Stephen Koch Attempts to Snowboard Everest

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Outside Magazine March 2004

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Facing the Fall Line
When Stephen Koch set out to snowboard the insanely steep Hornbein Couloir on Everest, he knew he might die trying. He chose life.

By Rob Buchanan


	Power grab; Stephen Koch carving turns at 21,000 feet on Everest's north face (Jimmy Chin)

"THE WHOLE TIME," big-mountain snowboarder Stephen Koch says of his latest expedition, "there's just this daunting mass above you."

Back home in Jackson, Wyoming, Koch, 35, is talking about the North Face of Everest, where he traveled last year hoping to complete his goal of snowboarding the highest mountain on each continent. (I wrote about his ambition in an Outside feature, "Slave to the Quest," in May 2003.) Although he took a consolation run down a lower section of Everest, Koch gave up the summit effort when he decided conditions were too dangerous. "That he used discretion and decided to turn around is a great victory," says Wade McKoy, a Jackson-based ski-and-mountaineering photographer. Koch's perspective: "You want to succeed, but you don't want to die."

Koch had set his sights on the direttissima, a never-been-done fall-line descent down the center of the North Face that involves two linked avalanche chutes: the steep, rock-walled Hornbein Couloir and the wider but equally vertiginous Japanese Couloir. He was determined to climb the 9,000-vertical-foot, 50- to 60-degree route in pure alpine style—fast, with no fixed ropes or bottled oxygen. To that end, he recruited just one other climber, Jimmy Chin, a 30-year-old Jackson-based photographer. In Kathmandu, Nepal, the team made a last-minute decision to hire Lakpa Dorge Sherpa, 40, and Kami Sherpa, 26, mountain guides with six Everest summits between them. The expedition's fifth member—30-year-old Eric Henderson, a backcountry skiing guide from Victor, Idaho—served as base-camp manager.

Arriving in Tibet in late August, Koch and Chin acclimatized by climbing and skiing Changzheng, Everest's 24,890-foot neighbor. After dark on August 30, the four climbers began what Koch envisioned as a single 36-hour push to the highest summit on earth, climbing at night to minimize avalanche danger and resting by day in a sun-warmed tent.

But sloppy snow on the steep slopes slowed their progress, and at 1:30 a.m., just as the climbers reached the foot of the Japanese Couloir, they heard what Koch describes as "a noise like a car accident," followed by a terrifying rumble. Above them, a giant serac—a hanging block of glacial ice—had collapsed and was tumbling down the couloir. The debris missed the team by only a few yards, coming so close that the air blast threw Chin to the end of his rope and sent his pack and ski poles skittering 200 feet down the glacier. Rattled and behind schedule, the climbers turned back.

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Contributing editor Rob Buchanan wrote about Antarctica in November 2001.

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