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.)


	"I just want to swing 'em": Koch in full quest mode at Jackson Lake, in Grand Teton National Park, not far from the site of his near-fatal avalanche accident in 1998 (Jeff Riedel)

IT'S 5:30 IN THE MORNING, and the floor of Koch's otherwise tidy living room is a sea of gear: ropes, slings of climbing hardware, axes and crampons, headlamps, batteries, and little packets of Gu. Five minutes later, it has all disappeared into a small daypack. Fifteen minutes after that, having heaved a snowmobile into the back of a friend's pickup truck, we're rolling west out of Jackson toward Teton Pass and the Idaho state line.

Koch had ligament surgery in October, his fourth procedure on the right knee and his sixth overall—the lingering legacy of Mount Owen. Today, nine weeks later, is a big test: his first day of ice climbing. Koch's knee is still volleyball-sized, but if he's worried, he doesn't show it. "Check this out," he says, grabbing his lower leg and pulling back on it. It travels a good inch rearward in the socket before stopping with an alarming clunk. "That's the PCL, the posterior cruciate ligament. Not really there anymore. But this way"—he pushes his leg side to side—"this is what I care about, and it's pretty good."

So why is Koch still determined to snowboard the Hornbein? "It's just the line, man," he says. "Any skier will tell you that—the best line on the highest mountain in the world."

When Koch talks about Mount Owen, he tends to emphasize the positive. The accident, he says, was a "giant wake-up call" that set him on a new path. "Too much to do," he told the Jackson Hole News from his hospital bed a week after the accident. "People to love. Babies to have. It's a sign I've got more work to do on this earth—helping others, especially, since I've been helped so much."

Spend some time with Koch, however, and you begin to suspect that the opposite is true—that his life hasn't changed at all. On the expedition to Peru, in 1999, we'd teased Koch for what he called his "homework": a book his first serious girlfriend since Hill, Tina Flowers, had given him, called Getting the Love You Want. Koch dutifully read it, and on his return to Jackson even got engaged to Flowers, an athletic, outgoing woman with a successful housecleaning and housesitting business. Then things fell apart. "I don't really know why," Koch says. He sighs, then hastens to smooth things over. "But it's good. We're still friends."

"Basically, it was a major decision to go with his career over wife and family," says Tom Turiano. "But deep down he wants a family, and he knows he blew it with Tina."

If Koch has found any comfort since Mount Owen, it's been in his climbing—a sport he's approached in a different way from his snowboarding. In Peru, the team was shocked and dismayed when Koch quit the expedition before we had even approached our main objective, a ski and snowboard descent of the West Rib of Huascaran—an act that, at the time, seemed monumentally selfish. But in retrospect, Koch's lame-sounding explanation—"I just want to swing 'em," he said, miming the action of his ice axes, "and not carry the board all over the place"—may well have been genuine. Over the years, and in between his Seven Summits expeditions, he's racked up a fairly impressive list of ascents, most notably the last of the three Alaska routes he did with Marko Prezelj—a 48-hour, nonstop push up an unclimbed rib on the southwest face of Mount McKinley.

"I think Stephen has made a natural evolution to alpinism, to making the full commitment," says Jack Tackle. "I'd like to see him evolve to the point where he could just decide what's important to him. My sense is, it's not snowboarding."

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