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Mountaineering: It Came from Rockford

High-altitude mutant Ed Viesturs’s careful assault on the top of the world
By Andrew Tilin

“It was all about putting another deposit in the Karma National
Bank,” says Ed Viesturs about his 1992 climb of K2, the
world’s second-highest peak.

A Seattle-based alpinist who specializes in the world’s biggest mountains, Viesturs
had been waiting out stormy weather in his tent at Camp
3 when he got a radio call from a teammate who
was exhausted and snow-blind and needed help off the mountain. He
obliged, trudging up a thousand feet to the victim and escorting
her 9,000 feet down to base camp. Then came the remarkable
part. Having already spent several brain-swelling days above 24,000 feet and
taken a dicey ride on an avalanche, Viesturs turned around and
headed up to the summit of the world’s deadliest mountain.

Such Herculean feats at heights better suited for jet travel are
business as usual for Viesturs, who over the last decade has
distinguished himself as arguably the world’s busiest and most reliable mountaineer,
if not its most daring. “I just take it steady,” he
says, with trademark understatement. So far, the slight, perpetually suntanned 36-year-old
has climbed Everest three times and–perhaps more astonishing–stood atop nine of
the world’s 14 peaks that measure 8,000 meters or higher. He
will depart for the Himalayas again this month to lead a
film crew up Everest before trying for his tenth 8,000-meter peak,
eastern Nepal’s 26,760-foot Manaslu. By the end of the century, if
all goes as planned, Viesturs will become the first American to
have climbed all 14. So why, relatively speaking, is he such
an unknown?

What he does is “boring,” says Reinhold Messner, a boyhood idol
of Viesturs and the first person to climb all the 8,000-meter
peaks. A few other top mountaineers guardedly agree, saying Viesturs rarely
puts up new routes, opting instead for well-worn lines that offer
better odds for success. “If your point is to get the
top, then you might as well take the easy way, if
there is such a thing,” says Scott Fischer, a fellow guide
who was on K2 with Viesturs. There’s also the helicopter factor.
Viesturs has been known to zoom from one big mountain to
the next, forgoing the long slog into base camp to maintain
his conditioning and acclimatization. The hit-and-run approach rankles a few in
the climbing community. “I’m not one to criticize anyone’s style,” says
Alex Lowe, whom many consider to be America’s finest and purest
all-around alpinist. “But I know a few people who could do
what Ed’s doing.”

Perhaps–but there are reasons Viesturs is so prolific. Because of his
conservative ways and friendly guy-next-door demeanor, sponsors line up to pay
his bills, including those for the expensive helicopter jaunts. “He’s reliable
when other climbers aren’t,” explains Paige Springer, marketing director for Mountain
Hardwear, one of Viesturs’s sponsors. “You can bank that he’s going
to come back alive, and there’s a good chance he’ll have
summited.” In other words, while some climbers enter the market whenever
they need someone to pay for their next extreme vacation, Viesturs
looks for long-term relationships to keep his 8,000-meter dream alive. “There
are no free lunches anymore in the sport of climbing–nobody’s willing
to send out a bunch of packs and not hear from
you again,” says Viesturs. “The climber-sponsor relationship needs constant nurturing.”

Viesturs’s planned expedition this month, his eighth trip to Everest, is
something of a publicist’s dream, with an IMAX film crew tagging
along to make a documentary that’s slated to appear in museums
and other giant-screen venues nationwide in 1997. Viesturs, of course, will
play the familiar role of the likable and utterly competent mountain
guide. But Everest is just a warm-up. Once Viesturs returns to
base camp, he’ll hop aboard a helicopter and touch down near
the Manaslu base camp. (Watch for Viesturs’s own exclusive reports from
the mountain on �����ԹϺ��� Online, http://www.starwave.com/outside.)

The Great Messner, of course, wouldn’t have done it that way,
but Viesturs doesn’t seem to care: He’s racking up serious time
at the top of the world, the place he loves most.
Almost two decades ago, Messner’s stories from the Himalayas gave goose
bumps to the teenage Viesturs, a Rockford, Illinois, high school student
who developed his work ethic in the swimming pool. He swam
freestyle on a national-record-holding medley-relay team. “The more I pushed, the
more I endured, the better swimmer I knew I’d be,” Viesturs
says. “That’s why climbing inspired me–it’s about realizing human potential.”

Viesturs moved to Seattle, he says, “to go to college and
walk up mountains.” He ultimately earned a doctorate in veterinary medicine
and, in 1982, a guiding job with Rainier Mountaineering Inc.

In the years since, Viesturs has lived the oft-quoted climbing mantra
“safety before success.” In camp, he’s an inveterate clock-watcher, often setting
out before anyone else, at midnight or even earlier, to ensure
returning from the summit before dark.

Viesturs’s most prized asset is his lung power. “Ed’s got superb
hypoxic ventilatory response,” says Eric Weiss, a Stanford Universitybased physician and
Himalayan veteran who’s treated hundreds of cases of acute mountain sickness.
Translation: Viesturs is a master at breathing hard. “That’s not to
say he doesn’t feel lousy in high places, just like the
rest of us. He just pushes through it like few others.”

For his part, Viesturs doesn’t seem preoccupied with his detractors or
with building lasting fame. “Whether three people or a hundred have
climbed the world’s tallest mountains is irrelevant,” he says. “I’m doing
this for me.”

The approach is working. As Mountain Hardwear’s Springer says, “There isn’t
a sure thing in mountaineering, but if there was, Ed would
be it.”