Chaos on Pobeda Peak Leaves Four Climbers Dead

“I looked out the window. It was snowing heavily outside,” Alexander Semenov recalled. “Then we started spinning.”

It was August 16 and the veteran Russian mountaineer was leading a team in a last-ditch attempt to save Natalya Nagovitsyna. The 48-year-old climber had been stranded near 23,450 feet, not far from the summit of Pobeda Peak (24,406ft), for four days, after breaking her leg while descending the mountain.

Shortly after Nagovitsyna’s injury, horrendous weather had begun to rock the mountain. Temperatures plummeted and winds surged, dashing rescue attempts. The situation was so severe that military helicopters evacuated over 60 people—climbers, guides, cooks, porters, and others—from the peak’s base camp at 13,100 feet. Two Iranian climbers, Maryam Pilehvari and Hassan Mashhadiaghalou, went missing the same day. Both are now presumed dead.

Ten thousand feet higher, Nagovitsyna was clinging to life. Unable to carry her down, her climbing partner, Russian Roman Mokrinsky, left her in a tent and descended to get help. Lower down, he met with the two other members of their party, Italian Luca Sinigaglia and German Günter Sigmund. Sigmund had already made the summit and descended, and Sinigaglia had aborted his own attempt after losing a mitten.

On August 13, the pair reached Nagovitsyna’s tent beneath a rock outcropping at 23,450 feet, with a sleeping bag and pad, camp stove, fuel, and food. But aside from bringing supplies and splinting their partner’s leg with a trekking pole, the men could do little, as they were unable to move her, and even returning to bring the supplies proved disastrous. “They called us from [base camp] and said that we had to go down,” Sigmund recalled in an interview with Russian paper Izvestia. “The weather was getting worse, the roof of Natalya’s tent was torn by the wind, but we couldn’t fix anything. We had to leave her in the destroyed tent and go back to the cave where Roman was waiting for us.”

The ice cave where the men sheltered, at around 22,600 feet, kept being buried by driving snow, and Sigmund realized they needed to descend further. “I said we had to go to the next camp despite the bad weather. Then Luca lost his composure. He shouted for us to go without him. His hand was frostbitten, and he was worried that the doctors would want to amputate it.” Sinigaglia’s condition quickly deteriorated. “Half an hour later he died in my arms,” Sigmund said. He and Mokrinsky descended alone.

Semenov and his crew hoped to use a tight weather window to fly a Russian Mi-8 helicopter as high as they could, to Camp II (17,000ft), to launch a rescue attempt. But heavy winds began battering the helicopter at 15,500 feet, sending them into a spiral. Semenov shouted to his team, “Hold on, hold on, we’re going down!”

Everything happened in an instant, he said. The helicopter smashed into the mountain and tumbled some 1,300 feet down a slope, where it came to rest upside down. “There was pain, screaming,” he recalled. “We were lying on the roof, fuel was leaking everywhere.”

Everyone was injured to some degree, but adrenaline kept Semenov and a few others mobile. They disabled all the helicopter’s electrical terminals to avoid sparking a fire, and managed to haul the most severely injured out on a stretcher. “From the outside we saw that the helicopter was lying tail-down in a crevasse,” Semenov said. As the adrenaline wore off, almost every member of the party began to realize the extent of their injuries, “ruptured joints, sprains, bruises and tears.” Three of the helicopter’s nine occupants, two of the rescuers and the pilot, who fractured his spine, were severely injured, but not fatally. In many respects, it was a miracle. All nine passengers had survived a helicopter crash above 15,000 feet. But for Nagovitsyna, the botched rescue attempt was the nail in the coffin—the beginning of the end.

Rescuers continued to try to reach the stranded climber on foot, but as the days wore on, conditions grew worse. Winds increased, and temperatures dropped as low as –22 °F. “There was a blizzard on the night of the 17th and the 18th,” said Semenov. “There was extremely heavy snowfall, and then there were avalanches on the 19th.” Despite the horrendous conditions, Nagovitsyna clung to life. An unmanned aerial drone flew over the summit that day, capturing footage of her waving from her battered tent.

A second rescue team fought their way to 20,000 feet, but still were unable to reach Nagovitsyna. “Over August 23 and 24, three Italian rescuers and I were preparing to work with a small helicopter provided by the Ministry of Emergency Situations,” reported Semenov, “but by the 25th, everything was cancelled due to bad weather. We could not take off.” Two days later, another drone flew over Nagovitsyna’s tent, and its thermal camera detected no signs of life. She had been above 23,000 feet, alone, for nearly two weeks.

Nagovitsyna and her group were climbing independently, without a guide, but used an outfitter, Ak-Sai Travel, to organize permits and base camp logistics. Ak-Sai did not respond to requests for comment from Climbing. But the group did post a public statement on Facebook, signed by Semenov and a number of other experienced climbers on the peak, announcing the cessation of any rescue attempts:

“The participants of this group, having compared all the risks to the life and health of rescuers, taking into account the difficult weather conditions, [have come] to the conclusion that it is impossible to conduct a search and rescue operation in the current season. Further organization of rescue operations, unfortunately, may lead to more victims.”

An unforgiving mountain

Also known as Jengish Chokusu or Victory Peak, Pobeda Peak sits on the border between China and Kyrgyzstan, in the Tian Shan range. It is the northernmost 7,000-meter (22,966-foot) mountain in the world, and known for its brutally harsh weather.

Pobeda is also one of the five 7,000-meter peaks in the former Soviet Union. Summiting these mountains earns mountaineers a coveted “Snow Leopard Award,” a feat Nagovitsyna was hoping to complete. Since the award was conceived in 1960, 716 people have earned the accolade, but only 35 women.

Pobeda—widely considered the most difficult and deadly of the five—was Nagovitsyna’s last summit to earn the award. She began climbing in 2016, and had summited the four other Snow Leopard peaks, Lenin Peak/Ibn Sina (23,406ft), Korzhenevskaya Peak (23,310ft), Ismoil Somoni/Communism Peak (24,590ft) in Tajikistan’s Pamir Range, and Khan Tengri (22,999ft), also in the Tian Shan. The latter peak was the site of a previous tragedy for Nagovitsyna. In 2021, her husband, Sergey Nagovitsyn, died of a stroke while the pair were on the mountain.

The Khan Tengri incident was when Nagovitsyna met Sinigaglia, but no one else in the party knew each other or had climbed together before. According to Sigmund, they’d decided to climb together simply to secure a cheaper rate from Ak-Sai. “We didn’t know each other personally before the trip, and neither did anyone else in the group,” he said. “We just teamed up for the discount.”

Over 80 climbers have died on Pobeda since attempts on the peak began in the 1950s, and no bodies have ever been recovered from the summit, according to Russian national paper Kommersant. A blizzard killed 11 members of a 12-person attempt in 1955. The sole surviving member, Ural Usenov, was part of the first ascent team the following year, which was led by Soviet climbing pioneer Vitaly Abalakov (the inventor of the Abalakov thread).

Even with modern improvements in gear and apparel, medicine, and technology, Pobeda seems to have become no less deadly. At least a dozen climbers have died on the mountain since 2021, said Semenov, who has been climbing and guiding on the mountain since the 1990s, summited each of the Snow Leopard peaks twice, and made seven 7,000-meter ascents this season.

Semenov explained that it’s not just the peak’s elevation and weather that makes ascents and rescues difficult, but Pobeda’s long, exposed routes. The peak has three summits—East, Central, and West—strung out along a meandering ridgeline. “Recovering [a victim] from a height of 7,000 meters or more is already a very difficult task,” Semenov said. But on Pobeda, with its long ridgelines, the recovery would require “dragging [the victim] more than three kilometers along the ridge to the top of Vazha Pshavela,” the western subsummit of the peak, before descending. “This is much more difficult.”

Perhaps no one knew Pobeda as well as Nikolay Totmyanin. The veteran Russian climber summited each of the Snow Leopard peaks seven times, and died after descending from Pobeda the day before Nagovitsyna’s accident. He once wrote that “the price for reaching the top of Pobeda is the life of one or more climbers. If no one died on Pobeda in a given year, that means no one reached the top.”

A pre-existing injury?

Accounts coming from Pobeda at the time of Nagovitsyna’s accident indicated that her leg injury on the peak was unprecedented, but in an interview with MSK1.RU, Russian climber Alexander Ishchenko theorized that the break was preexisting, and dated to an ascent of another Tian Shan peak, Teke-Tor (14,695ft), earlier this year.

“This tragedy began in the Ala-Archa alpine camp, when she broke her leg during the May holidays,” Ishchenko said. He explained that Nagovitsyna was hit by rockfall, breaking her leg in two places, and he was part of the group that saved her. “Our rescue team split into two groups: some went to pull her across the glacier to the landing site, while others prepared to transport her to the camp.” Nagovitsyna was successfully evacuated.

It’s unclear if her injury on Pobeda was a recurrence of the same injury, which hadn’t fully healed since Teke-Tor, or an unrelated incident. But Ishchenko said that, when news of the Pobeda disaster broke, he was shocked to hear that it was Nagovitsyna stranded on the peak, because she would have had to arrive in base camp in July, soon after her severe injury on Teke-Tor. “My first question is, how did she end up there, two months after a double fracture?” he said. “She acted irresponsibly.”

Alexander Pyatnitsyn, the vice president of the Russian Mountaineering Federation, told Climbing that while “the Federation regrets what happened on Pobeda Peak,” its leadership “calls on everyone who plans to climb high mountains along difficult routes to complete the entire course of necessary mountain training.” (The Russian Mountaineering Federation recommends that climbers who attempt Pobeda hold a “third-class” rank in Russia’s three-tiered climbing certification system, and Nagovitsyna only held a second-class rank.)

In an interview with newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, Vladimir Shataev, the official Snow Leopard award record keeper, said that because Nagovitsyna had “skipped” the rankings, he would not have been able to give her the award for her Pobeda Peak climb in the first place. “She broke the rules,” he said. “A climber can set out on a route of a new category only after having completed two routes of the previous category—starting with 3B and further [referring to the six-tiered system of Russian climbing grades]. She went to Lenin Peak, which has a category of 4B, without having completed two 4A routes before that. Then, she went to Khan Tengri (5A), having completed only one 4B route. According to the rules, such ascents, with ‘jumping,’ cannot be counted at all.” The standard route on Pobeda Peak, the west ridge—which Nagovitsyna and her party were using—is 5B.

Semenov said that, regardless of classifications or pre-existing injuries, the deaths on Pobeda were clearly due “to a series of many mistakes.” He said that the groups that ran into trouble on the mountain, both the Iranians and Nagovitsyna’s quartet, were “following the strong teams along their path and their ropes” and “did not know the route itself well, and did not take into account their strength in accordance with the weather conditions.” As a result, when things went south, they were in a poor position to respond.

“Many experienced comrades, including me, tried to dissuade them from climbing,” Semenov said. “But they still went to the mountain.”

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