by Glenn Stout
The three Europeans packed a few things, disassembled their tent, stashed some belongings under piles of rocks, donned down parkas and helmets as armor against thrown stones, and fled. They avoided the established route, down through the heart of Camp 2, for fear of being attacked again. They could see Sherpas lining the trail. Instead, they crawled out onto the glacier, to stay out of sight, and began picking their way through the crevasses—an improvised route, undertaken without ropes, through a maze of trapdoors. No one would dare follow. After a while, they rejoined the main roped trail through the icefall, keeping an eye on the path behind them, ready to pull up ladders and cut fixed lines if there were Sherpas in pursuit. They reached base camp just before dark. None of them slept that night.
By the next day, news of a brawl had gone around the world. Conflicting accounts gave rise to a crossfire of recrimination. One opinion, widely held, especially among people far away, was that Sherpas, revered throughout the climbing world for their skill and forbearance, would not have resorted to such violence unless they’d been provoked.
In Switzerland, and in much of Europe, where alpine exploits equate roughly to playoff heroics here, Ueli Steck is a superstar. The news of the “Krieg am Everest” had the tabloid wattage (adjusting for Swissness) of A-Rod’s affair with Madonna. Steck is a professional climber. “I’m still really impressed how this system works, to be able to make a living from climbing and not be a dirtbag for your life,” he told me, before leaving for Everest. For decades, climbing was a pastime for gentlemen and vagabonds. But in recent years people have found a way to subsist at it, by guiding, or working for apparel companies, or, as in Steck’s case, thriving on sponsorships and speeches and slide shows—what Steck calls “business.” “To make business, you need stories,” he said, by which he means amazing feats. To create stories, you need to come up with projects—bigger and bigger ones with each passing year—and then you need to succeed at them.
I first met Steck last November. He’d come to New York to run the marathon. His training regimen for each expedition is extremely meticulous, but it allows for larks, and since he runs for hours a day in the mountains, he thought he’d give the flats of the five boroughs a go. Like so many participants, he arrived in New York soon after Hurricane Sandy but before the race was canceled, at the last minute, by Mayor Bloomberg. Once it was called off, he had no reason to stay. “I would never go to a city just to go to a city,” he told me. Anyway, he wanted to get back to Interlaken to spend time with his wife. In the previous two months, he’d been home only a few days, amid a whirlwind of travel around Europe and North America to give talks and to shoot promotions and advertisements for his various sponsors. Half the life of a professional climber is retelling old stories to finance the creation of new ones. Steck gives as many as 100 slide shows a year, often to corporations, who pay him well.
He was as secretive about his winter plans as he was about his intentions on Everest, but in March he agreed to see me in Switzerland, a few days before he left for Nepal. He lives in the village of Ringgenberg, next to Interlaken, which is the gateway to the valleys leading up to the Jungfrau massif, the cluster of glaciated high peaks that includes the infamous Eiger. The day I arrived, he’d been planning to spend the night in a hut on the Jungfrau’s flank, to acclimatize to a higher altitude, prior to his flight to Kathmandu. But the weather was lousy, so instead he went for a jog. He ran up and down a mountain near Interlaken three times—18 miles, and 8,000 vertical feet—in three hours and 40 minutes. (“I enjoy it,” he said. “I feel my legs, I see the nature.”) Then, to cool down, he went to the gym and lifted weights for two hours. He explained, when I met him for coffee the next morning, that this was taking it easy: he was conserving energy for Nepal.
When you first see Steck, it is hard to believe that he can run any distance at all: he is almost comically bowlegged. He teeters on the outsides of his feet. He is lean and compact, with long muscular arms and fingers. He keeps his hair short and his face clean-shaven, and has intense blue eyes that seem to bulge and brighten when he discusses a project. He speaks with a reedy, heliated voice that suits his Swiss-German twang.
It was a day for business. Steck was wearing Levi’s and a lightweight blue down jacket with his sponsors’ names on it: Leki, Scarpa, Mountain Hardwear, Power Bar. He had a meeting in Bern, an hour away, with executives from another sponsor, Richner, a Swiss bathroom fixtures merchant. We drove there in his white Audi A4 wagon, with WWW.UELISTECK.CH emblazoned on both sides. (Audi, a sponsor, gives him a car every year.) He was careful to obey speed limits and to stop at crosswalks. “If I do one little thing wrong, people will make a big deal,” he said. “This is Switzerland.” His great fear was running over a toddler. He was anxious about his reputation—it was the distillate of all those faces and summits, his true currency—and this wasn’t a country that tolerated ostentation or entitlement in its mountain athletes, he said. Though he gave liberally of himself as a pitchman, he never let reporters meet his wife or talk to his parents or see his house. He wouldn’t even let me attend the bathroom fixtures meeting. But afterward he showed me around old Bern. His wife, who works for Bern’s electric company, had an apartment nearby. He’d met her at an ice-climbing competition. A year later, they climbed the Eiger together and spent a night sleeping on a ledge at what is called the Death Bivouac, because of climbers who died there.
After lunch, Steck drove to the city’s outskirts, to a warehouse that contained a vast climbing gym called Magnet: a Costco of climbing, with undulating pitches of varying steepness, each section a different hue, with hundreds of handholds affixed, stuck there like gobs of bubble gum, in dozens of bright colors, each denoting a particular line. Schoolkids, teens, seniors, and pros turtled in muscle: they scrambled up the walls and hung from the ceiling, belayed by companions on the ground. Steck changed into a Mountain Hardwear T-shirt and shorts and went over to a turret off to the side, a kind of pyramid stuck upside down into the ground, for bouldering—that is, scrambling without being roped. He began to maneuver around on it. A few patrons whispered and glanced in his direction—this was the equivalent of Tiger Woods showing up at the municipal driving range—but for the most part everyone left him alone. He followed a progression of blue handholds, then orange, then pink, hopping down to the mat each time, brushing the talc from his hands on his shorts and peering up at the wall, his head tilted as though the wall were a language he was trying to remember. “I can climb vertical ice—I don’t even need to train for it,” he said. “This is more for fun. This isn’t training—just moving a little bit. I don’t waste energy on climbing training. But I’m too fat now for hard rock climbing. I used to be eight kilos lighter. The weight gives me more stamina. It’s less cold.” After a while, he removed his T-shirt. With a woman named Julie, the wife of a friend, on belay, he began climbing a big wall. He moved Spider-Man fast, clipping in every three feet or so, until he was hanging from the ceiling. There were strange muscles in his back. Each contortion set off a different arrangement of them.
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.