This is familiar ground for me, too, having climbed Cholatse from this side a decade earlier. We scramble down a few hundred metres of steep penitentes, across a rock tower, and down a steep, snowy couloir. By late afternoon, we’re on a glacier, winding through a small icefall toward the Gokyo Valley below.
“There’s one more ice wall we will need crampons for,” Ueli says, shouldering his pack after a quick water break. From somewhere deep in my memory bank, a recollection sparks.
“No, Ueli,” I say. “If we cross the glacier here, there’s a climber trail on the other side of the moraine.”
Ueli looks at me and then continues in the same direction as before, but I’m certain I’m right. “We came this way in 2001,” I say. “Trust me, Ueli.”
Finally, the Swiss Machine is willing to let me lead.
THE WORST climbing accident of Ueli’s life occurred in August, 2010. Strangely, it occurred on the Wetterhorn, a peak in his home region of the Jungfrau, rather than on a farflung Himalayan giant; and the accident befell not him, but his partner that day: thirty-year-old Nicole Steck, his wife, a passionate climber in her own right. As the couple hiked up a casual approach trail toward the mountain, the path passed next to a waterfall. For a few metres, the footing was damp. He watched as Nicole slipped off and fell thirty metres.
The accident momentarily made headlines and Twitter feeds across Switzerland, media attention that was appalling to Ueli’s sense of privacy. Although Nicole has since made a full recovery, it’s obvious to those who know him that the experience, more than any other of his near-misses, has left Steck a changed man.
“Fuck, I’m thirty-five, and maybe, you know, I had already the high point of my career, it’s possible I cannot top it,” he confessed to me near the end of our trip. “You have to accept that, and go the way of it, or otherwise you get really strange and weird.”
At the same time, he recognizes that on his best solos, he never thought he could fall. “You’re not expecting you could die up there. You just think: no problem, I do it. I just go for it, and I do it. It’s not like I might not make it back, and I don’t care.”
The temptation to “ just go for it” will likely remain within Ueli’s character for the rest of his life. Indeed, he occasionally sounds like a recovering addict when he talks about his sport. “It’s my character, my whole life . . . I was so committed; you shouldn’t be so committed your whole life, otherwise it’s a dead end.
“I’ve been working for two years to get away from this solo climbing. Because it’s dangerous, if you do it too long, if you do it too much, you’re gonna die, for sure. You can look to the history, and all these climbers die at some point.
“I had this situation last fall, conditions were so great on the Eiger. It would be easier, I make the decision Monday, go take the car Tuesday morning, and I’m back for lunch, no big calling up friends . . . I really had to say ‘no, you’re not going alone.’ So, I start to try to find a friend, and it came up I had an old friend, a mountain guide. I ended up phoning him up and we went and it was so much fun.
“But I had to make the step—picking up the phone.”
POSTSCRIPT: Ueli and I parted ways in Kathmandu. He rendezvoused with Don Bowie and crossed by jeep into Tibet, and I flew to Alaska. Arriving at Shishapangma base camp first, he and Bowie proceeded directly to an advance camp at the foot of the south face. After his time in the Khumbu, Steck felt acclimatized and ready. Bowie, who had not spent any time acclimatizing beforehand, knew he would need several weeks to prepare. With his partner’s blessing, Steck launched up the face alone.
He was on the summit ten and a half hours later. “I promised my wife not to do any solos anymore. But this is not really a solo,” he wrote on his blog. “In this area a roped party would not really belay. You would lose too much time and it is not really necessary. I thought I could do it, and I could already see the exit.”
The team moved on to Cho Oyu, where Steck and Bowie together made a relaxed, multi-day ascent via its normal route. While he was on the mountain, Erhard Loretan, Steck’s old mentor, who had climbed both Shishapangma and Cho Oyu in a single expedition, was killed climbing in France. It was Loretan’s fifty-second birthday.
Finally focusing on Everest, Steck and Bowie made a high bivouac on May 20 and set out for the summit at nine P.M. Bowie turned back at 8,000 metres when his feet began to freeze. Steck continued on, weaving through groups of commercial clients trudging along using supplemental oxygen. Above the third step, he paused. A passing climbing Sherpa told him he was less than an hour from the summit. But there was no sensation left in his toes.
“For a moment I have thought to ask a sherpa if I could breathe ten minutes of oxygen, then I would have had again warm feets,” Steck wrote. “But then I would have stood on another peak.” Steck resisted the urge to just go for it, turned around, and returned home to Switzerland. He had come within a whisker of pulling off the trifecta.
Don Gillmor
THE DESCENT OF MAN
ISTOOD UNDER a cloudless sky near the peak of Mont Fort, staring at the glaciers of the Grand Combin, shining like starched sheets. Mont Fort, at Verbier, Switzerland, is one of the steepest ski runs in Europe. Most of the people who rode up on the tram went back down on it. My friend Ken and I had come to Europe to ski and escape ourselves. We were in our fifties, a shadowy decade. Looking down at the canton of Valais, I felt a combination of exhilaration and fear and simple awe. The world laid out, endless in its possibilities. The price, though, was a treacherous descent. It was late in the season and the moguls were large, rutted from spring thaws, and shiny with ice. A few skiers picked their way down carefully, making long, hesitant traverses across the hill.
We stood in that familiar lacuna, waiting for the right moment to go down, a moment when the path was clear, when courage was high. After several minutes, Ken launched himself. On the second turn, he crossed his skis and fell.
He slid quickly on the ice. Both skis blew off, then both poles. He hurtled down the steep hill headfirst, picking up speed, his helmeted head bouncing off the moguls. It occurred to me that he might not stop until the bottom, more than 300 metres below. There was a crevasse near the bottom, off to the side. It was marked with colourful racing poles to warn skiers away.
Beside me, near the tramline, were the remnants of a speed course that had been set up a month earlier. Speed skiing means simply getting into a tuck and going as fast as possible. The skis are 240 centimetres long, and specific aerodynamic helmets and clothing have been developed for this rarified sport. There are only about thirty courses in the world.
Speed skiing requires a very steep start and a long run out. The fastest anyone has ever gone on a pair of skis is 251.4 kilometres an hour, achieved by an Italian, Simone Origone. What is remarkable is that he reached that velocity in fifteen seconds, roughly as fast as the 690 horsepower Lamborghini Aventador—which gets to 250 km/h in 14.4 seconds. It was Origone who set the course record at Verbier with a speed of 219 km/h.
When I was young, speed was a visceral affirmation, an extension of my natural optimism (that I wouldn’t crash, that I would live forever), and part of my inchoate search for limits and meaning. But speed had become something else in middle age. I still sought it; as a way to prolong youth, perhaps. Yet skiing had become a balance between hope and fear—the hope that it would preserve me, that it would amplify my existence, and the fear that it might do the opposite.
Ken had managed to get himself turned around so that his feet were pointing downhill. People stopped to watch him, a Gore-Tex missile heading toward the crevasse. His boots sent up sprays of snow as he rocketed down. The late morning sun was brilliant. Had we waited another hour or so, the hill would have softened up.
Ken skied, he had told me, to take himself out of his own head, a head that was filled with screenplays, resentment, political rants, women, and, more than anything, himself. A head that struggled to contain an expansive ego that now flowe
d over the moguls 100 metres below.
The act of skiing is instinctive and ultimately solitary and at a certain age it provides welcome relief from our thoughts, our mortgages and disappointments. We were both aware that there wouldn’t be many more years of skiing like this. We could ski into old age, but it would be something else again.
Switzerland was having a nervous year. More than half of Verbier was closed, a brown ring around the bottom of the resort. While it was late April, this was still unusual. Swiss glaciers, like glaciers everywhere, were in retreat; they lost eighteen percent of their surface between 1985 and 2000. Seventy percent of them could be gone in the next three decades. The glaciers feed the Swiss river system, and half of the country’s power is hydroelectric. Low river levels will affect energy, transportation, and the many ingenious farms scattered through the valleys and crawling up the mountainside.
Swiss ski resorts have already felt the effects of glacial retreat. In 2005, Andermatt wrapped the disappearing Gurschen glacier in a protective foil made of polyester and polypropylene, designed to keep the sun off and the cold in. Mont Fort followed suit.
Standing at the top of Mont Fort in the perfect spring sun, the snow receding below me, Ken slowing down, I wondered if the sport would die before I did. Perhaps we would all go together.
Two hundred and fifty metres below me, Ken finally came to a stop. He lay motionless for more than a minute, then one arm rose and weakly waved, indicating he was alive, at least. His head wasn’t occupied with the messy details of his life now. He was mentally gauging the pain, tracking its source and intensity. Was anything broken? Had the helmet saved him from concussion? He had a bad back that was now much worse. He had knee issues, a sore wrist, a lifelong case of existential angst, and he travelled with a cache of celebrity-grade painkillers that would come in handy.
I started down, stopping to pick up his skis and poles, moving carefully on the ice, muscles straining, my head empty of conscious thought, reduced to a purely physical being, focused on survival.
I LEARNED to ski on a small hill perched inconveniently on the endless Canadian prairie. Mount Agassiz had a modest vertical of about 150 metres. It featured one T-bar and a rope tow that, in memory, ran off the flywheel of a tractor and was operated by a grumpy farmer who cursed us when we fell off or slid backward on the ice. The hill was a three-hour drive from Winnipeg and rarely seemed to be warmer than –20°F; we had to stop every half hour to warm up in the modest chalet. From the summit you could see conifers and low scrub and hardscrabble farmland that had been cultivated a century earlier by hopeful immigrants. My Scottish great-grandfather had tried to farm to the east, but finally gave up on that impossible land and moved to the city to become a minister in a particularly pessimistic branch of Calvinism (called, paradoxically, the Free Presbyterians).
Mount Agassiz took its name from Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz, a nineteenth-century Swiss geologist who was the first to suggest that the Earth had experienced an ice age. He argued that this ice age had replaced the biblical deluge; that it wiped out all (sinful) life, which then began anew. Agassiz kept his faith and resisted Darwin’s evolutionary theory for his entire life. But the mountain named after him was formed during the Pleistocene epoch, when glaciers ploughed through Manitoba, leaving a few upturned hills that were gradual on the side where the ice was advancing and dropped off sharply where the ice had pulled down huge slabs of rock as it went by. Geologically, this glacial till plain was an unlikely spot for a ski resort.
When we were seventeen, a group of us drove 1,500 kilometres across the frozen plain to ski at Lake Louise in the Rocky Mountains. Going up the Olympic chairlift, staring back at the immense scale of the valley and the Slate Range that stretched beyond it, I saw not just the possibilities of the sport, but the possibilities of life. Chief among them was the concept of freedom. In part it was the post-adolescent freedom of being on the road, of being in another place, unsupervised. But the summit of Lake Louise invited a larger sense of freedom, a phenomenological escape that changed my sense of the physical world. And there was the simple joy of that speed, the harmless physics of the prairie given way to something else.
Our Banff trip was a collage of hard skiing and wasted nights. Our lack of success with the few girls we met was epic. We turned to adolescent stunts, locking one of our number out of the hotel room, naked. We drank beer in crowded taverns and wished we were dancing with girls and stayed until closing time, hoping for a miracle, and woke up at 7 A.M. and ate pancakes and caught the first lift up.
None of us returned to Mount Agassiz. It was irretrievably diminished by then, a fondly remembered childhood relic. The following year I moved to Calgary and started skiing seriously, getting out fifty days or more each year. But after six years, even the yawning scale of the Banff area became too familiar. It began to feel as finite as Mount Agassiz had.
In 1978, after graduating from university, I went to France to ski. In the Grenoble train station I met a man my age wearing a ski jacket who told me that Val d’Isère was the place to go; that’s where he was heading. He looked like Robert Redford and introduced himself as Bob. He had seen the Redford film Downhill Racer several times and had adopted the star’s mannerisms. Occasionally he’d act a scene from the movie without crediting it.
At the time, Downhill Racer was a touchstone for a certain kind of skier. Redford’s character, David Chappellet, was a perfect late-sixties anti-hero, handsome and aloof and a bit of a shit. The movie trailer had a voiceover that asked the quasiexistential question, “How far must a man go to get from where he’s at?” Downhill Racer was a gritty, European-looking film, and I wanted to be like Redford, though not as badly as my new friend Bob did.
I spent the whole season in Val d’Isère, living in the basement of a massive eighteenth-century stone house with Bob and a handful of expatriates. The scale of the resort was immense; we could ski to other villages, to Italy.
Going up a large tram one day, a man who turned out to be from Brooklyn recognized me as North American and said, “Want to take a walk on the wild side?” In an urban setting, this could mean a number of different, largely uncomfortable things. But here it meant he knew the secret location of some incredible powder-filled bowl. So I followed. We climbed and traversed for three hours from where the lift let us off, into Italy, sweating heavily and panting in the thin air.
We finally arrived at a massive, very steep, untouched bowl. We hurtled down, floating in the bottomless powder. The run took less than two minutes, but that speed and the ethereal sensation of moving through the light powder made it feel longer, a suspension of not just gravity, but time. A thrill. The sensation of weightlessness made me feel I had transcended my physical self.
The freedom, the possibilities of life that I’d first felt at Lake Louise were all magnified in Val d’Isère. Just over the mountain was the world conjured by my literary imagination: Paris and Spain and doomed love affairs with tragic Europeans.
In spring my peripatetic Calgary girlfriend flew over and the tenor of my expatriate life changed. We skied and argued, then left for Italy. We ended up in Greece, admitting finally that our relationship, which had been pretty much defined by break-ups, wasn’t working. She decided to fly home and I stayed in Athens. After she got in the taxi to the airport, I walked to the harbour and sat on the hard sand of a vast, empty industrial beach. On the horizon, a figure approached in the heat shimmer, a woman carrying something. It turned out to be a wooden box, filled with cigarettes, which she carried with the aid of a neck strap, the kind that cigarette girls in 1930s nightclubs used to have. She stood over me. “Cigarette?” she said in a heavy accent. She was perhaps forty, and her legs, which were at my eye level, had small bruises on them. I bought a package of Marlboros and sat on the deserted beach smoking, pondering the end of my relationship with my girlfriend, and what proved to be the effective end of my relationship with skiing for the next decade.
BACK IN CANADA, I moved east,
where skiing withered amid the dwarfish hills of Ontario. I was trying to be a writer, and my world became almost exclusively urban. On those few occasions that I did get out skiing, I was reminded of Mount Agassiz and its limitations and the whole experience depressed me. Years went by without getting out on a hill.
In my thirties, I inched back to the sport, going to Quebec a few times. But by my forties, something else had changed. One March I drove to Jay Peak, Vermont, where a large thermometer at the top of the hill informed me it was 61°F. The snow was heavy and wet, and it was like skiing through peanut butter. A storm of tropical force that had been lurking on the other side of the mountain suddenly released a hard rain. Those of us who wanted to persevere were issued green garbage bags with armholes.
By fifty, both winter and myself were getting unreliable. I couldn’t count on snow, and I couldn’t count on my ability to negotiate some of the runs that had once thrilled me. Skiing claims to be our oldest sport (a 5,000-year-old ski was found in Sweden) and now it is showing its age. The sport and I appear to be going through some of the same issues: doubt, deterioration, financial worries, environmental dread. As I lose strength and stamina the glaciers retreat in solidarity, the snow dries up, the resorts dwindle. The number of U.S. ski resorts dropped from 727 in 1985 to 485 in 2008. Mount Agassiz closed in 2000, though I didn’t hear about it for another decade.
As the esteemed glaciologist Lonnie Thompson has warned us, glaciers are disappearing at an accelerating rate. Kilimanjaro—that Hemingwayesque symbol of mortality and loss—could vanish entirely within a decade. Ninety-nine percent of the glaciers in the Alps are in retreat. “As a result of our inaction,” Thompson wrote in his 2010 article in the journal Climate Change: The Evidence and Our Options, “we have three options: mitigation, adaptation, and suffering.” Not coincidentally, these are the three options that late middle age offers.
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