The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (47 page)

Over lunch, he revealed his Everest plan. “The Hornbein Couloir,” he whispered, eyes shining. This was a steep cleft in the rock of the North Face, on the Tibetan side. It was first climbed by an American pair 50 years ago, but Steck wanted to do it alpine style, an extremely rare feat in itself. Most years, the Hornbein holds either too much snow or too little. After ascending via the Hornbein, he planned to go down the Southeast Ridge, across the South Col, and up Lhotse, the fourth-highest mountain in the world—the Lhotse Traverse. If all went well, it would require that he and Moro spend more than three days above 8,000 meters, in the so-called death zone. No one had ever done anything like this. He had sold the exclusive Swiss rights to the story to a magazine published by Migros, the Swiss supermarket chain, for more than the trip would cost him.

 

Steck, a coppersmith's son, was reared in Emmental, hilly cow country, which by Swiss mountain-man standards makes him something of a flatlander. He and his two older brothers were hockey nuts; one went on to play professionally. When Ueli was 12, a friend's father took him rock climbing, and that was it for hockey. He began scaling walls in climbing gyms. Before long, he'd made the Swiss junior national sport-climbing team, but he grew restless and wanted to try his moves on the real mountains near home, chief among them the North Face of the Eiger, known as the Nordwand, the great test piece of the Alps—Europe's Everest. I drove up from Interlaken one afternoon to have a look, and seeing it for the first time, from the road leading up to Grindelwald, I found myself growling back at it. It was the bigger bear: a nasty shaded rampart of limestone and ice, nearly 6,000 vertical feet from bottom to top, bedeviled by avalanches, falling rocks, sketchy verglas (thin ice), and sudden storms that can pin a climber for days. The obsessive and often deadly attempts in the 1930s to be the first up, observed from a nearby hotel, still make for some of mountaineering's best-known tales. The first successful climb, in 1938, took four days.

Steck was 18 when he made his first ascent of the Nordwand. It took him and a friend two days. When he was 28, he soloed the 1938 route in 10 hours. Two years later, he did it in three hours and 54 minutes, breaking the record by 46 minutes. Still, he felt he could go faster. He dedicated the next year to the task, adopting a precise (and top-secret) daily regimen to fine-tune his stamina and strength. It was a novel idea, to bring the advanced science of sport training to the imprecise art of climbing. No climber had ever done this. It hadn't seemed necessary—until Steck introduced the question of speed.

In 2008, he climbed the Nordwand in two hours and 47 minutes—less time than it takes to watch
Cloud Atlas.
The style was pure too: he waited until a storm had left fresh ice and covered old tracks, and he used no ropes or protection of any kind—just crampons and ice axes, in a technique called dry-tooling. Later, he repeated the climb for a film crew, doing pitches over and over, waiting for the setup of each shot, and the footage of him dry-tooling verglas, and running up near-vertical snowfields, where one mistake could mean a mile-long plunge, brought him international renown. Just watching on a computer screen induces vertigo, yet he says it doesn't scare him. “I'm never afraid,” he said. “I wouldn't do it if I was afraid of it. I'm not an adrenaline junkie. I'm really Swiss, calculating.”

On the premier mountains of the world, there is little new left to do. To achieve a notable first ascent, you'd have to climb the mountains of the moon. So it can be hard these days for a climber to distinguish himself. One can do stylish routes up obscure or remote peaks, or do several peaks in one sequence (a so-called enchainment), or else go alone and unroped up classic routes in record time. Speed became Steck's shtick. The next winter, he followed up with record ascents of the north faces of the Grandes Jorasses (he broke the speed record by four and a half hours) and the Matterhorn (the whole thing in less than two hours).

To some, all this seemed a little gimmicky or robotic. The combination of speed, which seemed an affront to the mountains' majesty, and the methodical training regimen leached alpinism of some of its romance and poetry, its shaggy rebel charm. “For this I got a lot of, how you say, flak,” Steck said. “People said, ‘Climbing is not a sport. A climber's not an athlete. It's about adventure, being in the mountains, going out with friends.'”

The question of purity is an old one in climbing. In the 1930s, the stodgy members of the British Alpine Club, accustomed to tramping around on Swiss glaciers with local peasants as guides, used to dismiss the young itinerant Nordwand aspirants as daredevils and glory hounds. (And lest we idealize these rebels, keep in mind that many of them were climbing for the glory, and with the backing, of the Reich, perhaps with a different idea of purity in mind.) Over time, honor and admiration have migrated toward those who ascend using fewer ropes, carrying less on their backs, stopping less often, using less in the way of human support—lighter, faster, cleaner, more self-reliant. In that respect, not many can top Steck. Still, the professional climbing game can be a mercenary one, requiring fealty to sponsors and some self-glorification, which can undercut the elegance of the feats themselves.

“The purist thing doesn't exist,” Steck said. “You have to find a way to live. You're not living from eating the dirt. But you have to keep it as climbing.” Steck pays for his trips himself. He is sponsored, but the expeditions are not. He doesn't want to have to factor the sponsors' interests into the calculus of risk assessment. “If someone else pays, they decide what you have to do.” By the time he's on the mountain, Steck is climbing for himself and himself alone.

 

A climber's reputation rests not just on first ascents or flashy routes but on how he conducts himself when things go to pieces. Steck may be renowned as much for his abandoned expeditions as for the flawless ones. In May 2007, he attempted to put a new route up the south face of Annapurna, a perilous ice and rock face on the world's most lethal peak. On his first try, he got 700 feet up, and a falling rock hit him on the head, knocked him out, and off the face. He fell all the way to the bottom and regained consciousness. He was barely hurt.

Two weeks later, he met with Simon Anthamatten, an elite alpinist from Zermatt, and they agreed to give Annapurna a try. “I grew up in the guide tradition,” Anthamatten told me. “You don't go alone in the mountains.” The following spring, they went to Nepal. For an acclimatization climb, they achieved a first ascent of the north face of Tengkampoche, via a very technical route, which earned them a Piolet d'Or, the world's top climbing prize. Then they went back to Annapurna. They tried twice to get up the south face but were turned back each time by weather. There were two other expeditions on the mountain: a group of Russians, who had butchered a yak to eat, and whom the Swiss thought it best to avoid, and a mixed group consisting of a Russian, a Romanian, and a Basque named Iñaki Ochoa de Olza, who were attempting the east ridge. One day, as Anthamatten and Steck returned to their base camp, exhausted after a third abortive attempt, they received a call on their satellite phone from Ochoa de Olza's girlfriend at base camp, who was in touch with the Romanian climber via radio. There was a medical problem. Ochoa de Olza, stranded at 24,000 feet, was suffering, and the Russian had gone missing. They'd lost their medicine.

It was 9:00
P.M.
Steck and Anthamatten had been climbing all day, and had left their high-altitude gear at the base of their route up the south face. They didn't even know the way on the east ridge. Base camp sent two Sherpas up to help them, but one was drunk and the other exhausted after a 20-mile hike up from his village. So Steck and Anthamatten turned on their headlamps and set out into the night alone, in their light climbing gear. They reached Camp 2, almost 20,000 feet above sea level, at 8:00
A.M.
By now it was snowing hard, and they couldn't make out the other climbers' tracks. They came upon an avalanche-prone slope, and decided to wait until morning to cross it. The Romanian called frequently, through Ochoa de Olza's girlfriend, reporting that Ochoa de Olza's condition was getting worse. When they reached Camp 3, at noon the next day, the weather was deteriorating. The Russian had returned. He'd been on the summit and spent the night just below it. Steck and Anthamatten sent the Russian down, after Steck had swapped boots with him, and Steck proceeded up alone. In between Camp 3 and Camp 4, Steck and the Romanian met up. Steck gave him medicine and the last of his food and sent him to meet Anthamatten, who helped him down. Steck proceeded to Camp 4, at 24,000 feet, and came upon Ochoa de Olza, unconscious in a tent. Another night passed. Steck remained with Ochoa de Olza, who by the next morning was in the throes of death—unconscious, vomiting, coughing up blood. Pulmonary edema. At noon, he stopped breathing. After a while, Steck determined that he was dead. He spent the rest of the afternoon in the tent with the corpse and then decided, as night fell and the storm raged, to put the body outside. A weather report came from base camp that the next morning would be his best chance of getting off the mountain alive. Steck lay awake through the night. He was sure he heard something outside, like a man moaning. He began to wonder if Ochoa de Olza was alive. He stepped outside to see. Still dead. In the morning, Steck left the body behind, headed down, and at Camp 3 stumbled upon three rescuers, with whom he descended to base.

He and Anthamatten were hailed as heroes for abandoning their climb and risking their lives to save others. They were awarded a Prix Courage. Steck downplayed the rescue, because Ochoa de Olza had died in the end. And they'd failed to achieve what they'd come to do. “I'm done with Annapurna,” he said afterward. “It gives me a funny feeling.”

Eventually, he changed his mind. He had been planning to go back this fall, to have another go at the south face. But then came the
Krieg am Everest.

 

Scandal is a mainstay of climbing lore, as fundamental as courage and death. Controversies swirl around every mountain, and almost every mountaineer, like so many ravens. The first great first ascent, of the Matterhorn, in 1865, by an Englishman named Edward Whymper, led to the death, on the descent, of four of his companions. Their rope snapped, and they fell 4,000 feet. Afterward, Whymper and his guide, a local Zermatter named Peter Taugwalder, were accused of having cut the rope that connected them to the others in order to save themselves. An inquiry exonerated them—the case prompted Queen Victoria to consider a ban on mountain climbing—but a whiff of dishonor, along with the timeless problem of there being no witnesses in mountain accidents except, usually, the survivors, has forever shadowed the accomplishment. Whymper later suggested that Taugwalder might have intentionally chosen a flimsy rope, a slander that stuck to the family for decades. The Wallisers, the local Swiss valley dwellers, were the Sherpas of the so-called golden age of alpinism, when wellborn Englishmen competed to knock off the high peaks of Europe. The Swiss did the work and rarely got the credit. These days, of course, the Swiss are the ones going abroad in search of glory, and Taugwalder's descendants are the wealthy owners of luxury hotels.

Now Steck has a controversy of his own. Five days after he and his companions fled Camp 2 on Everest, he was back in Switzerland. For three days, he didn't go out. He saw no friends and stayed away from town. On Tuesday, May 7, he picked me up in Interlaken in his Audi, the name on the side now like a scarlet letter. It was his first time out in the car since he'd been back. He felt people looking at him. The Swiss media had mounted a siege, albeit a polite one.
Blick
, Switzerland's version of the
Post
, ran an interview with an old Swiss mountaineer. The headline: “Stecks Ego-Trip War Eine Provokation.”

Many accounts were sympathetic, but in others, and on many adventure blogs, Steck, Moro, and Griffith were being depicted as Gore-Tex imperialists, rich, arrogant European invaders of a sacred Sherpa ritual and violators of cross-cultural decorum. “For Simone, in Italy, this has not been such a problem,” Steck said. “But here in Switzerland, if they can find something like this about you, they kick your ass.” Many eminent climbers had spoken up in his defense, including Reinhold Messner and Chris Bonington. Still, he found himself in the unfamiliar position of being, in some quarters, the bad guy.

“I'm not really home yet,” he said. “It's just too much for me. I'm totally messed up. People wanted to kill me. For me, life was over. I was sitting in the tent and I didn't see any escape. They said, ‘Get that guy out here. First, we kill him and then we look for the other two.' Maybe I'm too sensitive, but I can't get over this.

“People have this understanding of the nice, good Sherpas, blah blah blah,” he said. “They say, ‘It was just Westerners in the wrong place. They were arrogant to be there. The Sherpas are there to do their work.' Well, I respect their work, but they should respect my work.” Steck and his team had paid tens of thousands of dollars for the requisite permits, and believed that they had a right to climb on the Lhotse Face, and that the requirements of the commercial climbing operations shouldn't take precedence over those of the professional ones. If anything, their expedition, one of two professional bids that season, may have merited some deference. Their mission, from a certain vantage, was an exalted one.

For the Sherpas, and for many Westerners who have worked alongside them over the years, getting hundreds of paying clients up to the summit, Steck, Moro, and Griffith had no business being on the Lhotse Face. The Yak Route, as it's sometimes called, wasn't part of their climb, and the Sherpas' work there is vital to most of the mountain's constituents: clients, guides, porters, and the ecosystem that has sprouted up around them, from the villages on the way to base camp to the gear companies and media outlets that treat the Everest climbing season as their Super Bowl.