we would not leave our comrades after all they have done for us,’ she said, defiantly.
At 10am, she radioed again with a wistful, contemplative message: ‘It is very sad here where it was once so beautiful.’
By midday, one more woman had died, and two more were experiencing their final moments.
‘They are all gone now. That last asked: “When will we see the flowers again?” [Two] others earlier asked about [their] children. Now it is no use.’
At 3.30pm, a distraught voice sent another update, accepting defeat: ‘We are sorry, we have failed you. We tried so hard. Now we are so cold.’
Base camp, in despair, promised a rescue was underway, but by 5pm another woman had died and only three remained.
By this point, rough winds had reached 100mph and temperatures sank to -40C. There was no hope.
An hour and a half later, Shatayeva uttered her last recorded words: ‘Another has died. We cannot go through another night. I do not have the strength to hold down the transmitter button.’
At 8.30, base camp heard another woman’s voice, believed to be Galina Perekhodyuk, the last survivor.
‘Now we are two. And now we will all die. We are very sorry. We tried but we could not… Please forgive us. We love you. Goodbye.’
The women’s bodies were discovered inadvertently by Japanese and American climbers, who had weathered the storm in camps little more than 1,000 feet below the peak.
They were unaware of the crisis and stumbled upon the still body of Shatayeva, lying in the snow in the sunlight.
The remains of three other women were found strewn around the remaining tatters of their ravaged tent.
A fifth body was soon located, still clutching a climbing rope, and two others were found halfway down a slope, frozen along with their parkas.
The search team ascended to the summit in an unsuccessful search for the eighth woman where they found footprints that led over the edge of the mountain, causing them to believe she had fallen into the abyss.
But in fact, the missing body was later found beneath the others, when Shatayeva’s husband and a support crew went up the mountain a week after to retrieve them.
Wren, one of the American climbers who found the eight women’s remains, wrote in his journal: ‘Within three hours, we are at the last steep snow face that leads to the summit itself.
‘The Japanese have halted. A body is stretched on the snow before us. With a chill of recognition, I know it is Elvira Shatayeva, the women’s team leader with whom I sat and talked one evening several weeks earlier.’
He continued: ‘The Japanese produce a radio and call base camp. We are instructed to look for other members of the team. We spread out and begin climbing the slope. As we climb, we find them one by one, frozen in desperate acts of escape.’
Contained in his diary are haunting details describing the sight of the women: ‘They still wear their parkas and goggles and even crampons on their icy boots.’
Later, a Soviet climber told him with confidence: ‘They died because of the weather, not because they were women.’
Once back in their tent, the men were haunted by hallucinations of the dead, and Wren insisted he heard sounds like the ‘plaintive voice of a girl outside’.
‘But each time we go out to look, we find only the tent lines squeaking against the snow,’ he wrote.
Vladimir was tasked with identifying the bodies – recording a description on his dictaphone for authorities – and of course he immediately recognised his wife, Shatayeva, lying still on the snowy slope.
He initially wanted to bury her body in Moscow, but later decided she should be laid to rest with four other teammates at the Edelweiss meadow, at the foot of Lenin Peak.
The bodies of the other three women were reclaimed by their relatives for alternative burial arrangements.
Arlene Blum, a biophysical chemist and environmentalist from Berkeley, California, also took part in the climb, and recorded her experience in her memoir ‘Breaking Trail’.
She commented on the way Shatayeva took the ultimate responsibility for her team, perhaps even sacrificing herself so as to not leave them alone on the peak.
‘The women were so very loyal to each other. They stayed together until the end,’ she said.