Climber Viesturs scales down lofty career

SEATTLE — For many elite mountain climbers, only one thing has proven tougher than struggling to the top of the world’s highest and deadliest peaks: simply walking away from them.

Not just until the next climbing season. For good.

The inner pull that lures mountaineers, time and again, into the cruel ice, wind and thin air of the Himalayas apparently has no off switch. Take a look at the alpine world’s who’s-who list and do the math: It’s haunted by as many ghosts as survivors.

Which is why last month, on the 10th anniversary of the deadly 1996 “Into Thin Air” disaster on Mount Everest, Ed Viesturs took time out to feel, for the first time in nearly two decades, the fresh spring grass between his toes.

And to feel fortunate to be alive.

“It’s kind of weird being here,” says a semi-retired Viesturs, 46, who in May 2005 completed his life’s quest by climbing Annapurna, the last of 14 mountains taller than 8,000 meters he had climbed without using bottled oxygen. “I can see the flowers blooming, the grass growing. I can go on Easter egg hunts. It’s all stuff I’m normally gone for.”

Gone, as in two months into an expedition somewhere on that arching, inhospitable spine of Asia.

It’s a novel experience for Viesturs, the only American on the list of about a dozen climbers who have completed the big 14 — and one of only five humans to do so without using bottled oxygen. It is, in fact, the first time in 19 years that Viesturs, a married father of three who lives on Bainbridge Island, has seen the rhododendrons bloom around Puget Sound.

This summer he will be back on Mount Rainier, where he got his mountaineering start, guiding trips with friends and clients at Rainier Mountaineering.

Viesturs is also an in-demand public speaker — both to climbing fans and, increasingly, to corporations..

“It’s not like I’m sitting around twiddling my thumbs,” he says with a laugh.

But it is difficult, at least on occasions such as the anniversary of the Everest disaster, to not think about how it all could have been different. Viesturs watched helplessly from base camp that day as a storm killed eight climbers, including Seattle mountaineering great Scott Fischer and fellow guide Rob Hall of New Zealand, both close friends of Viesturs.

When that Everest storm cleared, Viesturs was the first climber to reach his dead friends. He pushed on to the summit, to make a point and to honor his fallen comrades — two of a half-dozen friends, acquaintances or former climbing partners still up there somewhere in the Himalaya, frozen in time.

“In retrospect, I’m so happy to be here at home, standing in the grass, and alive,” he says.

“I somehow got away with it,” Viesturs says of his own storied climbing career. “I think I figured out how to manage the risk.”

Viesturs survived by combining legendary lungs and legs that could keep churning when others faltered with a sharp mind that possessed a rare, innate sense of when to turn back when a mountain didn’t feel right.

“There’s so many things that can go wrong up there; it’s amazing when nothing does,” he says.

Immediately after Viesturs, on his third attempt, claimed Annapurna with Gustafsson last May, Christian Kutner — a 42-year-old Italian climber also seeking to complete the fabled 14 summits — was killed by falling ice on the exact route and in the exact place Viesturs had stood only a week earlier.

And in late January, Viesturs’ friend and another talented climbing partner, Jean-Christophe Lafaille, 40, of France, disappeared high on the summit of Makalu during a daring winter solo attempt on the world’s fifth-highest mountain.

All of this has been fresh on Viesturs’ mind in recent months: He has been working with writer David Roberts on an autobiography, due out in the fall.

He says he’s happier writing about life-and-death encounters than experiencing them. But he admits that when March rolled around, his body felt the itch to travel.

“I kept thinking, `Man, I should go somewhere!’ ” he recalls.

A couple of expeditions already are vying for his expert services next spring on Everest — which, for a climber with his experience (six times on the summit), is a relatively safe mountain for Viesturs. He says he’s mulling it over.

Don’t be surprised to see him there. You can take a guy out of the thin air. But you never take the thin air out of his blood.