Nikolay Totmyanin, one of the old stars of Russian alpinism, died yesterday, August 11. He fell ill while descending from Pobeda Peak on the Kyrgyzstan-China border, according to Anna Piunova of Mountain.ru. Totmyanin was 66.
“He came down on his own, pushing hard, knowing he had to get lower as quickly as possible,” wrote Piunova on Facebook. “On the evening of August 10, he was admitted to intensive care in Bishkek. By morning, he was gone.”
Totmyanin worked as a nuclear power engineer in Saint Petersburg, Russia, but his extraordinary climbing career spanned decades. He completed over 200 ascents in the Caucasus, Pamirs, Tien Shan, Alps, Himalaya, Karakoram, and North America, including 27 climbs graded 5A and 10 graded 5B, as well as 63 big-wall climbs. He had previously summited 7,439m Pobeda, commonly known today as Jengish Chokusu, several times.
On a team led by Aleksander Shevchenko, Totmyanin helped two members climb Lhotse via the South Face Direttissima in 1990, a new route at the time. He summited Everest twice without supplemental oxygen, in 2003 and in 2006. He also helped pioneer a new route on K2’s highly difficult West Face in 2007 without bottled oxygen.
Totmyanin was part of the first ascent of Jannu’s north face in 2004, which earned a Piolet d’Or. In 2008, he summited Dhaulagiri I without bottled oxygen, and in 2011, he climbed Kangchenjunga, again in the same style.
He earned the coveted Snow Leopard award five times (for summiting all five 7,000m peaks in the former USSR (Jengish Chokusu, Khan Tengri, Lenin Peak, Korzhenevskaya, Ismoil Somoni). Totmyanin was honored as a Master of Sports and won his country’s version of a Golden Ice Axe, among many other distinctions.
