Remembering Anatoli Boukreev on Christmas Day
in memory of the legendary Russian-Kazakh mountaineer
This newsletter is a tribute to Anatoli Boukreev who was killed by an avalanche on Christmas Day in 1997.
One of the toughest and greatest climbers of all time, Anatoli Boukreev was born in 1958, in the Russian Urals, but spent much of his life close to the mountains of Kazakhstan, taking dual citizenship after the break up of the Soviet Union.
Boukreev was a huge, heroic and handsome mountaineer who made a name for himself in a series of audacious and fast 7,000m and 8,000m ascents almost always without supplemental oxygen which he objected to on ethical and practical grounds. He completed dozens of 7,000m ascents, and over two hundred others, in the Tien Shan, Pamir, and Caucasus ranges, with climbing teams of Kazakhstan and the wider Soviet Union. Continually, he broke speed records.
To make ends meet, he sometimes worked as a coach to the Russian women's cross-country ski team and the Military Sports Club of Kazakhstan, and even accompanied former Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev to the mountains around Almaty.
His name may be familiar if you’ve seen the biographical survival film, Everest (2015). The movie is about a terrible storm that hit the mountain in May 1996 as competing expedition teams were attempting to summit. Boukreev was responsible for saving the lives of several climbers who were stranded overnight in the blizzard. Eight others died. After a memorial service at base camp, remarkably he mustered the strength to make a one-day solo ascent of Everest's neighbour Lhotse, the fourth highest mountain in the world. An incredible act of defiance.
The Icelandic actor Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson portrayed Boukreev in the film, which is enjoyable enough, though critic Peter Bradshaw pans it here in The Guardian and author Jon Krakauer, who was a client and reporter on a rival commercial expedition to Boukreev’s group at the same time on Everest, was made furious by it).