Steck’s achievements might still have been lost among the larger outdoor audience were it not for a film about his exploits released in 2010 by the adventure film company Sender Films. Over the previous decade, Sender’s creative partners, Nick Rosen and Peter Mortimer, had established their street cred by capturing the global elite of the climbing world in action. Although similar alpine feats had often been reported “after the deed” in words and photographs, never before had the intense, intensely personal experience of freesoloing up a big mountain face been captured so vividly.
“I grew up in the youth program of the Swiss Alpine Club,” Steck deadpans at the start of the movie. “Swiss mountaineers, they’re really traditional . . . if there’s one thing, especially: you can’t run on crampons,” he continues—as the video cuts to several clips of him literally jogging up and down mountainsides, legs pumping more in the manner of a distance runner’s measured stride than a technical alpinist’s jerky movements.
Later in the film, viewers see Steck’s front points skate across the blank slab of the Hinterstoisser Traverse and the pick of one tool pop off a thin limestone edge before settling on a more secure placement. A helicopter-mounted camera, shooting from otherwise impossible angles, illuminates with heart-pumping clarity the insane exposure of the Eiger’s nearly 6,000 feet of relief.
It would be hard to conjure an image that better embodies the general public’s perception of risk than the final shot of Ueli racing toward the summit ridge. For an audience of the uninitiated, there can only be two explanations for this sort of behaviour: either Ueli Steck is crazy or he is Superman. And throughout the movie, Ueli appears quite sane.
As a finishing touch, Mortimer and Rosen titled their film The Swiss Machine. The moniker would stick, and I played a small role in its inception. The two filmmakers, who are friends of mine, had asked me to provide a supporting interview about Steck’s ascents. At the time, I knew him only in passing, though as a climber myself I felt qualified to put the immense psychological and physical demands of his solo ascents in perspective.
“Does he sleep?” I asked, rhetorically.
At the end of that interview, Rosen asked if I’d be willing to call Steck “the Swiss Machine” on camera. I thought it an apt description, and I went along with the gag.
By an odd quirk of fate, I ended up climbing with the Machine only six months later.
Sender Films planned to continue documenting Ueli’s adventures in the Himalayas the following spring, as he did a series of warm-up climbs with Italian alpinist Simone Moro before attempting a trilogy of 8,000-metre summits. Less than a month before departure, Moro had to drop out. Steck suggested we team up instead.
I had three weeks to train.
IN PERSON, Steck has straw-stock-blond hair and a gaptoothed grin. He is thin but gangly, both taller and longerlimbed than he may first appear, and he walks with a peculiar, pigeon-toed gait. Among strangers and new acquaintances, he smiles often and says little. He seems shy.
We rendezvoused in the Khumbu Valley in early March of 2011. Steck’s expedition strategy this time around derived from one of his mentors, the great Swiss alpinist Erhard Loretan. In 1990, Loretan, with fellow national Jean Troillet and Polish legend Wojciech Kurtyka, climbed back-to-back new routes on both Cho Oyu (the sixth-highest mountain in the world) and Shishapangma (the fourteenth-highest). Steck’s goal was to knock off both summits and then move on to Everest, a trifecta that had never before been accomplished in a single season.
Once you’ve acclimatized for one 8,000-metre peak, you might as well do more: so his thinking went. Although Steck would be approaching the three big peaks from Tibet, he had come to the Khumbu Valley first for a month of acclimatization before moving on to the windswept Tibetan plateau.
“There are no shortcuts to climbing above 8,000 metres,” Steck told me, one hand karate-chopping the air in a quick motion to accentuate the point. Steck often speaks in short declaratives and employs illustrative gestures. The more time you put in at moderate altitude, he explained—say, 4,000 or 5,000 metres—the stronger you will be. The Khumbu, with its pleasant Sherpa villages replete with German bakeries, juniper-scented guest houses, and intermittent Wi-Fi signals, made for a far more convivial environment to recover in between training climbs.
On a rest day in Namche, I watched as Ueli, clad in trailrunning gear and white wrap-around shades, left our hostel for a casual training run. He clattered down an alley past a few yaks and then took a left turn up the town’s endless, terraced flights of stone stairs, past a gang of western hikers labouring with oversized packs. The trail up the Khumbu Valley is probably the most popular trekking route in the Himalayas, a major physical endeavour in its own right for legions of mountain enthusiasts the world over. When people saw Steck coming up the path, easily jogging past them as they gasped for breath, whole cattle trains of tourists stopped to stare.
Steck enjoys the Khumbu for more than just its training environment. It reminds him of his own heritage—his home, the Jungfrau region of Switzerland, where he cut his teeth as a young alpinist and still pushes the limits. “You can do everything in my valley,” he says. “We have year-around sportclimbing; we have the Eiger.” The Jungfrau’s tightly bundled network of trains, roads, huts, and lifts provides seamless access to all manner of mountain terrain.
Although we held permits for two 6,000-metre peaks, our expedition had no base camp per se. We would stay in tea lodges along the main Everest trekking route, beginning each ascent by striking out directly in the early morning from a comfortable bed—a style not dissimilar to how one might embark upon a climb in the Alps.
Steck also made an unexpected pronouncement.
“If you do not stop this kind of solo climbing,” he told me, referring to his speed climbs in the Alps, “It will kill you. No question.” His hand chopped in another definitive gesture as he spoke. Ueli had resolved to step away from high-end soloing. His partner on all three 8,000-metre climbs would be Don Bowie, a Canadian-American with two 8,000-metre summits already to his credit, including K2.
Of course, “solo climbing” doesn’t kill anyone; soloists kill themselves. This, I realized as we prepared for our ascent, was the deeper conundrum Ueli faced: here he was, an elite-level athlete in the prime of his career—someone who had already achieved so much, such a highly specialized statement of physical excellence in the uncompromising face of death—gradually realizing that he could only reach his ultimate potential by sacrificing his life to the sport.
In short, Ueli Steck needed a vacation. He had come to the Himalayas that spring seeking new horizons. He sought to push his cardiovascular limits on the highest peaks on Earth; but he was not seeking the same level of mortal danger he’d faced on his speed ascents in the Alps.
There was one problem.
Alpine climbing is not black and white. It’s balancing one set of risks against another, a continuum of weighing a set of rewards against the likelihood of drawbacks should one fail. Whether tied into a rope or untethered, climbing alone or in the company of another, the danger in the situation hinges on the character of the participants rather than on the style of climbing they choose.
I STOP a thousand feet up Cholatse. We have been cruising, moving up casual grade II mixed terrain. Now, above us, a vertical passage looms. The frozen flow narrows to a single channel only a body-length wide; the colour of its surface changes subtly, from a de-saturated blue to an opaque white. I know I have reached my limit.
In fact, Ueli and I had discussed this precise set of circumstances—specifically, that we might reach a point in our climb where I’d feel unequipped to continue without a belay, yet might be sucked into following him into the void beyond.
“We will use the rope when you want, Freddie,” he had assured me.
I look at the pitch now facing me. It takes me less than two seconds to assure Ueli I am ready for the rope. His shoulders give a barely perceptible shrug. The rope comes out.
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bsp; There is no need to discuss who will lead, either. “You can film, I will lead,” Ueli had told me before the climb.
Ueli ties in and proceeds to sprint up the pitch. At the steep bit, where the angle tilts a few degrees and the colour changes imperceptibly, he pauses to grunt—and continues on, with nary a piece of protection between us. Sixty metres above me, Ueli runs out of rope and builds a belay.
The opaque white isn’t Styrofoam ice. It’s mashed potatoes—“snice,” compacted snow of nebulous consistency. You might find placements to bear a portion of your weight, but if your feet were to cut, your tools would not hold. I don’t second-guess my decision one bit.
“That was more tricky than I was expecting.” Ueli shrugs again at the top of the pitch.
He continues to lead; I continue to film.
A rope, like any tool, is only as effective as the user makes it. Steck seldom places more than two or three pieces of protection, which means that a fall would probably leave him badly maimed: a broken ankle at the least and perhaps much worse. This is par for the course in high-stakes alpine climbing. Even if one were inclined to take the time to stop and place more gear, the terrain itself affords scant opportunities. Legions of alpinists have sketched their way up similar passages; Steck himself had previously climbed this face, solo, in 2004. What struck me was how he moved without hesitation or doubt. He was unquestionably in the zone.
We gain height quickly, following a zigzag path across runnels of ice as a cloudy sky slowly wraps around us. We are more than halfway up the face when the first flakes begin to fall.
IT IS TEMPTING to attribute much of Ueli Steck’s temperament to his Swiss-German background—something he himself will allude to in good-natured fashion.
“You know, I am Swiss, so I like to wake up in bed, drink an espresso, go climbing, and return home on time for dinner,” he often jokes. His website states that he “emphasizes himself through his great self control.”
Yet even by the standards of his own culture, Steck is an intensely focused individual—the kind of person who naturally unwinds alone rather than socializing with other people. The more I got to know him, the more I realized he was not really shy but an unapologetic introvert, somebody quite comfortable in his own skin. One-on-one or with close friends, or when discussing matters of mutual interest, he is open, engaged, and friendly. Yet he has little tolerance for idle chitchat, the kind of superficial human interaction we Americans excel at.
“I’m not into a lot of ‘blah-blah-blah,’” he explains, one hand pantomiming a sock-puppet mouth opening, closing, and opening again. “I like to be alone, sometimes.”
Steck credits his family with his work ethic. The youngest of three boys, he compelled himself to keep up with his older siblings. “We grew up in this small Swiss town, and ice hockey was just the sport to do. . .” he reminisces. “My father was strict, but to play ice hockey, he was always fully behind us, my parents always supported us.” When Steck’s athletic imagination turned toward climbing, his dad had only one piece of advice. “He said, ‘I don’t care what you do, but I’m happy when you do something, and not just hang around. . . but I’ll tell you something: if you do a sport, you should try to do it as good as you can.’”
Steck did his mandatory service in the Swiss army, where a bit of a rebellious streak surfaced—he occasionally smuggled fresh bread and pastries to his unit when the opportunity presented itself. After finishing his time, he found work as a carpenter and climbed as often as possible. The noted Canadian climber Will Gadd remembers meeting him on a summer trip he made to the Canadian Rockies around 2002 and cheerfully recalls one near-miss Steck experienced while descending from a climb in the Bugaboos. “Ueli dropped his headlamp about fifty feet down into a bergschrund; unfortunately, Ueli was attached to his headlamp,” he told an audience at the 2009 Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival, “and he broke a few ribs. Stephen Holeczi, Josh Briggs, and one other climber ended up rescuing him, which they often point out.”
Soon after, Gadd and his wife Kim Csizmazia stayed with Ueli in Switzerland while competing in the 2001 World Ice Climbing Competition. “Ueli’s climbing results at that time were not impressive,” recounted Gadd, “but I have never seen anyone try so hard while training and climbing. He was already beating himself from normal metal into the iron of a superhero.”
Hard work, tempered with the occasional unexpected brush with death: these two themes pop up again and again in Steck’s athletic career.
In 2005, while making the first free-solo of Excalibur, a 5.10d rock climb in Switzerland, he arrived safely on the summit—only to find that the harness and rope he had stashed for the mandatory rappel descent had been ravaged by mice. Steck cobbled together enough uncompromised sections of rope to get off the mountain pillar alive. “We Swiss like to plan for everything, and this was not something I had planned for,” he told journalist Martin Gutmann at the time.
In 2007, he launched up the south face of Annapurna, hoping to solo the massive alpine face, one of Himalayan alpinism’s most fearsome challenges. Less than a thousand feet into the climb, an errant stone fell from the mountain above and struck him in the head. Steck came to at the base of the face, helmet smashed and body bruised but otherwise fine, having fallen an estimated 200 metres.
“It was important for me to understand whether I was pushing it too hard, or whether it had just come down to bad luck,” Steck later told journalist Tim Neville. “I decided in the end it was just bad luck.”
It was also in 2007 that Ueli redoubled his training. Indeed, there would be no room for unconsolidated snow, unexpected squalls, or bad luck in general on his next round of ascents. Speed alpinism, as he has freely acknowledged, is more a daring athletic performance—mountain as racecourse—than an act of throwing oneself at the unknown wilderness. “I have always considered myself an athlete rather than an adventurer,” he wrote on his blog.
In preparation for his Eiger speed rematch, for example, Ueli was coached by Simon Trachsel of the Swiss Olympic Medical Center through a year of intensive, periodized training. As his physical condition began to peak the following winter, he ruthlessly dropped weight from his frame to reach an optimal 141 pounds. Steck and Trachsel calculated he had a two-week window in which to make an attempt before his body would inevitably weaken.
Favourable conditions prevailed that season on the Eiger, but Steck knows all too well that this kind of luck will one day run out; hard work can only protect you for so long. Pierre Béghin, one of the greatest French alpinists of his day, was killed on the south face of Annapurna in 1992. Béghin’s young partner, Jean-Christophe Lafaille, survived to become a leading soloist himself, only to be lost and killed while attempting to solo Makalu in 2005. Tomaž Humar, a leading Slovenian soloist, died in 2009.
“When I look at Tomaž Humar, you know, he had his Dhaulagiri,” Steck says, referring to the Slovenian’s most notable achievement. “And after. . . he tried to keep up with that.”
AFTER TEN or more pitches of ascent, a 100-metre step of vertical climbing leads to the upper wall. The ice has sublimated away from the rock underneath: it’s hollow and vibrates like a steel drum with each swing of the axe. Ueli runs out of rope, but he’s in the midst of a long run-out, far from easy ground. The terrain affords no opportunities for reliable protection. I have no choice but to remove the anchor and begin climbing myself to generate slack for him to continue. We simul-climb for a hundred feet before he drills in a reliable ice screw and puts me on belay.
We’ve arrived at a fork in the road: the overhanging buttress looms directly overhead. Easier lines of escape ramp off to either side. The wispy contrails of a spindrift avalanche appear from the clouds above us. It’s already mid-afternoon, and we are both thinking the same thing.
“Straight, to the right, there are good pinnacles,” Ueli says, pointing at a corniced-topped fluting poking out of the murk above.
Our home for the night is a narrow ice ledge the size and s
hape of a sectional sofa. We hack into the slope with our tools in a vain attempt to make it flat. There’s enough room for us both to lie down, but we don’t trust the arrangement enough to untie from the rope. Two inches of snow has collected on my bag by the time the sun sets and the mountain plunges into darkness.
The snow has stopped when we wake the next morning, but soon after sunrise, clouds return to the face. We made it through the bivvy in relative comfort, but another night wouldn’t be much fun. Rappelling what we’ve already climbed wouldn’t be a good idea, either: there aren’t enough reliable cracks in the rock, nor is there enough solid water-ice from which to craft reliable anchors. Over instant coffee and granola bars we discuss the situation and our goal of climbing the direttissima shifts to making it up and over the mountain by the path of least resistance.
Ueli leads on, up a steep rib of unconsolidated snow and mixed steps. There’s barely any protection, but Ueli continues to fire. I belay and watch as he swims up a long patch of seventy-degree rotten snow, moving back and forth from one foot to the other like a prize fighter finding his rhythm. I’ve only experienced that kind of confidence on a handful of days myself, though I’ve seen it often in other partners. But normally, people get tired—you go all guns blazing to lead a few pitches of terrain, and then you bonk and let your partner take over. What’s striking about Ueli isn’t that he climbs at a notably higher standard than many of his peers, but that he is capable of maintaining such high performance for so long.
What’s truly impressive about Ueli, I realize, is that he’s always on.
We reach Cholatse’s 6,440-metre summit after six hours of climbing, and immediately we begin tromping toward our descent route, the southwest face, as fast as crampons will allow.
Rock, Paper, Fire Page 21
