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.)


	Total commitment: Koch makes his pioneering descent of Talk Is Cheap, March 1, 1995. (Jeff Riedel)

KOCH LEFT CHAMONIX in the fall of 1990 and, except for one glamorous hiatus, has lived in Jackson ever since. His current residence is a two-story condominium on a quiet street corner, equidistant from the brew pub and Snow King, the local ski hill. It's a comfortable place, but he doesn't own it; unlike many of his contemporaries, he missed out on the real estate boom of the early and mid-nineties. Though he professes to be happy with the mountain-bachelor lifestyle—a dependable 18-year-old Toyota pickup, a garage stacked with gear, a few bottles of wine in the rack—he's always looking for the next big opportunity.

In 1995, one of Koch's Exum clients offered to introduce him to Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone and Men's Journal, who was vacationing in Sun Valley, Idaho. "He went up there and hung out with Jann for the weekend," says Wade McKoy, who has been on four of Koch's Seven Summits expeditions, "and the next thing you know, Men's Journal is helping pay for our Denali trip."

With the Alaska trip scheduled for June 1996, Koch went off to Nepal that spring on a wildly audacious project: a climb of 27,923-foot Lhotse, Everest's slightly shorter but much steeper neighbor. Since Lhotse shares a base camp with Everest, Koch brought his snowboard, thinking that if things went well, he might sneak onto Everest sans permit and "poach" a first descent.

His first day in camp, a teammate introduced him to New York-based climber Sandy Hill Pittman, who had recently separated from her husband, media executive Robert Pittman. (They divorced in 1997.) She was there to climb Everest with a guided group from Mountain Madness. The two had spoken previously on the phone—Koch had called Pittman, who was pursuing her own Seven Summits quest, for logistical information—but this was their first face-to-face meeting. They got to know each other as part of a group of climbers bonding over a bottle of Jack Daniels, Koch recalls, and subsequently began a romantic relationship.

It was a relationship that was soon overshadowed, first by the events of May 10, 1996, when eight Everest climbers and guides perished—including Scott Fischer, the guide for Mountain Madness—and then by the controversies and recrimination that followed. In Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer's chronicle of the Everest disaster, Pittman is introduced as "a millionaire socialite-cum-climber" and a "shameless" publicity seeker. "Fairly or unfairly," Krakauer wrote, "to her derogators, Pittman epitomized all that was reprehensible about [the] popularization of the Seven Summits and the ensuing debasement of the world's highest mountain." To Koch, the criticism of Pittman was unfair and disproportionate—"as if she invented the idea of guided climbing," he says scornfully.

On Lhotse, Koch made it to nearly 26,000 feet—Camp 4—before being stopped by exhaustion and dehydration. He was descending the mountain when the big storm hit Everest. Once back in the United States, he escaped to Mount McKinley to collect the third of his snowboarding summits. Afterward, Pittman invited him to New York to be her houseguest, and Koch wound up staying more than a year and a half.

"Stephen offered me tremendous support after 1996," Hill, who has since remarried and now goes by her maiden name, wrote me in an e-mail. "He had been there, and he knew what had really happened and that so much of what was written following was exaggerated and fabricated to sell books, magazines, and movies."

One of Koch's reasons for moving to New York was to find backing for his Seven Summits Snowboarding Quest, but his efforts failed to produce the funding he sought. "If all the media frenzy of 1996 hadn't happened, he probably would've found sponsors for his Everest trip then," Hill wrote in her e-mail, "but I remember people telling him, ÔOh, Everest—that's an old story already . . . everyone's doing it now,' as though what Stephen had in mind could be pulled off by some weekend snowboarding teenager."

Nevertheless, Koch stayed in New York, telling himself a gym was a gym—he could train for big peaks anywhere. In the climbing world he became known as "someone who can hang in high society," as he puts it. But he did pull off one successful expedition during his New York sojourn: In January 1997, he, Wade McKoy, and climber Scott Backes went to Kilimanjaro to attempt the highly technical Hein Glacier route. "I was in the best shape ever," Koch says. "We did a new ice route on the way up and just killed it." Not long afterward, Koch's relationship with Hill ended, and he returned to Wyoming.

Back in Jackson, Koch began focusing on another long-dreamed-of objective, the Northeast Snowfields of 12,922-foot Mount Owen in Grand Teton National Park. Early one morning in April 1998, he made his bid. "It's a beautiful big face and a gorgeous line, and that's really all I was thinking about," he says. "I didn't have a turnaround time, didn't realize how warm a day it was—I had blinders on." Koch heard the roar of the avalanche a few seconds before it hit him, but there was nowhere to shelter. It swept him some 2,000 vertical feet, hurtling him over several cliff bands, breaking his back, lacerating his liver, tearing the ligaments in one knee and completely dislocating the other. Miraculously, he wasn't buried. Sliding on one hip, his other leg flopping uselessly, he worked his way downhill to a relatively secure spot, then spent the night waiting for rescue in his warmest garment—a long underwear top. A friend alerted park rangers that Koch was missing, but it wasn't until the next morning, 23 hours after his accident, that a rescue helicopter found him.

Being Sandy Hill's boyfriend hadn't helped Koch's credibility in the mountaineering world. The accident on Mount Owen seemed to confirm his dilettantism. "It led to a lot of skepticism about Stephen in the local climbing community," recalls Angus Thuermer, a climber and the editor of Jackson Hole News at the time. "It was a pretty elementary mistake. But I'll say this: I'm not sure anybody else would have survived."

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