The Best American Sports Writing 2014(107)

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.

At any rate, the argument with the fixing team was one that Steck was willing to take some blame for. “What happened on the Lhotse Face—we can discuss this, what was wrong, what was right. No problem. But what happened at Camp 2, this was unacceptable. Even if we made a big mistake, it’s no reason to try to kill three people.”

Steck seemed changed from when I’d seen him in March. He was subdued, speaking almost in a whisper, with an air of bafflement. Since the Camp 2 incident, he’d had a persistent headache. He was hardly sleeping, and when he did he had nightmares, which he’d never had in the past. “I’m fucked, eh?” he said. “Now I have to fix myself. I will seek professional help.”