Downhill Skiing/Snowboarding in Nepal - Slave to the Quest (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine May 2003

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Slave to the Quest (Cont.)


	One way down: Koch plots his Everest finale on Jackson Hole's Rendezvous Peak in January. (Jeff Riedel)

ONE DAY IN THE LATE 1980s, Jackson photographer Wade McKoy was shooting at Corbett's Couloir, the dramatically corniced chute near the top of Jackson Hole, when Koch showed up. "This kid on a snowboard told me he was going to air it and could I take a few pictures," McKoy recalls. "I didn't see him again for months, until one day he came up to me and said, ÔHey, I saw my picture in TransWorld Snowboarding, but not my name.' I said, ÔThat's because I didn't know it.' And he was like ÔWell, that's not good.' "

It's not hard to trace Koch's "powerful need for attention," as he puts it, to his childhood. Koch grew up in San Diego, the fourth of five children of an aerospace engineer—his dad designed rocket wings for General Dynamics—and "a very religious mom," a devout Catholic who sometimes organizes prayer support meetings when her son goes on an expedition. Seven years younger than his twin brothers and three years younger than his sister, Stephen often felt the kid brother's sense that he was missing out on the action. A natural athlete, he made up for it by showboating in his favorite sports: skateboarding and surfing.

There's a tradition of contemplative public service in the Koch family: One of the Koch twins is now a Benedictine monk in California; Stephen's sister, who lives in Oregon, counsels compulsive gamblers; and his younger brother did a stint with Teach for America. Koch himself might have wound up a doctor—he sometimes supplements his paltry guiding income by working as a freelance masseuse—if he hadn't been such a disaster in the classroom: "Hyperactive, the class clown, with ADD and all the rest of it," he says.

When Koch was 12, his family moved to Denver, where he became a proficient mogul skier, and then on to Boston midway through high school. "The thing about my family is that we were just so conformist," Koch says. "There was no model—not even any aunts or uncles—for living a different life."

In 1987, fresh out of high school and with no particular plans for college, Koch bought a one-way plane ticket to Jackson, where the idea was to learn how to snowboard and to benefit from Wyoming's legal drinking age of 19. He got a job baking cookies in Jackson Hole's cafeteria, thus obtaining a season ski pass, and took a snowboarding lesson the first day the mountain was open. "That was it," says Koch. "I picked it up instantly."

"He was just a punk—a partying snowboarder," recalls Tom Turiano, 36, a mountain guide who first got Koch interested in going off-piste. In June 1989, with just two seasons—but more than 200 days—of snowboarding under his belt, Koch set out to climb 13,770-foot Grand Teton with Turiano, hoping to become the first to snowboard it. "I had virtually no climbing experience," Koch says. "I'd never roped up in the mountains before, and I barely knew how to self-arrest." At first he lagged behind, tired and nervous. "When we got up on the east face," he says, "I got a big second wind and took over breaking the trail. We started down and did two rappels in the Stettner Couloir, and I was like ÔWhy am I doing this? This is turnable terrain.' I climbed back up and put the board back on."

"After that, he was the shit," Turiano recalls. "He was on the cover of both newspapers, everyone loved him, he made a lot of friends."

That fall, Koch moved to Chamonix, France, curious to see the legendary valley surrounded by "the equivalent of 15 Grand Tetons," as one Jackson climber put it. He washed dishes, modeled skiwear for a Swedish photographer, bought a valley ski pass, and found an Aussie girlfriend. "Chamonix was the sixties for me," he says. In terms of mountaineering, it was grad school. Koch saw the exploits of his French counterparts—legendary extremistes like Bruno Gouvy, Jean-Marc Boivin, and Patrick Vallencant—up close and did several climbs with another French standout, snowboarder Alain Moroni. "I realized that a lot of people in Chamonix were making a living doing this stuff," Koch says. "They were known to the general public; they were in the press. I was like 'OK, it's possible to make this happen.' "

"I remember going into a bar with Stephen and watching this film of Gouvy jumping off a helicopter onto the tip of the Dru, snowboarding it, and then breaking out his paraglider and flying down to the valley," recalls Greg Von Doersten, 39, a Jackson photographer who visited Koch in Chamonix. "It was superhero stuff—that whole idea of enchainement, of hopping off one thing and flying to the next. If you saw that and you were young and ambitious, you had to say, 'Wow, the possibilities are limitless.' "

As long as you stayed alive. While snowboarding alone, Koch had several very close calls. Then one day he heard that the great Gouvy himself, clad in his skintight Marlboro speed suit, had hopped out of a helicopter atop the Aiguille Verte, taken a couple of crisp practice turns above the Whymper Couloir, and promptly lost his edge and tumbled 3,000 feet to his death.

"Gouvy once said something about the grass being greener, the sky bluer, after one of these descents," says Von Doersten. "But you looked at him and you had to think, ÔOK, but you also started this machine that you couldn't stop.' "

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