Interrupted route. Master Gorbunov passed away

We are from the same generation, many times our paths crossed both in the mountains and in the city at the foot of the mountains. It used to be that they gathered on one expedition and walked around the bazaar, buying food, then they worked all summer in the same camp on the glacier under Khan-Tengri peak, and in the evenings they passed each other a guitar. And how many songs were sung by the rocks on the banks of the Ili River! And how many rocky routes Yuriy Gorbunov has passed, punched and prepared for other climbers! Not so long ago I met him in the city, was delighted, invited him to drink tea and talk …

On Boukreev’s orbit

Yura was a great storyteller and wrote very well. I asked him to tell about his friendship with Anatoly Bukreev, about whom I am writing a book and to whom a monument will be erected in Almaty early next year. Both Yura and Anatoly arrived at one time from Russia. Yuri Gorbunov got a job to spend the winter at a camp site in the Butakovo Gorge. He moved under the roof of the house from the tent, where he lived all summer with other visiting climbers. And in the basement under the apartment of Sergey Samoilov from Almaty there was a warm room, and the guys often spent the night there. But it was inconvenient to abuse the hospitality of a friend, and Gorbunov invited Bukreev to live with him at the camp site, where athletes from the village of Gorny gardener came through the mountains. There, Tolya met skiers who helped him get a job as a ski coach in a rural school.

So Bukreev settled in the Mountain gardener. He boarded up one wall of the barracks with old unpaired skis. Or as an identification mark, or thus plugged the cracks in the walls. He lived in this dwelling apart, as if he were the center of his own universe, and only a few could stay in his orbit. One of these people was Yuri Gorbunov.

– At the very first training session at the army club, Buka told the champions of the USSR: “Guys, you are somehow training incorrectly,” Yura recalled, drinking tea. – He was a skier, knew how to train and stubbornly stood his ground, but they looked askance at him. When in his first season they went to the top, he was above all. There was fierce competition in the team, there were many strong athletes. When he faced the problem of who to go with in the deuce route 5-B category of difficulty, I went with him. We went to Lithuania Peak in the South-Western Pamirs. One season he flew by because he knocked out his elbow while playing football in Lukovaya Polyana under Lenin Peak. Before the Kangchenjunga expedition, he did not have a single participation in the Union championships, and he was not quoted. But when, at the selections for the second Soviet Himalayan expedition to Kanchenjunga, Bukreev put the USSR national team in an uncomfortable position, being head and shoulders above everyone else, he was noticed.

Yuri Gorbunov was in that star army team of Yervand Ilyinsky, which left its mark on the history of sports. And he walked well in the mountains, and easily climbed the rocks, and his mileage on the rocks was huge, and his body worked automatically.

He wrote for a mountain website: “People often ask me why I liked to go first on climbs. Because I was afraid. Standing on a belay and watching a person climb is scary. And if he still does not know how to do this, then this is generally for strong people. When, having excellent rock training, I took up mountain climbing, I was most struck by the courage of people who walked along the route, with real chances of a breakdown.

And when they pointed out to me my excessive riskiness, I perfectly understood that I risk less than others, passing difficult sections, even if I do it very quickly. Just because of the fear of the mountain, I plowed in training, in the gym, and even more so on the rocks. I have provided my reserve of skill to eliminate these percentages as much as possible. But the main reason why I go first is laziness and physical weakness. It is much easier to climb the first 40 meters light, but allegedly at greater risk, than to go the same meters with a heavy backpack or hammer out pitons while flying with a pendulum.

Respect for spirits

Yura Gorbunov once told me a few stories that were included in my book “Almaty Legends”. Their family lived in Irkutsk. He had an older brother, Vladimir, a sports guy who once swam across a canal on the Angara on a dare in early spring, and got so cold that his legs gave out. For a year and a half, he fought the disease, performing various exercises, and then disappeared for a long time in the taiga, where he was finally healed. There, Vladimir met tourists and climbers who came to the forest for the weekend to ski and climb rocks. Vladimir began to train with the athletes, he took his younger brother with him to the taiga until he fell in love with a young athlete and left for Alma-Ata for her. Little Yura continued to visit winter huts – he knew the road well and walked the 15-kilometer path from the bus station to the huts.

In the summer, climbers and tourists went to the mountains, and winter huts, where cereals and canned food always remained after winter trips, were empty. Yura was 12 years old when he took with him a school friend Andrei Vasiliev, whom the guys called Vaska. The boys were walking through the forest, followed by stray dogs. We entered the winter hut and, first of all, kindled the stove to cook food. The fire started. The children hung out their sweat-dampened clothes, and then it was as if a log had been hit against the wall. However, there was no one on the street, and the dogs that accompanied them from the very bus stop lay peacefully at the entrance. Then a second blow was heard, more powerful, but this time the guys were afraid to look out and huddled on the bunk. The third blow was such that smoke came out of the cracks in the furnace. They quickly dressed and spent the night under a shed near the house, afraid to go inside and disturb someone’s peace.

Father always taught: come to an unfamiliar place, ask permission to enter and stay. He approached the river – ask permission to cross it, and entered the forest – ask for the right to wander along the paths. In the winter hut, this lesson was taught to the boys in practice, because it is customary for Siberian hunters to bow to invisible owners and ask for a lodging for the night, otherwise there will be trouble.

The next day, the children wandered through the forest for a long time in search of a rock called the Idol, climbed its ledges, and when they went down the sypukh, they lost all landmarks in this stone river. We walked back and forth for a long time, looking for a path, and the sun was already slipping below the horizon. Yura realized that he had to go down to the river itself, because the path went along its channel, only along the other bank. The guys were tired, but it was scary to stay under the open sky at night in the taiga, and they continued to move until they saw a fallen tree that could be used to cross the river.

“I started to make my way along the trunk, clinging to protruding branches with my hands, and my friend was behind me,” Yura recalls, “and at some point I raise my eyes, look at the other side, and there is a woman standing there. As I remember, it was a Buryat woman in a white shirt with a thick black braid, which she waved at us, as if calling us to her. I rejoiced – people! But at that very moment such a horror attacked that I pressed myself against this tree and closed my eyes in fear. I don’t know how much time has passed, but when I got over myself, opened my eyes and turned around, I saw that Andrei was also hiding astride a log. The river below us was serious, and I said: “Vaska, Vaska, let’s go, it’s getting dark already.” But he refuses to go to the other side, says that there is some kind of woman standing there. At these words, a second wave of horror seized me. We nevertheless made it to the winter hut that evening, and when we returned to the city, I told this story to my father. He said it was Sinilga. According to the legends, she shows good people with pure hearts where wealth is hidden, and a bad person cannot escape from her – she will lead them into a swamp.

Sinilga

The legend says: a daughter was born in the family of one Tungus, and on that day fluffy white flakes fell asleep in the taiga, and the father named the child Sinilga, which means snow in Russian. A beautiful smart girl became a shaman, her assistants were the spirits of the elements, but at a young age she passed away for no apparent reason. The girl was buried in a log hollowed out in a trunk, which, according to local custom, was hung from the branches of a tree on the banks of one of the rivers of Evenkia. However, the spirit of the shaman did not rest and her image appeared to lonely men. Then suddenly someone invisible knocked on the windows, then a voice was heard in the silence, then in clear calm weather a slight breeze arose on the street, and cold was felt in the heated hut.

Some shamans, with the help of their tambourines and spells, turned to Sinilga for help, others tried to drive the spirit away from the houses where they felt her presence. But if a lonely man succumbed to her love call, then he soon passed away.

Taught by taiga experience and legends, Yuri, following his brother, moved to Almaty, where he became a good athlete. He arranged a dugout for himself in the Tuyuk-Su tract at a climbing base, and when we were training on the rocks not far from the city, he decided, out of Siberian habit, to look for a place there as well. Worked out – slept, trained again, slept again. He climbed the opposite slope and to his surprise found a large hole overgrown with trees and shrubs. He went down to the city for a shovel, and at the same time found out that there was once a church in this place, which the communists blew up during the years of the revolution.

Yura dug all day, and in the evening he laid out his sleeping bag on the ground, lay down with his feet to the pit and zipped it up to his nose. I realized that his legs were slightly higher than his head, but he did not turn over. I woke up when I felt that the bag was being pulled along the ground, and towards the dug hole. If they were stray dogs, they would have given themselves away with some kind of sounds, but the sleeping bag moved silently. And Yura, numb with horror, began to pray with his lips alone: ​​”Lord, have mercy …” The movement stopped. The sleeping bag no longer crawled on the ground, but in the morning Yuri found his legs dangling over the dug hole.

Not only students and rock routes remained after the departure of Yuri Gorbunov. Remained on paper and his unforgettable stories.