The No. 1 Worldloppet Lady

October 3, 2009

Blanka Nedvedická (CZE) obtained her 6th WL Master at Bieg Piastów in March 2009. For several years Blanka and Lludmila Kolobanova (RUS) had the same number of Masters, however in 2009 Lludmila finished her season with 9 stamps in her sixth passport. But she plans to get both the 6 and the 7 next year. Since Blanka also plans to achieve her number 7 next year, we will observe in the coming years a fierce (but friendly) competition between the most assiduous female WL skiers.

Blanka, born in Rakovnik (CZE) in 1962, is well known to WL skiers. You have seen her helping with translation at the famous Jizerská Padesátka pasta parties, and in the Bedrichov tourist office that she managed during several years. In fact, her responsibilities included the biking/ski trail network in the whole Jizera area, and raising money for the maintenance of the ski trails (200 000 Euros each season). She planned and realized the connection between the ski tracks of the Czech Jizera mountains and those of the Polish Jizera mountains. Connecting people! If you skied last March the Bieg Piastów race, you probably ignored that you passed very close to the easternmost point of the Czech race. Blanka was co-founder of the registered IAWLS association and acted during several years as a committee member.
Blanka is a fast skier and has obtained top rankings in WL races. In 2003 she won the Dolomiten Champion title – Dolomitenlauf and Dolomiten Radrundfahrt combination. In 2006 she won the ladies’ 50 km CT race at La Transjurassienne. She has also won the combined ski/mountain bike event in her home country and obtained the Velká Královna (Great Queen) prize. Hard to believe that she was asthmatic as a teenager!

But all that is maybe only the visible part of the iceberg. Blanka is also an alpinist. In her twenties she made with another Czech girl the first winter ascension of Torre d’Aleghe in the Civetta north face of the Italian Dolomites. And she was member of the first woman team to climb the Freney Route on Mont Blanc. Connoisseurs are dumbfounded by these exploits. Blanka participated and summited in three Czech expeditions to over 7000m peaks in Asia. Once, while climbing Annapurna she was buried with her climbing partner during 5 hours under an avalanche from which they escaped miraculously by digging their way out with bare hands. With three Polish girls she participated in an all female expedition that created a new climbing route to the north summit of Huascarán (6662m) in the Andes.

After several years devoted to family, Blanka made a brilliant comeback to alpinism in 2008 by climbing with a Czech colleague Zdenek the Denali (Mount McKinley, 6194m). Denali is not very high but it is a dangerous mountain that has cost the life of more than 100 alpinists. It is located in Alaska only 3 degrees south of the Arctic Circle and the weather on the mountain can be very bad. After the summit reached on May 22, on the way down Blanka and Zdenek had to spend three days in a tent in a storm blowing at 150 km/h, at a temperature of -45°C (data recorded by the rangers). The temperature inside the tent was -15°C. During those three terrible days Zdenek froze his fingers. For non-experts it is difficult to imagine the difficulties of such an expedition. For example, one may wonder why the tent was not blown away, gone with the wind. Well, the answer is that Blanka had carefully planned all the details of the expedition and the equipment. They surrounded the tent by a snow wall. But the Denali snow is not the snow you have in your backyard, or on WL tracks. They had of course a shovel but it was unusable in that particular place, so they cut the snow with a snow saw, an indispensable tool for candidates to Denali! Why did they not build an igloo, since everybody knows that the temperature inside igloos is 0°C? Blanka explains that you can make an igloo in good weather conditions, not in severe frost when a strong wind is constantly blowing.  Zdenek was transported from the camp at 4300m by a small helicopter to a hospital and his fingers were saved. Blanka descended in two days 50 kg of climbing equipment to Kahiltna Glacier and from there back to civilization. Two pictures from the Denali expedition are shown here: the Kahiltna Glacier and the ridge of the west buttress.

This page was last revised on February 14, 2010