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.)

FROM THE TETON CANYON trailhead, it's about three miles to the ice formations Koch wants to climb. They don't look too hairy at first, just some ragged drips coming over the edge of a small cliff band. But 20 minutes later, standing right under them, they're suddenly formidable: thin sheets of dimpled ice hanging from the rock like crumpled paper.

As the rest of us—a local dentist and a civil engineer, both bike-racing pals of Koch, and I—slowly gear up, our leader stamps his feet in excitement. "The ice is perfect—so gooey," he says. "This is gonna be so cool." It's all Koch can do to contain himself—and a minute later, he can't. "God, I love myself!" he yells.

Everybody laughs. Where did that come from? But it's classic Koch—narcissistic, perhaps, but also totally unpredictable, and refreshingly incorrect.

Moving powerfully, Koch levers his way up the biggest piece of ice, then turns his attention to a problem that looks truly "interesting": a fanglike frozen waterfall 30 feet high that tapers to a column no thicker than his own thigh. Later, he tries another, trickier approach, via an overhanging shelf of rock and ice. He's halfway across, hanging tenuously by one arm, when a suitcase-size chunk of ice collapses onto his shoulder. It's an Incredible Hulk sort of moment—only a sudden burst of inhuman power is going to keep him from falling. Koch sends a bellowed obscenity ringing across the canyon, shrugs off the ice block, and then swings his free arm high overhead, hoping for a good stick. He gets it and, with one more shout, pulls himself over the lip.

"Well, that was exciting," he says, his voice calm again.

All things considered, it's a good first day back. "The knee is good," Koch says as we get into the truck for the drive back to Jackson. "I think I can start getting back on the snowboard."

Still, it's a long way from Teton Canyon to the North Face of Everest. The immediate issue is money. "We don't have the cash to foot the bill for an Everest trip, and I don't think any other companies in the industry do either," says Scott Hinton of Petzl, one of Koch's main gear suppliers. "I think he'll either have to do this really cheaply, which basically means on his own, or get some big sponsor, like a Red Bull, a Pepsi, or an MSN, which means sat phones and that crazy stuff."

But when I see Koch in New York in early February, he insists he's not worried about sponsors. He's in town to talk to agents and film producers. The amount of money being discussed, Koch says, makes his original $180,000 budget (for a team of four climbers and two cameramen) seem almost laughably unambitious. " 'I can get you $250,000 for the trip right now, and another $750,000 for post-production,'" Koch says one producer told him.

Apart from financing, there is one other obstacle: the Hornbein itself. "It's very hard to find the right conditions," says Dominique Perret, a Swiss freeskier who, along with Swiss snowboard mountaineer Jean Troillet, tried to climb and ski the couloir in 1996 and hopes to return for another bid in 2004. "The monsoon is an unsettled time when there are a lot of systems coming through. After a storm, you need a day of good weather for the mountain to clear itself—for the loose snow to slide off—and then two more days to make the climb, at least."

Koch has never been above 26,000 feet, which he reached on Lhotse. He also has a history of poor circulation in his toes—an annoyance on most mountains but a potentially lethal handicap for an Everest snowboarder. And then there's the sheer drudgery of postholing up 10,000 vertical feet. "Technical climbing is always interesting, because you're trying to find the route," says Prezelj. "But this is just snow. You need a very strong motivation."

So what is Koch's motivation? Ask him and he shrugs. "It's just the line, man," he says. "Any skier will tell you that—the best line on the highest mountain in the world." OK, but why all the added hurdles—no oxygen, no Sherpas, the insistence on a one-push alpine-style ascent? Tellingly, the answer is a climber's, not a snowboarder's. "Because style matters," Koch says. "Most people never think about style on Everest, but they should."

It's a pretty good clue to how Koch has wound up in the delicate position he's in. A wiser head, of course, might simply abandon the project. (Nearing the end of his own famous quest, Ed Viesturs, the American mountaineer who has successfully climbed 12 of the world's 14 8,000-meter peaks, continues to maintain he'd rather be careful than triumphant.) But sitting on a friend's couch in New York, Koch doesn't want to hear about Viesturs or anybody else with the courage to walk away from his dream.

"Listen," he says, sinking back in his seat, "I just want to do this, and then I wanna be free." He takes a deep breath. "I can't wait to be free."

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