his Story
1951 - 2023
Yurii Valentinovich Kudashkin was born in 1951 in At-Bashi, a remote mountain village in Kyrgyzstan, where his father had been sent after the war to develop agriculture. The mountains were always there — surrounding the village, shaping the boy.
He began mountaineering at sixteen, and by the time he entered the Mining and Geological Faculty of the Frunze Polytechnic Institute, the mountains had become his profession and his calling. He earned the USSR Master of Sport title at twenty-six, and went on to complete over forty routes of the fifth category of difficulty and six of the sixth — numbers that impress even seasoned climbers. Three mountain routes bear his name.
From 1981 to 1986 he served as head of the Central Tian Shan mountain rescue service, responsible for search and rescue across some of the most demanding terrain in Soviet mountaineering. He trained generations of climbers — as instructor, coach, and head of the Ala-Too mountaineering camp — and remained active in the mountains until the age of seventy.
In 1986 he moved to Omsk, where he built a second life. He founded a training center for industrial alpinism, led an alpine section at SibADI, and discovered that the same hands that had gripped ice axes could coax forms out of wood. He worked in a style he called plastika prirodnykh form — the plasticity of natural forms — finding vessels, sculptures, and furniture hidden inside willow, aspen, maple, poplar, and pine. He had brought archa, the alpine juniper that grows at altitude along the climber's path, from Kyrgyzstan to Omsk. "It turned out," he wrote, "that warm pink willow, and aspen that paints landscapes, and maple twisted with burls — all of it comes from the same water from the mountain glaciers. We all drink water from the mountains."
From 1994 he participated in twenty-one exhibitions, nine of them solo. His wood sculptures still stand on the streets of Omsk.
He also wrote — memoir stories about life in the mountains, honest and sometimes very funny — collected in the book На заре взять рюкзак (Take Your Rucksack at Dawn), which was nearly finished at the time of his death in October 2023.
His daughter Taya wrote of him: "He could be rough and sharp on the outside, but in his soul he was always a person of the deepest ethics, and very tender toward nature."
He left in the way he had always moved through the world — with dignity, strength, and the quiet modesty of a real mountaineer.
