When the sad news reached me this morning that Ueli Steck, probably the most accomplished mountaineer of his generation, had died near Mt. Everest, I was surprised to hear that he had returned to a place he disdained for its crowds and its bitter base-camp politics. Steck was forty. He reportedly fell on Nuptse, an adjacent peak, which he was climbing in order to acclimatize to the altitude. He was in Nepal for another attempt at a route—one connecting the summits of Everest and Lhotse—that he’d had to abandon in 2013, after being attacked by Sherpas.
He and his climbing partner that year, the Italian Simone Moro, had got into a dispute with a group of Sherpas who were fixing ropes on the Lhotse Face and felt that the climbers were endangering them. Moro called one of them a “motherfucker” in Nepali, a grave insult. A group of Sherpas later attacked Steck and Moro with rocks, at Camp 2. The climbers, convinced that their lives were in danger, fled down the Khumbu Icefall.
Many armchair observers, including me, tried to parse this incident, but, in the final accounting, I think it’s safe to say that Steck was not the cultural imperialist that some critics (including the Swiss papers) made him out to be. But he was certainly hardheaded and single-minded, to the point of being relatively heedless of the opinions of others, be they Sherpa or Swiss. He was an extraordinarily fit and talented alpine athlete, a bit of a freak, really. He didn’t love his nickname—the Swiss Machine—but it suited him.
Steck achieved fame, first, for his record speed climbs of the great north faces of the Alps, most notably the Eiger. His bewildering solo ascent, in the fall of 2013, of the south face of Annapurna, perhaps the greatest challenge in mountaineering, was a kind of a career capstone. The accomplishment was dogged, though, by doubters who undertook meticulous forensic investigations into the veracity of his claim that he’d made it to the top. I struggled with these allegations. The case against him could be persuasive, but it was impossible to prove, and it was hard for me to imagine the Steck whom I’d gotten to know perpetrating such a fraud. His obduracy seemed to leave no room for dishonesty. Mountaineers can be a competitive and jealous lot. As a climbing partner of his wrote to me once, in a dismissal of the skeptics, “Climbers I find are assholes at the end of the day!”
On a visit to New York a few years ago (he ran in the marathon and then joined me for a first ascent of One World Trade Center, via the stairwell route), he said that his new mantra was “Slow down and stay alive.” The risks that he’d taken on Annapurna had frightened him, and it seemed, as he approached forty, that he was moving on to more bespoke projects. The last time I saw him, in March, 2015, at a pizzeria in his home town of Interlaken, Switzerland, he was working out the logistics of an astonishing mission to climb all eighty-two of the peaks in the Alps higher than four thousand metres, without using any kind of motorized transport. That summer, he pulled it off in just sixty-two days, travelling between the peaks by foot, bicycle, and paraglider. This had a kind of elegance that seemed to preclude the more brutish ambitions of Everest.
But just as he’d returned to Annapurna in 2013, after two earlier failed attempts, so he was drawn back to Everest. Earlier this month, on his Web site, he tried to explain his reasons for giving it another go:
The lightness of being runs up against the weight of the odds. Last year, while attempting a new route up Shishapangma, in Tibet, Steck and a partner discovered the bodies of Alex Lowe, the American climber, and David Bridges, a photographer from Aspen, who had both been buried in an avalanche there in 1999. Lowe, who was widely considered to be the best mountaineer of his generation, was also forty when he died. Steck and Lowe are now forever linked, in the alpinists’ circle of death. Steck’s demise is a reminder, as though another one were ever necessary, that mountain climbing is an extremely perilous endeavor, and that even its strongest and most talented practitioners, experts by necessity in the art of risk assessment, need a great deal of luck to make it to old age.