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Outside Magazine May 2003

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Slave to the Quest
Ten years ago, extreme snowboarder Stephen Koch cooked up a media-savvy plan to become the first to climb and ride down the Seven Summits. Now there's only one mountain left to conquer: Everest. And for his grand finale, Koch is determined to fling himself down the most dangerous descent possible.

By Rob Buchanan


	Stephen Koch at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, January 5, 2003(Jeff Riedel)

One winter night in 1995, in a crowded Jackson, Wyoming, bar, Stephen Koch ran into a friend who, like many of his friends, was also something of a rival—a fellow player in the rarefied, hyperdangerous sport of ski and snowboard mountaineering. Over a pitcher of beer, the two made a curious discovery: Both had quietly been eyeing the same virgin line, a finger of snow snaking precipitously down the northeast ridge of Wyoming's 10,267-foot Cody Peak. The route had all the right stuff: It was narrow, scary-steep, and ended abruptly at a 350-foot cliff. Better yet, it was plainly visible from the base of nearby Jackson Hole Mountain Resort—and whoever got down it first would not be toiling in obscurity.

The way Koch tells the story, his friend made a bold announcement on his way out of the bar. He was, he said, going to ski the route first thing in the morning. Koch, who at the time was earning a living busing breakfast tables at Jackson Hole's Alpenhof Lodge, could only nod and feign a smile. "Great," he said. "When I get off work I'll come check out your tracks."

"I wonder if he feels like he's pounded himself into a corner and needs to get this out of the way so he can say he did it," says Jack Tackle, a fellow Exum climbing guide. "Which isn't the best place to be, psychologically, on a project of that scale."

It was noon the next day by the time Koch and a photographer pal made it to the summit of Cody after a 45-minute climb from the top of the ski area. To their delight, the northeast ridge was untracked. Wasting no time, Koch clipped into his snowboard, cinched the leashes of his ice axes, and dropped in. At the cliff band, he pulled out a rope and made a short, tricky rappel into an adjacent couloir, then put his board back on and finished the 4,000-vertical-foot run in style. It was an elegant first descent—Koch's tenth in the Tetons—and by the time he got back to town he'd come up with a name for it: Talk Is Cheap, a not entirely playful jab at his rival. In the supremely macho game of getting there first, Koch seemed to be saying, there was no room for spewing—your tracks either were there or they weren't.

It's one thing to spout fiery credos as a youth, but it's quite another thing to live by them forever after. And that, in a nutshell, is the dilemma of Stephen Koch.

Ten years ago, with a good deal of fanfare (and the subsequent collaboration of just about everybody in the adventure-sports press), a brash 24-year-old Koch announced his Seven Summits Snowboarding Quest—a bid to snowboard the highest peak on each continent. "I realized it was something sponsors and the media could understand," says Koch, now 34. "Plus it seemed like a pretty good way to see the world." Had things gone according to plan—he originally envisioned a three- or four-year time frame for the project—his quest would be a colorful footnote to the history of 20th-century mountaineering.

But in the mountains, things rarely go the way you want them to. There were technical glitches—on Koch's first visit to Alaska's 20,320-foot Mount McKinley, in 1993, a problem with his bindings made turning on steep, hard snow impossible, and he took a serious slide on a warm-up run above base camp. A bigger problem was the fickle public. Even though interest in mountaineering exploded after the Everest debacle of May 1996, Koch's quest, with its focus on other, more obscure peaks, never quite caught on, and his sponsors, who at one time included such industry powerhouses as The North Face and Burton Snowboards, gradually drifted away. By the end of 1997, Koch had collected only four of the Seven Summits: South America's 22,834-foot Aconcagua, Europe's 18,510-foot Elbrus, Africa's 19,340-foot Kilimanjaro, and McKinley.

More significantly, Koch himself was changing. Though he'd originally wanted to get to the tops of peaks merely to ride down them, he found himself increasingly drawn to "pure" alpinism—so much so that today, he admits, he prefers climbing to snowboarding. That's Koch you saw on the cover of the 2002 American Alpine Journal, leading a delicate traverse on the Mini-Moonflower Buttress of Alaska's Mount Hunter—one of a trio of extraordinarily difficult rock-and-ice routes that he and Slovenian climbing partner Marko Prezelj completed in June 2001. (The two were nominated for the Piolet d'Or award, the climbing world's equivalent of an Oscar, for the last of the climbs, a route on McKinley's southwest face they dubbed Light Traveler.)

Yet for all his success in this new arena, Koch the snowboarder has soldiered on, goaded, he says, by one overarching fear. "I've been talking smack about this thing for ten years," he explains. "I need to finish what I set out to do. I'd feel like an idiot if I didn't." Despite a near-fatal avalanche accident in the Tetons in April 1998, Koch knocked off two more of the remaining three summits: Antarctica's 16,067-foot Vinson Massif, in December 1999, and, in February 2001, Irian Jaya's Carstensz Pyramid, at 16,023 feet the highest point in Oceania (and 8,700 feet higher than Australia's tallest mountain).

It was never Koch's intention to leave the toughest challenge—Mount Everest—for last. He was none too pleased when, in October 2000, Slovenian alpinist Davo Karnicar retraced the standard south-side climbing route from summit to Base Camp without removing his skis—the first unbroken descent of Everest. Ditto the following spring, when young French snowboarder Marco Siffredi pulled off an even more impressive feat, dropping off the summit onto the mountain's precipitous North Face before traversing out to regain the North Col.

Now that Everest has been skied or snowboarded from both sides, what once loomed as a glorious finale to Koch's quest is no more. Or is it? What Koch wants to do—or has persuaded himself that he has to do—is not to merely snowboard the peak. Late this summer, he will attempt to climb and ride its steepest and most terrifying route, the Hornbein Couloir, an avalanche chute that plummets nearly 10,000 feet straight down the middle of Everest's North Face, on the Tibetan side of the mountain.

How dangerous is the Hornbein? To date, only one man has tried to descend it on skis or a snowboard: Siffredi, who returned to Everest in September 2002 in hopes of picking off the mountain's ultimate plum. According to the Sherpas who helped the Frenchman carry his board to the summit on September 8, the 23-year-old was relaxed, rested, and carrying a full cylinder of oxygen when he dropped off the lip and began his descent. He was never seen again.

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Contributing editor Rob Buchanan wrote about Antarctica in November 2001.

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