LOOKING UP AT THE FAT, GRAY SKY, it was hard to tell when, or even if, dusk had arrived. Looking down, it was easy. One minute the water beneath our paddles was the color of tea; the next, it was black. We pushed on around a few more bends, then beached the canoes on a riverbank at a clearing in the forest.

Gabon National Parks

The first night's campsite

Gabon National Parks

Boyer (in the bow) and Mbina paddle one of the aluminum vaches de mer.

Gabon National Parks

From left, Baert, the author, and Boyer walk their boats through a shallow section on day six.

Gabon National Parks

On day two, a bull elephant with massive tusks charged from the forest, coming within 20 feet of the lead canoes.

Gabon, Africa

Gabon map by Shout

Only Morgan Gnoundou—Mor-GAHN, he pronounced it, à la française—had any energy left. He cleared space for the tents with his machete, got a fire going, put a pot on to boil, and then bounded down to the river to dredge for crevettes—little shrimp with which to bait his fishing line. Sprawled on our Therm-a-Rests, the rest of us watched in awe.

It was early August, dry season in Gabon. That morning, eight of us, in four canoes, had set out from an abandoned logging camp on the upper Djidji River not far from the Congo border. The plan was to paddle downstream 100 or so miles to a take-out just above a spectacular cataract called Djidji Falls. In the process, we'd traverse the entire roadless expanse of 1,158-square-mile Ivindo National Park. Like all 13 of Gabon's national parks, it was created ex nihilo just over four years ago, largely at the urging of the Wildlife Conservation Society, the international nonprofit headquartered at the Bronx Zoo. No one, to our knowledge, had ever paddled the length of the Djidji before, but our real mission was to evaluate the river's touristic potential—something the WCS program director for Gabon, English-born biologist Lee White, was banking on.

“It's not a whitewater river; it's a wildlife river,” White had told me a few days earlier, at his office in Gabon's capital, Libreville. “And I think it could be the premier wildlife river in equatorial Africa.”

Sitting by the fire that first evening, I had my doubts. We'd seen animals, all right: monitor lizards, unidentifiable monkeys, and a large red forest antelope called a sitatunga, head up and stock still, as if posing in a diorama at the American Museum of Natural History. And we'd seen fantastic birds: sapphire-blue kingfishers, dinosaurish hornbills, flocks of gray parrots, and a huge, honking, iridescent thing called a hadada ibis.

But, truth be told, what we'd mostly seen were trees—fallen trees. Every 50 yards, it seemed, another giant mossy trunk lay across the river, blocking our path. Sometimes there was nothing to do but lift and shove our vessels straight over the top, Fitzcarraldo style. With two of the canoes, slender plastic things improbably mail-ordered from L.L. Bean, that was at least a semifeasible proposition. But the other two were big aluminum johnboats with square transoms—wider, more heavily laden, and about as portable as cast-iron bathtubs. Sometimes it took five or six of us, balancing precariously on branches and slippery trunks, to heave them over. We took to calling them “les vaches de mer“—the sea cows.

Then there were the snakes. The day before, while on a short pre-trip reconnaissance cruise, Gnoundou and Christian Mbina, a Gabonese environmentalist, had been hacking their way through a brambly snag a few hundred yards from the put-in when a fat black-and-tan snake dropped into the canoe—whereupon Mbina leaped out. Malcolm Starkey, a WCS project director for two of Gabon's parks, and our designated naturalist, was too busy laughing to identify the beast. “But,” he said cheerily, “I'm 90 percent certain it wasn't venomous.”

Less than reassured, we'd approached our first log crossings with a certain delicacy. But as the day wore on, it got harder and harder to worry. Ninety percent was good enough—the main thing was to keep the boats moving, a point that was driven home the first night as we sat sipping Scotch by the fire. “So, how far did we get?” our nominal leader, Bryan Curran, the director of projects for WCS Gabon, asked our navigator, Mark Boyer, a map specialist from the WCS office in New York. Boyer punched a few buttons on his GPS and raised his eyebrows dramatically. “It looks like we've covered a grand total of 4.8 kilometers,” he said. “Of course, that's as the crow flies; we probably did twice that over the ground.”

A stony silence ensued. We'd planned on spending a week on the river—which meant making 20 to 25 kilometers (12 to 15 miles) a day.Finally, Starkey spoke. “Hmmm,” he said, trying to sound chipper. “Where are we on the map?” Before the trip, Boyer had laboriously created and laminated a set of custom maps by combining some old topos from French colonial days with more recent data gathered by a NASA shuttle mission. He pulled the first sheet out of his daypack, squinted at his GPS again, and laughed. “We're not yet on it,” he said.

IN SEPTEMBER 2002, at the World Summit on Sustainable Development, in Johannesburg, South Africa, the famously diminutive president of Gabon, Omar Bongo, made a startling pledge: His Colorado-size nation, long known for its oil fields, would create a system of 13 national parks that together would constitute more than 10,000 square miles of equatorial rainforest—better than a tenth of the country's total land mass.

Gabon's virgin forests and indigenous wildlife, including the world's largest remaining population of forest elephants and the second-largest of gorillas and chimpanzees, had lately come to the world's attention via the exploits of WCS biologist Mike Fay, who traversed the country on foot as part of his 1,200-mile Megatransect. Unlike most of its neighbors, Gabon seemed to be in a position to afford its parks: With proven oil reserves of 2.5 billion barrels and a population of fewer than 1.5 million, the country enjoys a per capita income of $5,900 a year, approximately four times higher than the average for most sub-Saharan nations. Still, no one had expected Bongo to make such an extravagant gesture. Percentagewise, a WCS press release noted, only Costa Rica has set aside more land for conservation, though its total park acreage is much smaller. WCS committed more than $12 million over three years—about half of it foreign-aid money drawn from the $53 million that the U.S. government gave for the Congo Basin Forest Initiative in 2002—to help Gabon with the project. No logging or mining would be allowed in the parks, and development would be limited to small, eco-friendly tourism ventures and research facilities.

“By creating these national parks, we will develop a viable alternative to simple exploitation of natural resources that will promote the preservation of our environment,” Bongo said. “Already there is a broad consensus that Gabon has the potential to become a natural mecca, attracting pilgrims from the four points of the compass in search of the last remaining natural wonders on earth.”

Given the press coverage that Bongo's country has received ever since, you might be forgiven for thinking that the floodgates had opened. Gabon's parks have been glowingly written up everywhere from The New York Times to O: The Oprah Magazine, whose editors put it on the list of “Five Places to See in Your Lifetime.” In short, it's hot. So hot that, according to White, within ten years the country could conceivably see more than 100,000 visitors annually.

If you do actually get to Gabon, however—and that's not easy, given the distance, exorbitant airfares, and the inconvenient fact that the national carrier, Air Gabon, shut down last March—you'll come away with a slightly different take.

“Right now, there are 1,500 real tourists a year, maybe 2,000,” says Patrice Pasquier, a Frenchman who runs Mistral Voyages, one of the country's few full-service travel agencies. “Let's be frank. I don't see 100,000 or even 50,000 in ten years' time. How many rooms [in the parks] would that take? Fifteen hundred? How many are there now? Not even 100. And let's not even talk about the state of our infrastructure.”

The problem isn't limited to a lack of planes or rooms or roads. The Gabonese themselves may not be ready for the service business. “We envision a top-of-the-line client, but first we must identify the levels to which people must be trained,” says Franck Ndjimbi, marketing chief for the Conseil National des Parcs Nationaux.

“The long-term success of the parks is linked to the success of tourism,” says White. “We're going to have to change the mentality, to the point where the Gabonese actually smile at you. That's our job over the next ten years.”

It's not just the Gabonese who need convincing. A couple of months before we set off down the Djidji, I went to the Bronx Zoo to listen to White and another major player on the Gabon project, John Gwynne, make a lunchtime presentation to the WCS staff. White, 41, was one of the driving forces behind Bongo's decision to create the park system; his 2001 proposal to protect important Gabonese wilderness areas was adopted by the president virtually in its entirety. Gwynne, 58, is not an Africa specialist at all, nor even a trained scientist, but an artist and landscape architect who runs the zoo's Exhibitions and Graphic Arts Department.

At the time Bongo created the parks, White noted, Gabon's oil production had peaked and the government was beginning to think about the transition to a diversified economy. “Like it or not,” he said, “they've decided it is an economic project.”

Then it was Gwynne's turn to speak. The first step, he said, was to create a new “global destination”: the African Rainforest. “Yes, at first it's a wall of green, and we have to part that—it's critical to see animals,” he said. “But we have to look to Costa Rica's success, presenting the overall experience as much as the animals.” There was, he added, one more challenge: “This is a place where chimps and gorillas haven't seen people. They're not afraid. How do we bring thousands in without screwing up the Garden of Eden?”

An hour went by, and only a handful of people left. The crowd seemed intrigued but skeptical. It was a big step, a conservation-and-research organization taking on a tourism project, welcoming Mammon to the temple.

“How do you bring in investors and not lose control?” someone asked.

“What are your standards for ecotourism?” another wanted to know. “It's like the word healthy on a cereal box—what does it mean?”

Those were the specific questions. The bigger question, the one that hung in the air as the meeting broke up, was the same one we'd be asking two months later on the banks of the Djidji: Are we getting in over our heads here?

TOWARD NOON on day two, as Bruno Baert, the director of logistics for WCS Gabon, and I were attempting to force one of the vaches through yet another snag, we looked downriver to see one of the faster green boats signaling to us. Something was happening around the next bend, but by the time we caught up, it was all over.

The two lead canoes had noticed a great gray boulder set back in the high sawgrass. Suddenly the boulder had exploded in a full-on charge, right down to the edge of the river—a bull elephant with flared ears and magnificent tusks that had somehow escaped the poacher's knife. Then, with an imperious snort, he'd disappeared into the forest. The four had been just 20 feet away and were still reeling from an experience that, as Boyer put it, was “so real it seemed fake.”

Baert and I groaned and resolved to paddle harder. But an hour later, the same thing happened—another elephant sighting, with us just out of range behind. No charge this time, the green-boaters assured us. Nothing special. Baert stood up. “I want to see an ay-lay-phant,” he said. “I need to see an ay-lay-phant.”

By the end of the day we'd covered five miles as the crow flies and nine over the ground—almost twice our first day's total but still not nearly enough, we thought, to squeeze the Djidji into a single week.

And yet at some point that evening my attitude changed. It helped that our campsite was perfect, an old poacher's camp on a promontory above the confluence of a small tributary. The bloodsucking tsetse flies that had plagued us all day had vanished, and the eerie daytime silence of the forest gave way to the amazing cacophony of the African night: the pounding chorus of a bat colony, the scream of the tree hyrax, and a distant timpani-like sound that Starkey and Curran said was a gorilla pounding its chest. The hissing fire; the soft grunts of Baert and Gnoundou as they hooked and landed perch, catfish, and the primitively scaled capitaine; the unbroken wildness beyond—this was what camping in the equatorial rainforest was meant to be.

Alex Tehrani, the photographer, must have been similarly inspired by that exquisite moment, because he jumped up, grabbed a tripod out of the tent we were sharing, and walked a few feet into the forest to take some long-exposure shots. A minute later I heard him call out sharply.

“Ow,” he said. “Damn! Fuck!“

Then, a moment later, the one phrase I wanted to hear even less than “snake in the boat”: “They're all over me!” Tehrani came sprinting back to the fire, clutching his camera and tripod in one hand and slapping madly at his legs with the other. “Army ants, also known as driver ants,” Starkey said helpfully, before zipping himself into his own tent. Curran laughed. “Welcome to the Congo Basin,” he said.

The bites hurt, but the sting didn't last. “They're not really a problem unless you're tied to a tree,” Curran said. So once Tehrani had de-anted himself, we crept back to the edge of the clearing for another look. The column had by this time overrun our unzipped tent—there was nothing to do but pick it up, shake everything out of it, and then hold it over the fire and let the smoke drive out the last of the interlopers. A particularly gruesome tableau was formed by my muddy Tevas, which were completely encrusted by a wriggling layer of ants—apparently there was something in the river clay they had to have.

Later, lying in the tent, I could hear the army moving over the leaves of the forest floor—a million crinkly footsteps, like high-pitched rain. In the morning, we awoke to find my sandals picked clean and the ants long gone.

WHILE WE MIGHT HAVE BEEN the first team to attempt a complete descent of the Djidji, we were hardly the first people to travel on it. Downstream of the put-in, we'd noticed old machete scars and bits of cord on some of the overhanging branches—an indication that workers from the logging camp had likely come this way in search of meat. Another good indication: On the floor of one of the abandoned cabins, we'd found a photo of a grinning Congolese worker holding a bloody pair of elephant tusks. And then there was the mysterious Joseph Okouyi, a Gabonese doctoral candidate studying red river hogs, who had recently established a research camp halfway down the Djidji, at the very center of Ivindo National Park, and who, in fact, had been scheduled to join us but dropped out at the last minute.

Curran was anxious to make it to Okouyi's camp by the end of day three—crucial timing, he figured, if we were going to make the train back to Libreville by week's end. But the log crossings were starting to take their toll, and we managed to rack up only nine over-the-ground miles before collapsing, exhausted, on a sandbar at dusk. Still, paddling in one of the green boats, I had seen my first elephant: just a glimpse of grimy tusks and an ancient gimlet eye staring out through leaves—but thrilling nonetheless. And I'd caught the biggest excitement of the day when an eight-foot crocodile came shooting out of the high grass and down a sandbank, heading directly for the canoe in front of me before diving beneath it at the last second.

About noon on the next day, we arrived at a place—a wide spot in the river—that felt somehow different. There was more sky, and shrubs instead of trees, and the banks of the river were littered with a mad profusion of tracks and dung, including gorilla and leopard, Starkey said. It was an obvious crossroads, and after we'd floated through it, he pulled over to the side and motioned for the rest of us to stop.

“The wind is in our favor right now,” he said. “If we go back upstream and sit behind those trees, I think the chances are good we'll see something within the hour.”

It was the perfect call. No sooner were we out of the boats and installed in our impromptu blind than two elephants materialized out of the brush about 50 yards downstream, a mother and a baby whose age Starkey estimated at one year. They stood on the bank for a moment, then swayingly moved into the river. The place was a “saline,” Starkey explained; there was some kind of salt in the clay soil that the elephants loved. Rather than eat the soil, they sluiced a slurry of it back and forth in their trunks to extract its briny essence.

We crouched cautiously out of view at first, but when it became clear that the elephants couldn't see us, we stepped forward boldly, cameras snapping. A few minutes later, another mother and calf, this one about three, appeared and joined the first pair in the river, and then, perhaps more remarkably, the sun came out for the first time all week. Gnoundou took a canoe and paddled down to within about 20 yards of the grouping. The two cows looked up, sensing something, but then went back to their sluicing. Gnoundou waded in even closer, and Tehrani followed him, his camera out. “This is crazy,” he said, glancing back at the rest of us and grinning from ear to ear.

This was it, and we all knew it: the primordial Djidji experience that White had been talking about. The canoes, the sweet-flowing river, the elephants' fissured gray flanks glistening like wet stone in the warm sun.

That afternoon, as the Djidji whisked us westward, we analyzed the tourist potential of what we'd already dubbed Plage des ÉlĂ©phants (“Elephant Beach”). It was an obvious attraction within the park, a riverine version of LangouĂ© Bai—the vast, grassy clearing in the southern part of the park that was famously frequented by elephants and gorillas. The first issue was how to get people there; the only alternative to three and a half days of log-hopping hell seemed to be a road. But of course a road would mean access for everybody—and everybody, Starkey pointed out, “means poachers.”

At dusk we came upon a snag that had been chainsawed—a sure sign that we were approaching Okouyi's camp. I'd already conjured an image of the place in my mind: a small clearing by the side of the river with a few old canvas tents pitched beneath the limbs of some massive tree. Instead, we rounded a corner and beheld something truly shocking: a steep and completely clear-cut hillside littered with giant brush piles and the trunks of felled trees. Two wooden buildings had been erected and a third was under construction. Behind the first clearing was a second of similar size.

Curran was furious. Okouyi had “cut far more trees than he was supposed to,” he said. Boyer was appalled. He'd imagined the camp as a potential site for one of John Gwynne's eco-lodges, but that seemed out of the question now—no tourist was going to come to the rainforest to look at a bunch of stumps.

No one was around, but the ashes in the firepit were still warm. I proposed that we camp there; it was late, Okouyi and his researchers would soon be returning, and we could get the full story. But no one else wanted to stay, so we shoved off and made camp a half-mile downstream. A short while later we heard a jarring sound—the whine of an outboard—and then a long dugout with six men in it came flying around the bend. Spotting our canoes, the helmsman cut the throttle and ducked behind a snag on the opposite bank, then pulled out a minute later and slowly approached.

It was indeed Okouyi's crew, returning from a day walking transects in the western end of the park, but Okouyi himself, they told us, was in Makokou on business. Curran nodded curtly. “Why did you cut down all those trees?” he asked. “You know this is a national park.” The men stared blankly, not sure how to respond. “And what is the meaning of that second clearing behind the camp?”

“Plantation,” one of the men said.

Curran shook his head disgustedly. “You tell Joseph . . .” He stopped, then went on. “You tell him we need to talk.”

A FEW MILES BELOW Okouyi's camp, a major tributary joins the Djidji from the north. The river broadens and then begins stacking up in a series of oxbows. So there were far fewer snags the next day—only the biggest fallen trees could block the river's width—and we started to make up for lost time. I was consigned to a vache with Boyer, and we fell steadily behind the lead boats, then finally stopped worrying about seeing wildlife. Boyer took out his fly rod and made some practice casts under the overhanging boughs along the bank.

On day six I wound up in a green boat with a new partner, Christian Mbina. We hadn't talked much—he was a serious guy who avoided the campfire, instead tucking into his tent after dinner to read the Bible. He wasn't a WCS employee but ran his own NGO, șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Sans Frontieres, whose main mission was to take schoolchildren to the beach in Pongara National Park, just outside of Libreville, a prime nesting site for leatherback turtles. He also had an environmentally focused show on Gabonese TV called Ça Se Passe Ici (“It Happens Here“). Still, he confessed, he wasn't altogether thrilled about the way his career was going. There wasn't enough money in it and, worse, not enough opportunity.

“I think most people who think about it are proud of the parks,” Mbina said of his fellow Gabonese. “At the same time, they say, ‘They give us the money, the U.S., but what do they do with it?' Look at the WCS project directors in each of their parks—every one of them is a foreigner. Why? Aren't there any Gabonese who can do that job?”

Mbina wasn't the only skeptic. “This is a country where we want one thing but also the other,” a Gabonese eco-activist named Marc Ona had told me in Libreville. “The parks are a good project to show to the outside world, but to take logging permits away for something long-term is a huge gamble. It won't pay off for 10 or 20 years, if ever,” he said. “And—let's be honest—Gabon is not Kenya. You can go 100 kilometers without seeing anything.”

The next afternoon, the pace of the river began to accelerate. We were approaching the edge of the escarpment, where the Djidji tumbled down to meet Gabon's biggest river, the Ogooué. There were more rocks now and long riffles that gave the best canoeing of the trip, then, suddenly, real rapids. We proceeded cautiously, lining the boats through difficult sections and laboriously portaging them around one thundering six-foot waterfall. The thought that ran through all of our heads was, If it's borderline now, at the height of the dry season, what happens when it starts to rain?

By dark, Boyer's GPS told us we were just a few miles, as the crow flies, from Djidji Falls. We camped at a rocky bend where a lone Cape buffalo eyed us warily before bolting. Curran got out the sat phone, waded out into the river for better reception, and called the WCS office in Ivindo National Park. “We should be at the take-out by 11,” he said.

But the Djidji wasn't quite ready to let us go. The next morning, our seventh on the river, we funneled into a narrow, rock-strewn channel a mile below our camp without stopping to scout it. The first three canoes made it through. The fourth, a vache piloted by Starkey, flipped and wrapped around a rock, then broke free, pinning Mbina, the bowman, against a thorn-studded pandanus trunk. I ran back up the riverbank to help yank the boat loose, then stupidly decided to float back down to my canoe instead of walking.

The water was only three feet deep, but it was moving fast. I couldn't stop myself or even get over to the bank. A minute later I was swept around a bend, pushed over a small drop, and then driven deep into a hole—shockingly deep, because when I stroked for the surface, I didn't get there. Another desperate stroke and I popped up, then nearly got sucked down again into a submerged tangle of conical pandanus roots—a nightmarish scenario that even now makes me wince. Instead, the current spat me sideways onto a rocky ledge where, badly shaken, I pulled myself out of the river.

Mbina and Starkey's vache was even worse off. After the boat folded around the rock, the aluminum weld running along the transom had partially given way, opening a large gap. We effected a MacGyveresque field repair, inserting a rubber strap in the hole and pounding the metal into place with a rock, and then pushed on.

Half an hour later, with the roar of the fast-approaching falls drumming in our ears, we rounded a left-hand bend and saw a most welcome sight, a crew of half a dozen park workers in coveralls and Wellingtons, smiling and beckoning us to shore. The eight of us staggered out of the canoes, and the trail crew began loading our boats and gear onto a couple of Land Cruisers. A minute later there was an excited shout: A snake was nestled beneath a drybag in the bottom of one of the boats.

It was a short hike down the escarpment to the base of Djidji Falls. There, we lounged on close-cropped green turf and took a final, celebratory swim in the Djidji. I couldn't quite focus on the WCS vision of a nearby eco-lodge; no doubt it made sense, but to me the place was just about perfect—hard-earned, unexpectedly beautiful, unruined.

We drove out to the town of Ivindo on an overgrown logging road that, as soon as we left the park, became as wide and smooth as Libreville's voie express. Empty logging trucks passed us going the other way, kicking up great contrails of red dust, and rounding one corner I glimpsed the rear end of a large, dark ape scrambling into the woods on all fours—the only gorilla sighting of the trip.

Just before Ivindo, we came upon a solitary figure walking down the road, a machete in one hand and a bulging sack made of woven plastic slung over his shoulder. Strangely, for this part of the world, he didn't bother to ask for a ride or even look up as we passed.

“I know that guy,” Mbina said after we rolled by. “We stopped him last year when I was up here on patrol. He's a poacher.”

“That must be crocodile he's got,” Gnoundou said. “Anything else would bleed through the sack.”

“Unless it's been smoked,” Starkey said. According to Starkey, who'd done his thesis on the bushmeat market, the price would likely be 300 to 400 CFA francs per kilo—30 or 40 cents a pound, affordable for Gabon's non-elite. “When you compare that to chicken or beef, which is anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 CFA,” he said, “you can appreciate what we're up against.”

Those days and nights on the Djidji stayed with me for a long time afterwards, and not just because tsetse fly bites itch like nothing else in the world. There were the army ants, Boyer's maps and Gnoundou's fresh fish bouillons, Plage des ÉlĂ©phants and the waterfall, and not least the bond I'd formed with my vache mates—fond memories all. But the guy with the gunnysack stayed with me, too. In the end, how different was he from us, with our own booty squirreled away in our drybags—our notebooks and film canisters and memory cards? All of us want to have our crocodiles and eat them, too.

Getting There: Fly from New York City to Libreville, Gabon, for about $2,000 round-trip on Air France ().

Prime Time: June to September is the dry season, when temperatures range from 71 to 77 degrees, but Gabon can be visited year-round, since the rain that comes from October to May falls mainly at night.

Where to Go: Currently you can tour seven of Gabon's 13 national parks: Ivindo, LopĂ©, Loango, Pongara, Akanda, Monts de Cristal, and Plateaux BatĂ©kĂ©. Mistral Voyages (011-241-76-0421, ) can arrange guided tours that include the forests, wetlands, and savannas of two or three parks—where you'll likely see elephants, gorillas, crocodiles, and other wildlife. For more information, go to . Where to Stay: Loango Lodge offers seven bungalows and three suites (from $376 per person; ). The LopĂ© Hotel has 24 rooms on the banks of the OgoouĂ© River ($112 per person; book both lodges through Mistral Voyages).

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ONE LATE-SUMMER AFTERNOON in the high pastures of Pakistan’s Rupal Valley, Steve House stuck his head out the door of his mess tent and glanced up at the cloud-cloaked mountain that loomed above. Eventually, House knew, the north wind would begin to blow, ushering in the first high-pressure system of the post-monsoon season, and everything would come clear. But it needed to happen fast. Already, ten days had gone by since he and his climbing partner, Vince Anderson, had come down from their final round of acclimatization.

Steve House

House in Ouray, Colorado, July 2006

Steve House and Vince Anderson

House and Anderson at the base of Nanga Parbat.

What House was looking at, or trying to, was the colossal south face of Nanga Parbat, at 26,660 feet the world’s ninth-highest mountain. Rising nearly 15,000 vertical feet from the valley floor, the Rupal Face, as it’s more commonly known, is an impossible maze of rock towers, hanging snowfields, and ice, sometimes described as the biggest mountain wall in the world. “Imagine this,” Reinhold Messner wrote in his 2002 book The Naked Mountain. “The east face of the Monte Rosa with the Eigerwand above and the Matterhorn perched on top.”

It was Messner, of course, who first scaled the Rupal Face. In 1970, when he was just 25, he and his brother GĂŒnther (who would later die on the descent) led the push up a difficult route on its left side as part of a joint German-Austrian expedition. Fourteen years later, a second route, to the right, was established by another Himalayan legend, Polish alpinist Jerry Kukuczka, and three others. For House and Anderson, both 36, an obvious prize remained: the unclimbed Central Pillar, the Rupal Face’s steepest, most direct line and also, undoubtedly, its most difficult. And that wasn’t all. Whereas previous teams had relied on “siege” tactics methodically establishing a series of successively higher camps and using fixed ropes to move back and forth between them the pair were committed to climbing alpine style, in a single bottom-to-top push.

House had attempted the face before. The previous summer, in 2004, he and another partner, Boulder, Colorado based Bruce Miller, 43, had come very close to completing the route. They were five days up the face and less than 2,000 vertical feet below the summit when House, who had led most of the tough pitches on the way up, began to feel the effects of altitude sickness and slowed dramatically. After an agonizing hourlong discussion, Miller became convinced that House’s life was in peril, so he persuaded his partner to turn around a decision that House would later, and quite controversially, suggest was more a reflection of Miller’s fear than of his own incapacity.

Meanwhile, others had set their sights on the Central Pillar. When House, Anderson, and two other American climbers, Scott Johnston and Colin Haley (who were there to attempt a previously climbed route on Nanga Parbat), had trekked into the Rupal Valley three weeks earlier, they’d found Tomaz Humar, the celebrated Slovenian alpinist, already ensconced at the prime base-camp location in Baseen Meadows, along with a small army of followers a film team, a Web-site technician, even, according to House, an “aura reader.” The Americans exchanged pleasantries with Humar and kept walking, eventually establishing a camp of their own in Latoba Meadows, a two-hour walk upvalley. “I wanted to be as far away from that circus as possible,” House told me when I hiked in a few weeks later.

By then, the details of Humar’s botched summit attempt had become the talk of the mountaineering world. The day after House and Anderson’s arrival, the Slovenian had launched a solo bid up the middle of the face. He wound up stuck on rotten ice at 19,350 feet, pinned down by the weather and out of food and water. Nine days later, after a series of dramatic radio transmissions, Humar was snatched from the precipice by a daring Pakistani army helicopter pilot. The general consensus: The Slovenian had pulled a stupid stunt, endangered others’ lives, and was lucky to have survived.

On my first night in base camp, as we dined on chapatis and a freshly killed chicken prepared by expedition cook Fida Hussein, House offered his own piquant analysis of his rival’s misadventure. The way he saw it, Humar had been defeated not just by hubris and bad planning he wasn’t fully acclimatized and had set off despite a sketchy weather forecast but by the overwhelmingly commercial nature of his expedition. It was “interesting,” House said caustically, that Humar claimed to have run out of food and fuel but still had plenty of batteries to power his radio, “so he could do daily dispatches for the Slovenian national radio network, which just happened to be one of his major sponsors.”

To House, a dedicated minimalist who argues that any extra weight even that of, say, a video camera could mean “the difference between life and death” on a long, tough route, the implication was clear: Humar was less a cutting-edge alpinist than a careerist profiteer.

House tipped his chair back and shook his head dismissively. “It’s not like you need a lot of money to climb these peaks,” he said, offering as evidence his own budget for six weeks in Pakistan: just $10,800, split evenly among him, Anderson, Johnson, and Haley. “I’ve never understood the whole argument for sponsored expeditions,” he concluded. “To me, the money just gets in the way.”

AT FIRST GLANCE, Steve House doesn’t fit the image of a super-alpinist. At five foot ten and 165 pounds, with rounded, sloping shoulders, he’s not particularly imposing. His dark, darting eyes can sometimes give him a look of feral intensity, but his manner is friendly and down-home, sometimes even shy. One of his early mentors and climbing partners, Canadian alpinist Barry Blanchard, calls House “Farm Boy,” because, as Blanchard once wrote, he “looks like he should be chewing on a stalk of straw and slicing into his mom’s fresh apple pie.”

Yet over the past decade, while much of the public’s attention has been focused on the cattle route up Everest, House has pursued a completely different kind of climbing, stringing together steep mixed pitches of rock, ice, and snow in head-spinningly fast times, even at very high altitude. In 2001, for example, climbing in the Alaska Range with Boulder, Colorado’s Rolando Garibotti, he summited one of North America’s hardest routes the 9,000-foot line on Mount Foraker’s Infinite Spur in just 25 hours, more than six days faster than the previous time. That same year, as an “experiment,” he raced up and down an 8,000-meter peak, Tibet’s Cho Oyu, in less than a day.

There’s one other thing that sets House apart: his tongue. In recent years he’s made a name for himself as America’s leading advocate for alpine-style climbing and as a relentless critic of anyone who doesn’t climb that way. House doesn’t just practice alpinism; he preaches it on both environmental and personal grounds.

“There is and should be repulsion at the idea that people leave camps and ropes and trash in the wilderness and permanently deface the rock by bolting it,” he says. “It trashes the resource and changes the experience of everyone who comes after.”

Another of House’s arguments is harder to articulate, but it’s just as strongly felt. “I need another word, but there’s a moral or ethical element here,” he told me in Pakistan. “Climbing is a form of expression that has no practical purpose it’s for one’s own personal satisfaction. So to climb in a manner that is not what I call moral is to diminish your own experience. We already know we can climb any route with enough technology. So what’s the point? That’s not interesting. Uncertainty is the most important aspect.”

One of House’s first public salvos about all this came in 2000, when The American Alpine Journal an annual compendium of “the world’s most significant climbs” put out by the American Alpine Club published an essay in which he decried “business climbing.” He singled out a commercially sponsored expedition to Pakistan’s Great Trango Tower, made the year before by Mark Synnott, Jared Ogden, and the late Alex Lowe, in which the three, accompanied by a camera team, sent out regular Web broadcasts from their portaledge. Besides “degrading” the caliber of the climbing, he railed, any climbs that rely on bolts and fixed lines, as this one did, “do not stretch our collective experience any more.”

House has kept up the debate ever since. More recently he’s aimed his cannon at the Russian Big Wall Project, a ten-year initiative led by St. Petersburg based Alexander Odintsov to conquer the world’s biggest unclimbed walls in classic siege style. “They’ve got some incredible things on their list the west face of Makalu, the west face of K2 and they’re going to wreck them for the rest of us,” House says. “It makes me sick to think about it.”

House’s biggest outburst to date occurred at the 2005 Piolet d’Or, or “Golden Ice Ax,” an annual Oscar-style awards show in Grenoble, France, put on by the French magazine Montagnes to recognize the greatest alpine-climbing feat of the preceding year. Not surprisingly, House had been nominated for his 2004 solo effort on K7, a 22,776-foot peak in northern Pakistan, until then climbed just once. House had ascended it, via a new route, in one sleepless 41-hour push. To his consternation, however, among the other five nominees was a 12-member Russian expedition that had scaled the north face of 25,295-foot Jannu, a sheer wall in Nepal considered one of the climbing world’s “last great problems.” House objected to the way the Russians had sieged their route, the dozens of bolts they’d drilled, and the fact that they’d left most of their gear (including 77 ropes) hanging on the mountain. When they won the award, he stormed off the stage.

That performance drew its own catcalls. “I really think people like Steve miss the boat of public appeal and interest with the dogmatic approach,” says Kelly Cordes, 38, a Colorado climber and a senior editor at The American Alpine Journal. “His climbing speaks so loudly that, it could be argued, his bantering actually weakens his cause. Many people view it as a pissing match, and they’ve got a point.”

In a 2005 article in Climbing, Synnott defended the Russian approach as a bold effort by determined climbers who were coming out of a different, communitarian tradition. “There exists a category of people with a firm knowledge of how one is supposed to live,” Odintsov, the Jannu expedition’s leader, told Synnott, in an obvious reference to House. “To them, it’s absolutely necessary that everyone around them live life by their patterns.”

“In alpinism, if you take ethics away, there’s nothing on the other side only helicopters,” counters Marko Prezelj, a Slovenian climber and frequent expedition partner of House’s. “If you’re not harsh, nobody listens.”

Even those who share House’s views have been taken aback by his apparent willingness to sacrifice everything, even friendship, to make a point as he did last year when he seemed to attack Bruce Miller, his partner on the 2004 Rupal Face climb. In an account he wrote in the spring 2005 issue of Alpinist, the bible of the hardcore mountaineering crowd, House said it’s impossible to know what might have happened if the two had kept going. “It would have been the greatest accomplishment of my life. But I had to go down with Bruce because his no was necessarily stronger than my yes,” he wrote. “Bruce had acted on fear… At 7,650 meters, Bruce’s overriding fear had become me, become my death.”

House still thinks the climb could have succeeded. “I believe [Miller] believes that we needed to go down,” he told me in Pakistan. “I think it’s a possibility. But, really, I don’t believe it. We’d done 300 meters in three hours, and we were 600 meters from the top that’s my answer.”

Not everyone agrees, including a friend of both climbers who asked not to be named but clearly thinks Miller did the right thing. “Look at the pictures from that trip,” this person wrote in an e-mail. “Steve’s head is swollen like a watermelon… When Steve dissed Bruce in that article, it REALLY put off a lot of people. Frankly, Bruce saved Steve’s life I remember Bruce telling me that Steve admitted that he was willing to die for the route. (Bruce, so low-key, told me, ‘Well, I thought to myself, Ya know, that might be OK for you, but it’s really not alright by me.’)”

Miller was more circumspect when I reached him by phone. “On day four, this lung crud started to catch up with him,” he said. “By the last day it was pretty clear to me, and I felt like I had to make a call. I thought my partner was dying.” He paused. “I thought it was weird, that account he wrote. Let me put it this way: I need all my fingers and probably a couple of toes to count my friends who I don’t have anymore, who I wish were alive to give me shit.”

AS AUGUST ROLLED on at the base of Nanga Parbat, the days grew shorter and the nights chillier. In the meadows, the sheep and goats bent to the grass, packing on the fat, and in the mess tent it was pretty much the same: nonstop chomping. If the tension was mounting, it was hard to see. What was apparent, though, was that Anderson, with his pierced ears and nipples, and the straitlaced House were getting along like old friends.

But they weren’t old friends, really, even though they’d first met in Alaska in the late nineties and had done some work together as American Mountain Guide Association instructors. (While Anderson still works full-time as a guide, House’s main employment these days is as an “ambassador” and product tester for Patagonia.) Over the winter, House had, in Anderson’s phrase, “cold-called” him about the Rupal climb. Amazingly, until their rounds of acclimatization on Nanga Parbat, the two had never done any serious climbing together.

“I think some of our strengths are complementary,” Anderson told me. “I can keep it rolling pretty much forever, albeit slowly. On the other side, Steve has a lot of fortitude, and he’s smart at figuring things out. I don’t know I might balance out some of his eagerness.”

House, too, seemed cautiously optimistic. “An alpine partnership is probably one of the most challenging things in the world,” he said. “It’s not easy to trust like that. Messner and Habeler, Boardman and Tasker there haven’t been a lot. It’s rare.”

Then again, the two have a lot in common. Both grew up in the West House in eastern Oregon, Anderson in central Colorado. Both are smart and thoughtful, House with a degree in environmental science from Olympia, Washington’s Evergreen State College and Anderson a University of Colorado graduate in architectural engineering. And both possess an innate sense of style that extends to more than just climbing. “I’m just a dirtbag,” Anderson says, “but, still, I hate surrounding myself with cheap plastic stuff.”

Anderson got into mountaineering via a teenage interest in steep backcountry skiing. For House, the path had a lot to do with his decision to spend a year studying abroad after graduating from high school in 1988. His father, Don, a former accountant who still lives in LeGrande, Oregon, with House’s mother, Marti, a retired teacher, had to pull out an atlas to find the country to which his son was assigned: Slovenia, a tiny, mountainous enclave at the eastern end of the Alps. House’s outlet there was climbing practically the national sport. He joined a local outing club and spent every weekend in the mountains.

“I think he learned from the Slovenian climbers, who are accustomed to much harder living than we soft Americans are, what was ‘normal’ in the mountains,” says Mark Twight, a climber, writer, and alpine-style hardliner who’s known House since 1998.

In 1990, after his freshman year in college, House joined some of his Slovenian clubmates on an expedition to Nanga Parbat’s Schell Route, just a few miles west of the Rupal Face. The bid was successful, placing two climbers on the summit, but for the 20-year-old House, it ended with him vomiting in the snow at Camp II. “I left very humbled,” he recalls. “I was so undergunned I had no business being here.” At the same time, he adds, “it’s not surprising I conjured it as a dream.”

After graduating, House moved to Mazama, Washington, and started work as a climbing and backcountry-skiing guide in the North Cascades, often in tandem with his college sweetheart, Anne Keller, whom he married in 1995. (The two divorced in 2004.) Over the next ten years, he completed nearly 30 expeditions in Alaska. His first big route, in 1995, was a fast and light assault on Mount McKinley’s 4,400-vertical-foot Father and Son’s Wall, which he climbed with another guide, Eli Helmuth, in 33 hours.

It was in Alaska, a year later, that House met Alex Lowe, who invited him to a frozen-waterfall-climbing “gathering” in Cody, Wyoming an experience that House says was “pretty much like Larry Bird asking me to shoot a few hoops.” In Cody, mixing with a dozen of Lowe’s friends, the elite of the alpine world, House made a strong first impression.

“There were new routes to climb all over the place, and Steve and I put up a couple one day,” recalls Bill Belcourt, a manager at Black Diamond Equipment. “Steve had an easy grace that was beyond his years. He showed a lot of patience and control, and there was nothing flashy about his climbing style, something that showed a profound level of maturity. I liked to say, ‘Steve climbed like an old guy.’ “

Soon, House found himself climbing big routes with alpinists whose pictures he had once cut out of magazines: Barry Blanchard, Scott Backes, and Mark Twight a close-knit group of alpine-style purists. In 1999, he led the charge on a new route called M-16, on Howse Peak, in the Canadian Rockies. The crux was an insanely fragile 200-foot tongue of vertical ice that was one to two feet wide and in places about half an inch thick. House took three and a half hours to negotiate the pitch, then fixed an anchor with eight ice screws to belay his partners. “It was as hard as anything I’ve ever done,” he says.

Twight, whose angry climbing screed “The Rise and Fall of the American Alpinist” had turned House on when he read it in high school, became a mentor. After he, Backes, and House completed the most notorious climb of the 2000 season, a 60-hour, 9,000-vertical-foot route on McKinley called Czech Direct, he told House that his own career was winding down, adding, “You must know deep inside that this responsibility will pass to your shoulders sometime.”

House hated the pressure that came with such pronouncements. At the Ouray Ice Festival a few years ago, he stood up to give a slide show about the “progression” he saw in his own climbing career. As he was trying to explain why he’d recently shifted his focus to the Himalayas “Basically, there was no terrain left in Alaska that was big enough” a British rock climber who’d had a few beers loudly called House an “arrogant cunt.” House was stunned but gathered himself and went on.

“I was unprepared for the burden of proof being directed at me,” House says of his rise to prominence. “I’ve thought about just not responding, but I feel like if I don’t, I don’t know who will.”

ONE AFTERNOON, when House and Anderson were out bouldering, Aslam Rana, House’s liaison officer a government representative that every expedition in Pakistan is assigned excitedly returned from a visit downvalley to report that a large party headed by Reinhold Messner was setting up its tents at Tap Meadows, the same place the German-Austrian expedition had been based 35 years earlier. ” ‘Vee camp here!’ ” a giggling Rana said, mimicking Messner’s imperious proclamation.

I walked over at teatime and found Messner at the head of a long table in his mess tent with 15 German trekkers he was leading on a two-week trip around the mountain. At 60, Messner still looked fit, with a bushy beard and that famously thick head of hair. He didn’t seem particularly impressed by the details of House’s project.

“Yes, the only possibility is the Central Pillar,” he said, as if he’d scoped it himself long ago which he probably had. He did ask one question: Would House be carrying a radio? “I call it my ABC,” Messner said. “No Artificial oxygen, no Bolts, no Communication.” No radio for House, I told him, though he was planning to use a sat phone from base camp to consult with a weather forecaster. “Ah,” said Messner, visibly pleased at this sign of weakness. “But isn’t that judgment part of alpinism, too?”

Nevertheless, the next morning Messner, wearing a jaunty Tyrolean hat, strode into our camp. Hussein and Rana pulled out some chairs, and Messner, House, and Anderson sat down for a cup of coffee while a photographer with the German group scuttled around. House was excited; he’d told us the night before that he still has a copy of the Tyrolean’s famous alpine-style manifesto, “The Murder of the Impossible,” taped to his office wall.

Messner’s style at this meeting was more press conference than conversation, though. The only time he seemed truly curious was when House told him he’d climbed with Twight, an author Messner admires because “he has rediscovered the spirit of the 19th-century writing about the mountains.” Otherwise, Messner was mostly dismissive. When Ed Viesturs’s name came up, for instance the American had just completed climbing all 14 of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks without supplemental oxygen, the famous feat Messner had pioneered the Tyrolean rolled his eyes.

“Now I hear a woman is trying to do it,” he said disdainfully. “It’s silly the most boring kind of climbing.”

House grinned impishly. “Yeah,” he said. “I wonder who invented that, anyway?” Messner didn’t crack a smile.

I’d like to be able to report that, as he left, the world’s most famous alpinist cast an envious eye on the younger men or clapped them on the back. But no torches were passed, ceremonial or otherwise. Messner stood and posed for a few last pictures with House, nodded a curt farewell, and strode off at a fast clip, his retinue in tow.

House seemed more amused than disappointed. “He projects this idea that alpinism is over: He did all this stuff; now it’s finished,” House said. “But, hey, he’s still the man.”

THAT SAME DAY, House and Anderson began packing for their climb. They did the food first: piles of Stove Top stuffing with packets of Gu and baggies of a powdered drink mix called Spiz, enough for 12 days. “In Alaska, you’d take [enough for] 24,” Anderson said, and House nodded, tossing in some chunks of halvah and a few tins of kippered herring, which he called “my own special burden.”

A day later they started winnowing their gear, an exercise in minimalism that was spectacular to behold. Their single-wall tent weighed two pounds. Their sleeping bag why take two? was a featherlight quilt of Polarguard that House had stitched together himself and that compressed to fit inside a helmet. Their “rack” was, by rock-climbing standards, tiny: five ice screws, nine stoppers, or nuts, nine titanium pitons, three spring-loaded camming devices, 20 wire-gated carabiners, two locking carabiners, and two rappel devices. The only redundancy was an extra camera. “In the modern world of climbing,” House noted, “if you come back without pictures, no one will believe you.” In all, it came to 64 pounds; by splitting the load, they’d be able to do most of the climbing with their packs on.

On the evening of August 27, my last night in camp, House placed a sat-phone call to a meteorologist in Jackson, Wyoming, and got a provisional go-ahead. The next morning, at 4 a.m., I joined the two for a hike to the glacier where the route begins. But at dawn, the cloud deck was still hovering menacingly a few thousand feet above the valley floor, and when I left them an hour later they were pondering whether to launch or not.

In the end, they started four days later, on September 1. Day two was technically the hardest, with several ice pitches up to 90 degrees, while day three was the longest, an 18-hour marathon with more than 30 pitches that ended only when they found a bergschrund on which to camp. The psychological crux came on the fourth day, when they had to find a way through a seemingly impassable rock band and did after a desperate hour of searching.

“If we hadn’t,” House told me later, “we’d have been looking at 60 to 80 rappels to get down, and with the gear we had we couldn’t have done it.”

Summit day, day six, was interminable. They’d camped at 24,278 feet, but soft snow in the morning bogged them down, and it took an hour to make the first 200 feet. When House looked over at Anderson and asked him how he felt, Anderson put a finger to his temple and pulled an imaginary trigger a positive sign, House concluded, because it meant Anderson was “still able to make a joke.”

They reached the summit just before sunset, stayed an exultant 15 minutes, returned to their high camp, and, after a few hours of sleep, descended via the Messner Route, the same way House and Miller had bailed the year before. A day later, as they stumbled down the moraine in a state of complete exhaustion, four strange men came running out of the junipers and embraced them in terrifying bear hugs. It took House a few minutes to realize that among them were Rana and Ghulam, the assistant cook. In base camp, House hugged a tearful Hussein.

“Success, Fida, success!” he said, before the emotion became too much and he stole off to his tent.

IN JANUARY, at the Ouray Ice Festival, House gave a slide show about the climb to a packed crowd, admitting that he’d been fairly depressed after the ascent. The last word of the night came from a man with a cane standing at the back of the room: Jeff Lowe, a Utah climber who was once one of America’s top alpinists and is now stricken with multiple sclerosis.

“Rather than a question like everyone else had, he just had a comment that brought huge applause,” says American Alpine Journal‘s Kelly Cordes, who was there. “Something like ‘Steve, you shouldn’t be depressed. You’ve done something great and you’ve brought it all back to everyone here. Congratulations on a truly great ascent!’ “

“Jeff could certainly relate to Steve’s ambition and life-driving passion for climbing as much as anyone ever could,” Cordes continues, “and here he is, one of the all-time greats, now dealing with something much bigger than climbing, offering those pure and positive words of encouragement. It put a lump in my throat.”

The next month, House and Anderson flew to France for the Piolet d’Or awards and won hands down. After House threatened to bolt the “yellow ax” to the bumper of his van, Anderson took it home “for safekeeping.” The two stayed close, and even though Anderson’s wife gave birth to a baby boy in June, he headed back to Pakistan with House late in the summer to attempt the “gnarly” south face of the unclimbed east summit of Kunyang Chhish, a 25,590-foot peak north of Gilgit. “We had one great climb together,” Anderson told me a few days before they left. “This one may not have the same magic as the Rupal, but I hope it does.”

For the moment, at least, the partnership was intact. And in the end, perhaps that was the thing House had been seeking all along maybe even more than the Rupal Face itself.

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To bag, or not to bag: That is the question.

Alan Douglas

Alan Douglas, a.k.a. “the Arch Lomondeer”

Buachaille Etive MĂłr

Baggers’s Banquet: Glen Coe’s Buachaille Etive MĂłr

Scotland

Map of Scotland by Mike Reagan

Charlie Campbell, Mike Lates, Highlands' Applecross Forest, Dave Hewitt

RAMBLE ON: from left, super Munro-bagger Charlie Campbell near Glasgow; mountain guide Mike Lates on the Isle of Skye; an ancient wall in the Highlands’ Applecross Forest; Dave Hewitt, editor of The Angry Corrie

Inaccessible Pinnacle

THE LAST MUNRO: the dreaded Inaccessible Pinnacle, on the Isle of Skye

Alan Douglas and I are sitting in the otherwise empty car park at Rowardennan, on the shores of Loch Lomond, in western Scotland, glumly watching raindrops splatter across his windshield. Up above us, shrouded in a not-so-wee bit of mist, is a giant haystack called Ben Lomond. As the southernmost of the so-called Munros—the 284 Scottish peaks higher than 3,000 feet—Ben Lomond endures the plodding boot steps of more than 30,000 hill walkers a year. But on this wet May day, there may be just two of us heading up—or no one at all.

Douglas, who’s invited me to climb the peak with him, leans forward to squint at the sky. “I don’t know,” he says. “On a normal day, I might not start if it was like this.”

Is my host serious? Or is he just offering me, a newcomer to the sport of Munro bagging, an easy out? I’ll never know, because suddenly, without any warning at all, the rain stops. Before it can change its mind, we hop out of the car, pull on our daypacks, and set off—not on the main path up Ben Lomond’s gentle southern shoulder but on a narrower one that approaches the peak via its less visited western flanks. “Twenty years ago there wasn’t any path here at all,” Douglas says as I pant along behind him. Then he laughs. “Actually, I suppose I’m partly to blame for it.”

A hawk-nosed 60-year-old from the nearby village of Killearn, Douglas first started climbing Ben Lomond as a teenager, back in the sixties. But it wasn’t until the mid-nineties that his career as “the Arch Lomondeer,” as a fellow hill walker once dubbed him, really began. In 1987, his employer, the Clydesdale Bank, was gobbled up by a larger bank, and Douglas, a computer-services manager, was slowly phased out.

What Douglas mostly does these days, it seems, is climb Ben Lomond—three or four times a week, sometimes even twice a day. When people ask him about it, he tells them he’s no different than a golfer who enjoys playing the same course over and over. “They always say, ‘Ah, but that’s different every time,’ ” he tells me. “Well, so it is with this.”

We toil on, cresting a little “top,” or subsidiary peak, called Ptarmigan, dropping down a few hundred feet to a spongy bog, and then heading back up into the mist. Only it’s not really toiling. It’s perfect walking country, this: hillsides carpeted with heather and fragrant yellow gorse, crunchy patches of last year’s bracken scattered here and there, springy soil underfoot.

The heather gives way to rock and then, surprisingly, snow. Above us, I can just make out the dim outline of Ben Lomond’s summit. It’s steep and, to the left, downright vertiginous, with big cliffs falling away into a deep corrie, or cirque—a typical feature of Scottish peaks, many of whose northern aspects were formed by glaciation.

Two hours out from the parking lot, we crest a little rise to find a tapered concrete pillar about four feet high. It’s a surveyor’s mark—a “trig point,” Douglas calls it—marking Ben Lomond’s 3,192-foot summit. We stand there peering out at the view of… nothing. Then, right on cue, the clouds tear open and we catch a couple of glimpses that, for me, seem to crystallize the dual essence of Scotland: to the south, emerald farm fields, silvery lochs, and the distant smudge of industrial Glasgow; and to the north, the Highlands, a wild landscape of snowcapped peaks, rugged moors, and, as far as I can see, no towns at all.

The clouds close in again. Douglas takes out a little gadget to measure the wind speed and temperature—21 miles per hour and three degrees Celsius, about 37 Fahrenheit—and jots them in a notebook, then starts down the main path in search of a windless lunch spot. A few steps later he stops and turns around.

“Och, I nearly forgot,” he says, reaching out to shake my hand. “Congratulations on your first Munro!”

“Thanks,” I say, feeling a sudden flush of pride. “And congratulations on your—well, how many Ben Lomonds is it?”

Douglas smiles shyly. “Well,” he says, “today would be my 1,317th.”

LIKE A LOT OF GREAT Scottish traditions—haggis, the bagpipes, the Loch Ness monster—Munro bagging is both silly and serious business. Silly because, well, who really cares how many Scottish mountains you’ve climbed—none of them are particularly big. And serious because, in Scotland, a lot of people actually do care.

“Many of us in this world are interested in systems, categories, and using lists to organize our lives,” says Dave Hewitt, editor of a hill-walking fanzine called The Angry Corrie, which scrupulously tracks the bagging of not only Munros but also Scottish Corbetts (hills of between 2,500 and 3,000 feet) and Grahams (hills of 2,000 to 2,500 feet), among others. “You can call it obsessive or whatever, but the lists provide a motivation and a framework for getting out, and what’s wrong with that?”

Hewitt wouldn’t have gotten an argument from Sir Hugh Munro, a gentleman adventurer who, in 1891, made a fateful contribution to the Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal: “Tables giving all the Scottish Mountains exceeding 3,000 feet in height.” The 35-year-old had already climbed many of the features on his list—283 peaks (a figure since amended to 284) and 255 subsidiary tops (now 227)—and was intent on scaling them all. But he was beaten to the punch by another Scot, the Reverend A. E. Robertson, who after a campaign of more than ten years claimed his last Munro, Meall Dearg, in 1901.

Munro himself never quite got there, dying in 1919 with two Munros unclimbed. But over the next 60 years, about 40 others did, proudly taking their place on the Mountaineering Club’s official list of “compleaters.” Then, in 1974, an outdoor educator named Hamish Brown reeled off a 112-day, self-propelled “continuous round” of the Munros. His book Hamish’s Mountain Walk became a bestseller in Scotland and, coincidentally or not, was followed by a huge upsurge in the popularity of Munro bagging—one that has yet to crest.

If you go to the Scottish Mountaineering Club’s Web site today, you’ll find more than 3,300 registered compleaters, a large number of them English and Dutch, along with a smattering of Americans. For many, the Munros are primarily a competitive challenge—one that can become extreme. Take Charlie Campbell, a part-time postman from Glasgow who, in the summer of 2000, ran, biked, and swam his way up the 284 Munros in the phenomenal time of 48 days and 12 hours. (The swimming came in handy for the sea crossings to the isles of Mull and Skye.) Or Edinburgh’s Steven Fallon, a computer programmer for the National Health Service who has completed an astonishing 12 rounds of the Munros at the tender age of 35.

But there’s another, often overlooked aspect of Munro bagging that, for me, is just as appealing: the idea that roaming around in the hills can be a political act. As in England, where “rambling” developed a keen following among the working class, the roots of Munro bagging—and for that matter, all Scottish climbing—go back to the Industrial Revolution and the nostalgia of Glasgow factory workers for the crags and campfires of their youth. Despite (or perhaps because of) the country’s feudal past—even today, just 350 people hold title to half the private land—the average Scot considers it his right to walk anywhere he pleases. “There’s still a heavy residue of that socialist instinct, and thankfully so,” Hewitt points out. “A lot of people here go out walking to express their freedom, the idea that the hills are ours.”

Scotland’s hills aren’t entirely mine, but I do have a small claim on them: Two hundred and fifty years ago, one of my forefathers, a devout Presbyterian named Walter Buchanan, emigrated from Stirlingshire to Pennsylvania. Though my family has always honored that heritage via the usual means—tartan boxer shorts and bathrobes and, of course, single-malt whisky—none of us ever got around to actually visiting the place. Then, 12 years ago, my sister met a Scottish strawberry farmer at a wedding in San Francisco—and married him.

The Scottish mountains surprised me the first time I saw them. They were bigger and more beautiful than I had expected, and something in their majestic contours—perhaps their soft cloaks of green—seemed to invite the casual climber onto their heights. Nor did there seem to be any incentive not to go: no signs, no fences. According to my brother-in-law, there was no such thing as criminal trespassing in Scotland.

A year later, my sister sent me a guide to the Munros for Christmas. Most were walk-ups, but a select few involved scrambling or tricky traverses, and one, the Isle of Skye’s Sgurr Dearg—also known as “the Inaccessible Pinnacle”—required a bit more. The “east ridge is narrow and remarkably exposed, with vertical drops on both sides and a disconcerting lack of really good handholds,” the guide reported. “If there is a wind blowing, the situation may seem to be precarious.” As I read on, a vague idea began to take shape. How many Munros could an inspired visitor climb in a week? If I were to start at my sister and brother-in-law’s farm, near Edinburgh, could I make it all the way to Skye? Would the notoriously fickle weather allow me a shot at Sgurr Dearg—and if so, could I handle it?

A Munro-bagging holiday doesn’t require much planning. I already had the guidebook and a pair of boots. I could have packed some camping gear, too—in Scotland you can pretty much camp anywhere. But why bivy in the rain if you could plunk down 20 pounds at one of the country’s ubiquitous B&Bs, take a good soak in a seven-foot bathtub, and load up on eggs and blood sausage in the morning? At the last minute I threw in a compass, for form’s sake, and I was ready to go.

DRIVING NORTH FROM BEN LOMOND, I wind through the Trossachs, a picturesque region of forested lochs and crags much romanticized in the writings of Sir Walter Scott. But for me the Highlands really begin a bit farther north, with the great wilderness of Rannoch Moor, a high, desolate wasteland of heathery tussocks and bogs. Here the road parallels the West Highland Way, a well-trod 95-mile hiking trail that runs from Glasgow to Fort William, at the foot of 4,406-foot Ben Nevis, Britain’s highest peak.

The few small hotels along the way are clogged with “ramblers”—not really hill walkers but walkers, pure and simple. Checking out their anoraks and the dorky map pouches strung around their necks, I can’t help but feel a certain smug superiority—pretty much the same attitude, I am to discover, that climbers sling at Munro-baggers.

After Rannoch Moor, the road swings west and begins to drop down to the sea in the great green trough of Glen Coe. It’s Scotland’s version of Yosemite—no really big walls, but a triumphal avenue of glacially sculpted peaks and high, hidden valleys. I find a B&B in Ballachulish, on nearby Loch Leven, and in the morning return to the glen intent on bagging my second Munro, 3,773-foot Bidean nam Bian, Gaelic for “Pinnacle of the Hills.”

The terrain is much steeper than Ben Lomond’s, and by the time I reach the summit, it’s snowing hard, and the view I’m counting on is gone. Rather than retreat the way I’ve come, I decide to continue east along a ridge to another Munro, Stob Coire Sgreamhach, “Peak of the Dreadful Corrie,” eventually glissading down a scree gully to the valley bottom. It’s a long day—eight hours, car to car—but one of the most exhilarating ridge walks I’ve ever done. Plus I’ve scored a bonus Munro!

That night in Fort William, I face a decision: Should I keep moving north or stay and attempt Ben Nevis, the biggest Munro of them all? I’m tempted—the Ben is just a straightforward five-mile plod by the so-called tourist path—but in the end I give it a miss. It will be a good candidate for my last Munro, I decide, should I ever attain the exquisite status that The Angry Corrie refers to as “M-minus-1.”

Just south of Loch Ness, I turn west off the main road to Inverness and begin the long, beautiful drive to Skye. The road runs over a stretch of moorland and drops into a narrow valley. Glen Shiel is a Munro-bagger’s paradise: All you have to do is climb up from one side of the road or the other and start ticking. Yet when I reach the trailhead for a peak called the Saddle—a unique Munro, in its lack of a Gaelic name—there’s just one other vehicle in the car park.

The Saddle is on my list because of a famous knife-edge called the Forcan Ridge—a classic, dramatically exposed route that I’m hoping will offer some psychological preparation for the terrors of the Inaccessible Pinnacle. As I approach it, I overtake a young couple with the telltale hill walker’s accessories, “hiking sticks,” strapped to their daypacks. They seem pleased to have the company, and I am, too—the ridge has a number of less-than-obvious passages and slippery downclimbs, and it helps to share the route-finding chores.

An hour later we’re on the summit, picnicking on a grassy slope near the trig point and soaking up the view. The Saddle, the woman proudly informs me, is her 87th Munro, and she plans to tick another before nightfall. Tomorrow she and her husband will do the South Glen Shiel Ridge, a 14-mile jaunt giving seven Munros, then cross the glen and tag the Five Sisters of Kintail on Sunday. If the weekend works out according to plan, she’ll be back at work Monday morning with 100 Munros in the bag. She looks at her husband and snorts. “You’re stuck on forty-something, aren’t you?”

He shrugs: “She’s goal-oriented, and I’m not.”

“I DON’T LIKE SKYE,” the proprietor of a shop in Fort William had told me. “We call it Little England, because the bloody Brits have taken over. They’re like some of your countrymen, I’m afraid—you hear them before you see them.”

Sure enough, Mike Lates, the guide I’ve been e-mailing about Skye’s legendary Black Cuillin Ridge, where ten of the most difficult Munros stand virtually side by side, turns out to be English—or, as he puts it, “a person of confused nationality.” Born in Bedfordshire, Lates spent his teenage years rock-climbing in Wales, and then moved to Skye at age 25. Before hanging out his shingle as a guide, he spent a couple of years working at one of Skye’s numerous salmon farms—one reason, he says, that he’s escaped the hostility that usually greets “incomers.”

“The In Pinn, eh?” Lates says when I stop by his cottage in the little village of Luib. “I don’t tend to be too patient with that—you really see hill-walking culture in all its glory.” He agrees to take me on one condition: Instead of trudging up the normal approach on the shoulder of Sgurr Dearg, we get a bit of sport by scaling the walls of Corrie Lagan. “That’s my mission in life, chief,” he says. “Converting hill walkers into proper mountain climbers.”

The next morning Lates and I make the 20-mile drive from Luib to Glen Brittle, trailhead for the southern end of the Black Cuillin Ridge. The Skye landscape is forlorn, bereft of trees and, for the most part, people. In the 19th century, it was a central site in one of Scotland’s saddest chapters—the Clearances, in which crofters, or tenant farmers, were forcibly exiled to make way for sheep. On Skye alone, some 34,000 people were packed onto ships, at times with only a day’s notice, and sent to North America.

We hike into Corrie Lagan under a gentle rain, then begin to climb steeper slopes toward a distinctive rock formation known in Gaelic as the Cioch, or “Tit.” An hour later, having roped up and topped out on it, we’re standing on the main crest of the Cuillin, a startlingly sheer, unvegetated massif and the only true alpine landscape in Britain. Following the ridge north, we encounter a severe “mauvais pas,” as Lates refers to it—a scary, sloping traverse with a nasty drop beneath, and no good place to put one’s hands. Lates tells me to stand up straight and trust my feet—the very opposite of the scrambler’s instinct to reach out and grab something. Passing safely, we trek across the airy, lunar summits of two Munros, Sgurr Alasdair and Sgurr Mhic Choinnich, named after two 19th-century figures who pioneered climbing on Skye, Alexander Nicholson and John MacKenzie. Then it’s on to the Inaccessible Pinnacle, the 200-foot-high shark’s fin projecting from Sgurr Dearg.

When we get there, we’re greeted with a bizarre scene—a writhing alpine tableau as imagined by Brueghel. Nine or ten people, roped up and helmeted, are strung out along the razor-thin back of the fin, clinging to it in various states of alarm. At the base of the rock stand another 10 or 12 climbers, attended by their guides, waiting in line.

“My God, it’s tragic,” says Lates.

Growing impatient, he proposes a different line to the summit—a rock climb up South Crack, an obvious feature that splits the In Pinn’s south face. He leads the thing in about four minutes and keeps the rope tight as I claw my way up to join him.

“Yee-haw,” he says, somewhat perfunctorily. “Way to go, chief.”

We’ve jumped ahead of at least 15 people with our little stunt, but there are still half a dozen baggers in front of us, a fearful cluster facing the Munroist’s ultimate nightmare: the 60-foot abseil, or rappel, off the rock’s overhanging west face. One woman stalls repeatedly on the brink, her face entirely drained of color.

“Am I abseiling, or are you lowering me?” she whimpers to her guide.

“I’m lowering you,” the guide says, glancing back at Lates and rolling his eyes. “Now lean back and keep your feet between you and the rock.”

A minute later, a rangy guy in an orange jacket crawls up behind us and collapses on the summit, grinning with terror. “I don’t know what I’m doing up here in all this kit,” he says, tugging at his climbing harness. “I’m just a hill walker, and I’ll always be a hill walker.”

Down on the rocks below, an impromptu party breaks out, with Pinnacle survivors cheering their mates on. When the guy in the orange jacket finally makes it to the ground, the joy on his face is so palpable I can only assume that the long trick is over—Sgurr Dearg is his last Munro, number 284, the end of the line.

“Noooo, man, I’ve a fair few left,” he says. “But it’s downhill from here, isn’t it?”

IN THE MORNING I awake to find my thigh muscles in a state of gridlock, and both big toenails beginning to turn an ominous shade of purple. Much worse, though, is the hangover I’ve acquired courtesy of the Sconser Lodge Hotel, a Fawlty Towers–type establishment whose eccentric staff and roster of guests—some climbers, some not—insisted on celebrating my conquest of the In Pinn well into the wee-est of hours. Still, a Munro-bagger’s list is never complete—or at least mine isn’t. And so, slipping on a pair of very un-Scottish flip-flops, I climb into the car and head north.

Beyond Skye, the Highlands grow progressively wilder. My first stop is Liathach, a famously steep four-mile-long ridge that, according to the Scottish mountaineer W. H. Murray, “certainly does fire the heart of a man too long accustomed to rounded shapes and long slopes of grass.” It takes a while to fire mine—at first my objectives, Liathach’s two Munros, are completely invisible, as is everything else. But after an hour’s climb, I pop out of thick fog into an unexpected world of rocky pinnacles, bright sun, and blue sky. Scotland is nowhere to be seen; in its place, a gauzy white sea rolls away to the horizon.

A day later, I’m 50 miles north of Torridon, near Dundonnell, going for one final twofer, on a mountain called An Teallach, “the Forge.” It’s another airy ridge walk around a gaping glacial corrie—the finest such ridge, according to the guidebooks, outside of Skye. There’s fog again, but this time it doesn’t relent. I lose the trail repeatedly and then, on one of the forepeaks, get totally turned around and nearly walk off the back of the mountain before I remember the compass sitting in my pack.

What I’m looking for up here, beyond the two Munros, is a famous rock pillar called Lord Berkeley’s Seat, where one can supposedly sit and wiggle one’s toes over a thousand feet of air. It seems like an appropriately Byronic note on which to end my holiday. I traverse three increasingly steep and scary towers, made all the more slippery by the dense mist, but somehow I never find the seat.

The descent is painful, with my muscles now in full rebellion and long boggy passages threatening to suck my boots off. I keep my mind occupied by adding up the totals: seven climbing days, almost 30,000 vertical feet, 11 Munros, and two completely dead big toenails. True, Charlie Campbell, the speed-bagging-record holder, collected 52 Munros in the same space of time. But my totals aren’t bad for a first-timer. Eleven down, 273 to go.

Naturally the skies over An Teallach begin to clear just as I reach the car. As I drive south toward the strawberry farm, I keep glancing in the rearview mirror for one more look at the teetering spire of Lord Berkeley’s Seat. Someday, I realize, I’ll have to go back and climb An Teallach again. I’ve ticked it, all right, but I can’t quite cross it off the list.

Getting There: Only Continental Airlines flies direct to Scotland, offering year-round flights to Glasgow and Edinburgh from Newark for about $800 (800-231-0856, ). Other U.S. carriers connect in London or Manchester. Or take the train from London’s Euston Station to Glasgow for five hours of rolling countryside; round-trip fares start at $170 (011-44-845-722-2333, ).

Prime Time: Straddle the busy season by hitting the Highlands in either May and June or September and October. That way, you may avoid the fearsome midges (biting insects like no-see-ums) that swarm, like tourists, in humid July.

Getting Around: Car rental starts at around $350 per week for an economy-size vehicle. Alamo has 12 locations in Scotland, at major airports and in cities (011-44-870-400-4562, ). First ScotRail’s above-average train service connects Highlands destinations (including Fort William, Inverness, and Rannoch) to Glasgow and Edinburgh, with multiple daily departures (011-44-845-755-0033, ).

Bagging Munros: While Scotland’s peaks aren’t Himalayan in stature, a good day in the hills will leave you longing for a comfortable bed and a warm, inviting pub. Here’s a guide to where to eat, drink, and recharge for another day of bagging. LOCH LOMOND // The village of Drymen, near the southeastern corner of the lake, is a fine base for climbing Ben Lomond (the trailhead is ten miles north in Rowardennan). Stay at the Buchanan Arms Hotel, a dowdy but charming inn with 52 rooms, plus a swimming pool and fitness center (doubles, $282–$320, including breakfast; 011-44-1360-660-588, ). For evening libations, check out the Clachan Inn, Scotland’s oldest licensed pub, with an attached B&B offering rooms from $40 (011-44-1360-660-824). GLEN COE // At the eastern entrance to Glen Coe is the 22-room Kingshouse Hotel, with a famous climbers’ bar featuring pub grub and hill-walking memorabilia (doubles, $96–$111; 011-44-1855-851-259, ). Nestled farther down the valley is the 23-room Clachaig Inn, the hangout spot for climbers and Munro-baggers (doubles, $63–$79; 011-44-1855-811-252, ). If you’re feeling flush, splurge on one of 17 royally appointed rooms at Inverlochy Castle, a luxury country-house hotel on a 500-acre estate four miles north of Fort William (doubles, $602–$1,035; 011-44-1397-702-177, ). For some of the Highlands’ best seafood, try the Crannog West Highland Seafood restaurant, overlooking Fort William’s Loch Linnhe (011-44-1397-705-589, ). ISLE OF SKYE // The hamlets of Sconser and Sligachan offer easy access to the Red and Black Cuillin. Try the Sconser Lodge Hotel, with eight rooms, a lively bar, and a traditional dining room (doubles, $150–$206; 011-44-1478-650-333, ), or the 22-room Sligachan Hotel, where you’ll find an impressive single-malt selection, a microbrewery, and fine Scottish fare at the Cairidh restaurant (doubles, $90; 011-44-1478-650-204, ). WESTER ROSS // Dozens of stunning pinnacles and Munros dominate the landscape between the small villages of Torridon and Dundonnell in this coastal region. Snooze in towered splendor at the Loch Torridon Country House Hotel, where many of the 19 bedrooms have views of the awe-inspiring Liathach Ridge (doubles, $285–$622, including breakfast; 011-44-1445-791-242, ). Located just a mile from the trailhead for An Teallach, the roadside Dundonnell Hotel, in Ross-shire, has a surprisingly good restaurant and 28 rooms (doubles, $122–$159, including breakfast; 011-44-1854-633-204, ).

Guides: Skye Guides has ten years of instruction-and-guiding experience on Skye’s many peaks, including Sgurr Dearg, led by rock ace Mike Lates (011-44-1471-822-116, ). Fort William–based West Coast Mountain Guides offers private guide services and both summer and winter courses on local peaks (011-44-1397-700-451, ).

Resources: The Munros: Scottish Mountaineering Club Hillwalkers’ Guide (1999) includes photos and route maps. A CD-ROM version is available for $74 (). Tiso, a UK outdoor-store chain, can supply all hill-walking essentials.

The post The High Hills of Freedom appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

When Christian Beckwith hitchhiked into Jackson, Wyoming, in the spring of 1993, his game plan was pretty simple: find a couch to sleep on, score a part-time job, go climbing. A little over a year later, though, the bookish, bespectacled 25-year-old New Englander had embarked on something more ambitious: a climbing 'zine called The Mountain Yodel. True, the Yodel was just 20 pages of throwaway newsprint, but it had a lofty aim: to give a voice to the Tetons' passionate but sometimes divergent community of rock climbers, skiers, and mountaineers. And for a few years there, locals say, it did just that.

The Alpinist

CLEAN LINES: a cover from Christian Beckwith’s Alpinist

Christian Beckwith

BIG DREAMER: Alpinist editor Christian Beckwith at home in Jackson, Wyoming

Marc Ewing

MONEY MAN: Marc Ewing inside his Jackson living room

Among the juiciest morsels in the Yodel were its editorials—or, rather, manifestos. Despite the relative skimpiness of his climbing rĂ©sumĂ©, Beckwith didn't hesitate to condemn what he saw as climbing's evils, including the increasing reliance on bolts, or artificial anchors, and other adventure-killing contrivances. Above all, he denounced the drift toward commercial sponsorship and “business climbing.”

“Who will speak of the integrity and respect and humility that climbers need to practice and defend?” he thundered in the Yodel's first issue. The answer was found at the bottom of the page, where Beckwith affixed his huge, looping, decidedly unhumble signature.

“It's pretty interesting the way Christian signs his name,” says snowboarder and climber Stephen Koch, nodding with mock solemnity. “There's definitely something going on there. You ought to get one of those handwriting-analyst guys to look into it.”

Across the table—I'm with Koch and Beckwith in a Jackson restaurant, late at night—Beckwith folds his arms over his chest, looking slightly miffed. But eventually he offers a story. When he left Jackson in 1996 to take his first “real” job, as the youngest-ever editor of The American Alpine Journal, he found himself working with Bradford Washburn, the Harvard-educated cartographer, now 94, who is the American Alpine Club's grayest eminence. Washburn told Beckwith that while he liked everything about him, he wondered about his signature.

“‘Young man,'” says Beckwith, imitating Washburn's patrician speech and scowl, “‘it looks like you fancy yourself!'”

Beckwith is no longer the editor of The American Alpine Journal. Three years ago, in an episode that startled the insular world of climbing, he abruptly lost his job—a job that, like an appointment to the Supreme Court, was widely regarded as a life-tenure position. But just a few months later he resurfaced at the helm of a most unlikely climbing magazine: Alpinist, a glossy quarterly predominantly focused on the sport's most demanding—and perhaps most obscure—subdiscipline.

In essence, alpinism is the art of climbing big mountains in good style—in other words, by hard routes and “fair means,” with a minimum of gear and support. Slogging up the beaten path on Mount Everest doesn't count, but tackle it Messner style—alone, without oxygen, and by a new route—and you definitely qualify. For Beckwith and his heroes—past demigods like Walter Bonatti and contemporary standouts like Steve House—alpinism sometimes seems to be as much a spiritual challenge as a physical one.

“You take the biggest problems and resolve them in the simplest, most aesthetic way possible,” he explains. “It's more interesting, more nuanced, more beautiful than any other form of climbing. It's so complex, so dangerous, that it just becomes this paradigm of human potential.”

Featuring detailed expedition stories, some as long as 10,000 words, and in-depth “mountain profiles” (climbing histories of famously challenging peaks like Patagonia's Fitz Roy and Pakistan's Gasherbrum IV), the two-and-a-half-year-old Alpinist is a throwback to a simpler era, one in which readers actually had time to read. Its thick, gleaming paper, arresting photos, hyperclean layout, and almost eerie lack of ads make it what magazine pros call a “dream book”—the publishing world's equivalent of a concept car.

“Climbing and Rock & Ice—people chuck those things all the time,” says climber Kelly Cordes, referring to the two most established American climbing magazines. “But nobody is chucking their Alpinists—they're too beautiful. They're works of art.”

Therein lies the magazine's unique appeal, and its dilemma. Alpinist clearly wants to be the bible of mountaineering's hardcore, the men (and sometimes women) who live in their vans and eat sardines with their pitons, and especially the so-called Brotherhood, true believers like House who risk it all on high, stormy faces. Yet its $12.95-an-issue price makes it an extravagant indulgence for the average rock jock—and, with just over 5,000 subscribers, it has yet to be profitable.

“My dirtbag friends who are sitting in a tent right now down at Indian Creek might not be able to afford it,” acknowledges Beckwith. “But one will buy it and it'll circulate through 20 sets of hands—we hear that all the time.”

What's kept Alpinist afloat until now is a latter-day Medici named Marc Ewing, an amiable, self-effacing 35-year-old software tycoon and sometime climber. The Chicago-based Ewing, who cofounded Alpinist with Beckwith, has so far sunk more than $1.5 million into the magazine, and though he threatened to back out last summer, he says he's willing to spend more. But at some point, even Medicis run out of patience, and it seems inevitable that Alpinist will either have to make its way in the marketplace or fold. Which, for the magazine's defiantly purist editor, could pose some interesting challenges.

“I don't want to do commercial art,” Beckwith says. “For me the ideal is something that has no commercial aspect whatsoever.”

On a sunny morning in Jackson, Beckwith, Koch, and I pile into Beckwith's Subaru wagon and head 160 miles east for a day of sport climbing near Lander, Wyoming. (Sport climbing, which Alpinist has never featured, involves using ample, evenly spaced bolts from top to bottom on a route.) A few days ago, Beckwith shipped the final pages of Alpinist 9 to a printing plant in China. Now, from behind the wheel, he recaps the issue's highlights, including a story on what he calls one of the “climbs of the year”: Kelly Cordes and Josh Wharton's first ascent, in July, of the southwest ridge of Pakistan's 20,623-foot Great Trango Tower.

Though Beckwith has never set foot in Pakistan, he deftly conjures the jagged, 7,400-vertical-foot route and the terrible choice it posed for the two Colorado climbers. “They ran out of water on day three, but there was no way they were going back,” he says, glancing over, eyes shining. “The route was way too complicated—too many runouts and tension traverses and pendulums—to turn around. The only way off was to go up and over.”

As we approach the limestone cliffs of Sinks Canyon, a few miles outside Lander, Beckwith's expansive mood gives way to seriousness. At five foot seven, with rimless glasses and a stern demeanor, he stands in marked contrast to his strapping, gregarious climbing partner—a brooding Jeff to Koch's Mutt. He climbs deliberately and with dark intensity, and when he falls he glowers. “It's frustrating,” he says after peeling off a route rated 5.11a. “You just can't do 70 hours in the office and then come out here and expect to climb halfway decently.”

Beckwith, who grew up on a farm in Warren, Maine, and went to college at the University of Vermont, got his first taste of rock climbing during a 1990 junior year abroad in Canterbury, England. There, classmates introduced him to the legendary crags of North Wales—as well as the area's lively pub scene. When Beckwith arrived in Jackson three years later, after stints at climber hangouts like Joshua Tree, California, and Hueco Tanks, Texas, he was struck by the lack of similar social opportunities for Teton climbers. So he helped create an outing club called the Wayward Mountaineers.

“Christian was always the instigator,” says Angus Thuermer, co-editor of the Jackson Hole News & Guide. “He organized slide shows, speaker programs, avalanche-training sessions —stuff that went pretty deep. And it was always followed by a party.”

Beckwith was a night owl who could quote poetry and argue climbing history into the wee hours—and still find time, as Koch jokes, “to kiss every woman in Jackson.” Not everyone was charmed, however, especially once his moralizing editorials began appearing in the Yodel.

“I remember thinking, Man, this guy is fun and bright, but he's only been climbing a very short while,” says Sam Lightner Jr., a former Jackson resident and accomplished sport climber. “Seems like a pretty short time in the sport to make all these beliefs the absolute gospel.”

One summer, Lightner and some friends put up a difficult route in the Tetons' Garnet Canyon, placing a few bolts in the process. Lightner knew that the route, a tough 5.12, was too hard for Beckwith to climb, so as a rebuttal to his anti-bolting rants he named it Yodel This.

Another rebuff came from Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia and a part-time Jackson resident. When Beckwith approached him in 1994 asking for advice about the Yodel, Chouinard told him it would never succeed. Still, Beckwith clearly made an impression. A few months later, when the longtime editor of The American Alpine Journal, H. Adams Carter, suddenly died, Chouinard recommended Beckwith for the position.

Thus did Beckwith obtain what's undoubtedly the most influential post in mountain climbing: the editorship of the Journal, an annual 500-page compendium of “the world's most significant climbs” that is distributed to the club's roughly 7,000 members. By all accounts, he worked tirelessly, in particular reaching out to climbers in the former Soviet Union, whose many accomplishments had never been fully appreciated in the West.

“Christian really modernized the Journal and kept it relevant, and by going out and getting the stories of those guys, he made sure it stayed the journal of record, not just for America but the world,” says Michael Kennedy, the former publisher and editor of Climbing and a seasoned Alpinist in his own right. “I thought he was pretty well psyched to settle in and run the thing for the next 25 or 30 years.”

But six and a half years into the job, in February 2002, Beckwith's tenure came to an abrupt end. There was no single cause, and in part Beckwith simply got caught up in power struggles that were swirling around inside the club. But his high-handedness and brusque business manner were factors, too. He'd alienated a large portion of the club staff, and he sometimes leaped before he looked. In one 1998 e-mail, for instance, sent to a climber friend who had participated in an expedition on Baffin Island whose apparent first ascents Beckwith had questioned, Beckwith added a profane reference to one of the expedition's sponsors, National Geographic. This gratuitous slap got forwarded around, and it did considerable damage to Beckwith's standing in the climbing world.

“It burned me pretty hard,” Beckwith says of the episode. “I never realized the power of e-mail before that.”

Beckwith committed his final blunder on the eve of the club's 2002 annual meeting in Snowbird, Utah, when he threatened to resign in a phone conversation with the club's executive director, Charlie Shimanski. When club president Jim Frush heard about it, he convened a closed-door board meeting at Snowbird and informed the attendees that he had another editor, John Harlin III, ready to take over the Journal. Two hours later, Beckwith was out of a job.

“In the end, I think it was a 'doesn't play well with others' kind of thing,” says Kelly Cordes, a Beckwith hire who is still an assistant editor at the Journal. “When you're part of a big organization, you have to be diplomatic and accountable. When the president of the club is calling you, you gotta call him back. You don't resign and then say you're just kidding.”

The day after his dismissal, Beckwith went ice-climbing in Utah's Maple Canyon—one of his best ice-climbing days ever, he says. When he woke up the next morning, he says, he “felt like I'd been run over by a truck. Then, still processing what had happened, he made the six-hour drive back to Jackson.

Not long after he got back, the phone rang. It was a secretary from Chicago, asking if Beckwith had time to speak with her boss, some guy named Marc Ewing.

“I'm starting a climbing magazine,” Ewing explained a few minutes later, “and I wanted to see if you were interested.”

“Well,” said Beckwith, “your timing is impeccable.”

Like Beckwith, Marc Ewing discovered climbing in college. A computer-science and mathematics major at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University, he occasionally weekended at Seneca Rocks, in nearby West Virginia. After graduating in 1992, Ewing began tinkering with something called Linux—a new, free, nonproprietary computer operating system that was sprouting up in pieces all over the Internet. He soon realized that the working version he'd cobbled together for himself might be something his fellow techies would pay for. “It wasn't like I had some sort of business plan,” Ewing says. “I just wanted to avoid getting a real job.”

In 1994, Ewing and a partner formed Red Hat, a company that made and distributed Linux products and would later be swarmed by investors keen to cash in on the tech boom. Red Hat was capitalized at around $6.5 billion in 1999, and though a lot of that value subsequently vanished, Ewing is in no danger of going broke. According to the 2004 Forbes “40 Under 40” report—an annual ranking of the youngest, richest people in the country—Ewing occupies the 24th spot, just ahead of Julia Roberts, with a fortune estimated at $217 million.

With time and money to spare, Ewing found himself drawn back to climbing, this time in the Tetons. In 2001 he hired Exum guide Kevin Pusey to teach him the basics of winter mountaineering, and a few months later he and his wife, Lisa Lee, bought a house in Jackson. The following winter, Ewing told Pusey he'd been mulling the idea of launching a new climbing magazine. Pusey told him he ought to call a guy named Christian Beckwith.

A lot of people, hearing the short version of the Alpinist story, assume that Beckwith lassoed a gullible nouveau-Jackson type into bankrolling his vision. But in Ewing's first, unsolicited letter to Beckwith, he proposed something very close to what Alpinist became, albeit with a different name.

“Unlike existing books…which cover the world of sport climbing, climbing ‘news,' and competitions, Mountaineering will…place an emphasis on ‘alpine style' climbs, and ‘single push' ascents,” Ewing wrote. “These styles of climbing strip away as much of what is not climbing as possible, leaving only the cleanest interactions with the mountain, the purest ascents, the most intimate experiences.”

“It was fantastic,” recalls Beckwith. “He wanted a magazine devoted to single-push alpine climbs—the market for which is 50. I was like ‘Oh, my God.' ” Within a couple of weeks of their first conversation, Beckwith flew to Chicago to meet Ewing in person. The two look-alikes—Ewing is also short, short-haired, and bespectacled—hit it off immediately.

“I remember thinking, Wow, this guy is pretty rough,” Ewing says. “I mean, he looked like a real climber, all weathered and kind of buffed out. But he was charming, very polite, and I thought, This could work out.”

Beckwith and Ewing launched Alpinist six months later, in August 2002. The offices they chose, all 870 square feet of them, are still located on the second floor of a boxy commercial building in West Jackson—the unchic, industrial-park end of town. Inside are work spaces for six people: Beckwith and Alpinist's marketing-and-circulation director, Andy Leinicke, who sit in separate cubicles; Jon Jones, the production supervisor; office manager Thea Inoue; and two unpaid interns. But it doesn't take long to realize the truth of what one ex-employee, former “mountain editor” Jeff Hollenbaugh, says: “It's an edit staff of one.”

One afternoon during my visit to Jackson, Beckwith wheels across the floor in his chair to show me a mock-up of the latest issue, Alpinist 9. There are only about a dozen full-page ads, clumped at either end of the magazine so as not to distract from the edit pages. The layout is almost self-consciously uncluttered, and the text highly legible. “I want the design to be so utterly simple that readers don't even notice it,” he says. “As soon as your design gets too busy, you lose your ability to affect a reader on an aesthetic level.”

Beckwith obsesses this way about everything in his life. He likes to quote the 19th-century designer William Morris, who once said, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” And in a strange way his own house—a sagging Victorian, surrounded by a fence planked with old skis, that he rents for the astonishingly low Jackson price of $450 a month—bears that out. There's nothing expensive inside, but there's perfect order in the gear closet, an enameled blue saucepan hangs over the stove just so, and it seems that every wall is painted in a different artsy shade.

It's hard to imagine another person sharing this shrine, but lately Beckwith seems to have settled on one girlfriend, a New York ob-gyn who's apparently keen to move to Jackson and start a new lifestyle. Beckwith admits he's not sure whether he's quite ready for her to move in. “I'd like to live in the same town for a while first,” he says.

“Why am I difficult?” he adds rhetorically. “Because I'm a fucking artist—and a perfectionist to boot.”

In the fall of 2003, two Russian alpinists, Valeriy Babanov and Yuri Koshelenko, made a bold first ascent of the southeast ridge of Nepal's Nuptse East I, a 25,604-foot subpeak of Everest's immediate neighbor, Nuptse.

Because of the route's phenomenal length (more than 8,000 vertical feet) and difficulty (it had thwarted nine previous expeditions), the two men fixed ropes more than halfway up, drilling several bolts to secure them, and preset two camps before launching their summit bid. They were dangerously overextended when they finally topped out, after dark on day five, and far too tired to remove much of their gear on the descent.

The climbing world can be a remarkably catty place, so it came as no surprise that not everyone was awed by the Russians' feat. As usual, some of the loudest critics were members of the Brotherhood, the diehard alpine-style purists whose American adherents include Mark Twight and Steve House. In a scathing letter published in Alpinist 7, House wrote, “Alpinism is not: fixed ropes, fixed camps, bolts, high-altitude porters or breathing supplemental oxygen,” adding that “alpinists from all over the world should stand up strongly for good style and draw a line that the style Babanov and Koshelenko employed is no longer acceptable.”

For the Brotherhood, the Nuptse climb is an emotional issue, not just because the route had first been attempted by alpine-style climbers (thus, in their view, ethically obliging subsequent parties to follow suit) but also because the bolts and abandoned ropes had, as House put it, “desecrated” the route. Yet, for the Russians, it is equally emotional. As Babanov explained later, he placed only bolts that he “considered absolutely necessary for safety”—and even so, he and his partner very nearly perished. Had they followed the Brotherhood's rules, they probably would have.

“It comes across too strong sometimes, that hard line, and it's pretty frustrating, because I want to see all climbers become a brotherhood,” says Mark Synott, a New Hampshire climber who's been criticized by purists for participating in commercially sponsored expeditions. “To do single-push stuff on Himalayan peaks—I mean, what about the 99 percent of climbers who aren't good enough or committed enough to do that? It's incredibly elitist.”

Oddly, considering his reputation for being in the Brotherhood camp, Beckwith published Babanov's lengthy account of the Nuptse climb in the same issue as House's denunciation. “I thought it was a great effort that couldn't be discounted,” he says. “I don't publish bullshit, but when I see things that are worthy, I like to publish them regardless of what any individual clique thinks. I believe in beauty; I don't believe in one particular streak of ideology.”

Wherever Beckwith comes down on such matters, he faces a more pressing question: Are there enough people who care either way? To an outsider, the numbers don't seem encouraging: As of January 1, the magazine had just over 5,000 subscribers and was still operating in the red, though Beckwith and Leinicke insist that, at the current rate of growth, subscriber numbers will triple by the end of 2006.

“In advertising-driven magazines, 50,000 readers is kind of the magic number,” says Leinicke, a New York publishing veteran who's the third guy to hold the circulation job. “Here, to break even, I think we'd need only about a third of that.”

“There are a finite number of climbers, and there are an even smaller number of climbers who are actually interested in what we're doing,” Beckwith acknowledges. “That's the inherent limitation of this. We know we can break even and maybe make a small profit, but we don't think we can ever, you know, go gangbusters.”

Nevertheless, he argues, as the brand grows, Alpinist can function as a sort of nonprofit flagship for a host of profitable side businesses, including books, calendars, films, and especially custom-published special issues on behalf of individual corporate clients like Nike and The North Face.

This ambitious scheme won't happen without one crucial element: Ewing's continued support. Early last summer, the rumors began flying that Alpinist was on the ropes. Beckwith had written a new prospectus and was looking for additional investors, and if he didn't find them, Ewing was going to drop out. In the climbing world, this generated a collective “I told you so.”

“How could Ewing not have known what he was getting into?” says one former climbing-magazine publisher, requesting anonymity. “When people asked what I thought about it, based on my experience, I said that if they expected to run it as a business, it was doomed—there was no way to make money on it.”

Ewing relented, after he and Beckwith agreed on a general belt tightening. Hollenbaugh was laid off, and others agreed to pay cuts. Word and photo rates were pared back, and there seems to have been a slight shift in editorial focus, with more coverage of non-Alpinist pursuits like bouldering and rock climbing.

“We were thinking about trying to get some additional investors,” acknowledges Ewing. “But Christian is very stubborn. He wants to stick with what we said we were going to do for the readers, and some of the things that came back were going to cause us to change that and maybe lose some control. So I kind of re-upped my commitment to the magazine, just so we could remain independent and keep pushing.”

How deep is that commitment? Ewing admits he hasn't been climbing in more than a year, mostly because of a new passion: yacht racing. Last summer, with just 18 months of sailing experience, he led a ten-man crew to a respectable eighth-place finish in the highly competitive Farr 40 World Championship.

“I didn't know I had this competitive thing in me, but apparently I do,” says Ewing, laughing. “There's a chance that the next thing could be sailing. It's pretty big for me right now.”

One of the classic mountaineering routes in the Tetons—perhaps the classic—is the Grand Traverse, a north–south scramble along the crest of the range that takes in ten of its highest peaks and, in terms of cumulative elevation gain, surpasses 25,000 vertical feet. Parties normally take three days to do it, though in the summer of 2000, Rolando Garibotti, an Italian-born Alpinist living in Boulder, ran it in just under seven hours.

The day after our sport-climbing excursion to Lander, Beckwith and I set out to knock off the first and simplest leg of the Traverse—a quick climb of Teewinot, the 12,325-foot peak just northeast of the Grand Teton. It's more of a walk-up than an exercise in alpinism, especially since there's no snow or ice on the route. Still, it requires a hefty pull of more than 5,500 vertical feet from the parking lot near Jenny Lake.

Three hours into the climb, we come to a steep, slabby section that requires us to put our hands on the rock, and also do a bit of route finding. The top, when it finally comes, feels like a well- deserved reward. It's a beautiful, airy place—a sharp prow hung out in space, opposite the colossal north face of the Grand Teton. There's room for only one of us at a time on the tiny, exposed point of the summit itself. As Beckwith edges out to it, straddling the rock, I'm relieved to see that he, too, is feeling the exposure.

The descent is a long, thigh-crushing ordeal—just the kind of thing, Beckwith notes, that a Garibotti would do at a dead run. One of his recurrent frustrations at Alpinist, he adds, is not being able to get climbers like the publicity-shy Garibotti to write about their exploits. “He wouldn't touch it,” Beckwith says, sighing. “Usually the people that really deserve to be the heroes of the world want nothing to do with it.”

Toward the bottom of the mountain, Beckwith mentions another, older climber, once a regular in climbing magazines but not heard from much in recent years. “It's a pretty sad story,” he says. “The guy was one of the best and really pushed the standard higher. Now he can't climb at the same level, and as a result he's kind of retreated into this shell. He's bitter, he doesn't know what to do with himself—he basically thinks his life is over.”

When I tell Beckwith that it sounds like the makings of a good magazine piece, he turns and shoots me a quick glance, then continues down the trail.

“No way,” he says. “It's not an Alpinist story.”

The post The Purists appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

LET ME JUST SAY RIGHT OFF THE BAT that I didn’t have any illusions about doing well in the Blackburn Challenge. Or at least not that many. After all, the Blackburn, held each year in mid-July, is the longest open-water race on the East Coast, a 23-mile marathon circumnavigating Cape Ann, the rocky thumb of Massachusetts that juts out into the Atlantic north of Boston. While the beginning and end of the course are in protected waters, the bulk of it—about 20 miles—is in open sea, where anything can happen. Tough people row the Blackburn, and not all of them finish it. What kind of threat was I, a guy from New York who’d rowed crew in college but now got out just a few times a month on the placid waters around Shelter Island?

Blackburn challenge

Not long after arriving in the old fishing port of Gloucester, I stumbled on the Crow’s Nest, the grungy locals’ bar immortalized in The Perfect Storm. I was tempted to go in for a beer but didn’t, fearing the inevitable conversation: “Did you say Shelter Island?” “Actually, I live in Greenport, but it’s near Shelter Island, you know, out on the East End of Long Island.” “Hey, boys, whoo-whee, we got somebody here from Shelter Island!”


Down at the Gloucester High parking lot, launch site for the Blackburn, hard-bitten scullers and paddlers were unloading battered shells and kayaks from their cartops, all the while staring anxiously at the sky. Low, gray clouds were streaming in from the northeast, and the forecast was calling for a major low to pass overhead during the night.


The first guy I talked to was Dana Gaines, 46, a Blackburn veteran who, rowing a two-man shell in 2001, had set the course record of two hours 21 minutes. “I’d say out of ten years, seven are pretty nice, two are bad, and one is awful,” he said when I asked him about the conditions. “Tomorrow’ll probably be one of the bad.”


But the next morning, things seemed OK. Though the wind was blowing out of the north-northeast, the Annisquam River, whose snaking channel we would follow for the first two miles of the course, looked reassuringly flat. The race was set to go off at 7:30, shortly after high tide, the idea being to ride the ebb north to Ipswich Bay and then on to Halibut Point, at the northern tip of the Cape Ann peninsula. After a sweeping turn back to the south, we’d follow the rocky coastline all the way to Eastern Point, at the head of Gloucester Harbor. From there it was a short jog north to the finish line, off Gloucester’s main beach.


By the time I launched, there were about 150 people on the water, split into two main camps—backward-facing rowers and forward-facing paddlers. Eyeing one another warily, we exchanged cursory nods and slowly grouped ourselves into smaller subcategories. The rowing contingent went first, led by four venerable Banks dories, the traditional high-ended, flat-bottomed boats emblematic of Yankee seafaring. After that, at five-minute intervals, came waves of increasingly speedy fixed-seat rowing craft—home-built plywood skiffs, rugged surf boats, fragile wherries, multi-oared gigs. Last among the rowers was my category: sliding-seat racing singles—skinny, tippy fiberglass shells nearly as long and light as those rowed in the Olympics.


As the one-minute warning sounded, I felt an unexpected surge of confidence. True, there were two fast, smooth-stroking guys who were probably out of my league. But the rest of the field of seven looked vulnerable. One rower about my age (45) was clearly fit, but his boat was a couple of feet shorter than my 24-foot one, and thus theoretically slower. There was an aging graybeard (he would wilt down the stretch, I figured), a petite, if determined-looking, woman, and a fat guy in a life preserver. The dorky vest, I knew, would prevent him from bringing his oars all the way into his body, and thus from completing anything close to a full stroke. Plus, it looked ridiculous—nobody rows in a life preserver.


So it was that, as the starter barked out a few final commands, I mentally assigned myself a podium finish. Not bad for my first stab at the Blackburn!

A CENTRUY AND a quarter ago, Gloucester was the leading fishing port in the world. Gloucestermen departed in racy schooners for “the Banks”—the fish-rich but notoriously storm-tossed shoals that stretch from Cape Cod to Newfoundland. Once there, they fanned out in two-man dories to set trawls, longlines studded with multiple baited hooks, for cod and halibut. Small boats launching from speedy, lightweight mother ships: It was an ingenious technology, but also incredibly dangerous. In Gloucester’s heyday, the 25-year stretch from 1866 to 1890, a staggering 382 schooners and 2,454 men were lost at sea.


But for his strong back and superhuman will—in a story that’s become legend in these parts—Howard Blackburn would undoubtedly have joined those doomed legions. In January 1883, the 23-year-old Nova Scotian signed on to fish halibut aboard the Gloucester schooner Grace L. Fears. Two weeks later, a sudden, blinding blizzard blew in, and he and his dorymate, Thomas Welch, became separated from the Fears. After a desperate night in the tiny open boat, the two decided to make for the coast of Newfoundland, some 60 miles away.


It was a terrible ordeal. On the second night, Welch gave up the oars, lay down, and froze to death. Meanwhile Blackburn, frantically seeking to empty the boat after a wave had swamped it, accidentally bailed his own mittens over the side. Nevertheless he rowed on, his hands eventually freezing into stiff hooks. After five days at sea without food or water, he made the coast of Newfoundland, where a homesteading family took him in and nursed him back to health. In the spring, Blackburn returned to an astonished Gloucester, minus his fingers, half of each thumb, and most of his toes. He quickly became the toast of the town and, once the national press picked up the story, the sea hero of the era.


“Howard Blackburn is still very well remembered in Gloucester,” says John Spencer, cofounder of the Cape Ann Rowing Club, the group that has run the Blackburn Challenge since its inception, in 1987. “Dorymen were the hardiest of fisherman, and he was the toughest of a tough breed.”

THE RACE STARTED pretty much the way I’d expected: The two fast, smooth guys bolted into the lead while the rest of us hung together in a loose pack. It was fun to call out obstacles—”Hey, you’re about to hit that buoy”—and look into the picture windows of elegant waterfront homes. Far more satisfying, however, was picking off the slower vessels that had started before us: the lumbering dories, skiffs, and wherries.


As we approached the lighthouse that marks the end of the Annisquam River, I was sitting comfortably in fourth place among the sliding-seaters. Then we came around the corner into Ipswich Bay, and the real race began.


The wind was blowing hard, driving big waves before it and occasionally pushing whitecaps over their tops. Suddenly, without warning, a wave broke directly over the bow of my boat. It wasn’t really scary—the boat is a sealed, watertight tube, and even the little hollow where my feet are braced has a self-bailer, a sort of one-way drain. But it was still a shock. Back home on Peconic Bay, the only time I ever filled the footwell was when giant powerboats waked me at 20 knots. A minute later I took another wave, and felt a growing sense of alarm. I was soaked, barely moving, and still a good 19 or 20 miles from the finish line.


Incredibly, it got worse. The tide was running in direct opposition to the wind, and at each of the several rocky headlands that lie between Annisquam Light and Halibut Point, the sea pitched up in the most absurdly chaotic mess—a “potato patch,” as sailors sometimes call it—short-period, six-foot-high waves that seemed to come from all directions at once. The footwell was perpetually swamped now, my forearms were pumped from choking the oars in a death grip, and dime-size blisters had begun to well up under the calluses on my palms.


It was at one of these junctures—the second or third potato patch, I think—that I noticed another racer 20 or 30 yards to starboard. It was the sole woman entered in the sliding-seat category—Kinley Gregg, I learned later, a 41-year-old historian from York, Maine. Somehow she was rowing smoothly through the slop, gaining on me at what seemed like four or five feet per stroke. “I like the challenge of uncertain conditions,” Gregg explained to me later. “I abhor the monotony of river rowing, where every stroke is exactly like the last and the oarsman strokes along like a metronome. I say, if it’s not doing anything, it’s not water, and not worth going out.”


Head down and suffering, I barely noticed the other rowers going by. But rounding Halibut Point, I was relieved to see that at least one of them, the guy in the life preserver, was still well astern. Then, just as I turned for the long run across Sandy Bay, he made his move, flanking me 100 yards to port. I glanced over, not quite believing it. Obviously he was riding some secret ocean current that everybody but me knew about. The day’s humiliations were hardly over, though. Behind me, just rounding Halibut Point, I could see a small figure robotically chopping at the water with a double-bladed paddle—the first of the kayakers.

BACK IN 1987, at the inaugural Blackburn Challenge, all 45 of the entrants were oar-powered rowing craft. Of the 167 boats that entered last year, 131 were paddle-powered. No one’s complaining, exactly, but still—is paddling really Blackburnesque?


“The kayaks have really proliferated, and we’ve sort of grudgingly accepted them,” Henry Szostek, a 60-year-old machinist who builds his own boats and has never missed a Blackburn, told me. “But I don’t understand it. I wouldn’t get in any boat you have to know how to operate with your head underwater.”


Of course, when it comes to rowing, paddlers have their own questions. A friend of mine put it best. As I explained the mechanical advantages of rowing—the oar as lever, the oarlock as fulcrum, the sliding seat as a tool for harnessing leg power—he nodded, then frowned. “But how do you know where you’re going?” he said.


You don’t, always, but maybe that’s part of rowing’s appeal. Paddlers, if I may generalize, are forward-looking people, bouncy and optimistic—literalists who focus on their destination the way an ape focuses on a banana. Rowers are backward-looking, complicated, and wistful—romantic grinders who pull for a goal without ever quite seeing it clearly. Face away from what you want, the sport teaches. Put your back into it and pull hard, and someday you’ll get there.


For me, the essential difference between the two disciplines was driven home the night before the race, when the Cape Ann Rowing Club hosted a talk by two ocean rowers, Tom Mailhot, 44, and John Zeigler, 54. A year earlier, the two had raced 35 other crews 2,900 nautical miles across the Atlantic, from the Canary Islands to Barbados. Something about the way Mailhot recounted their time—”58 days, three hours, and 54 minutes”—made the crowd laugh. But the venture had clearly exacted a steep price, wiping out Mailhot’s bank account, wrecking Zeigler’s marriage, and, they freely admitted, taking them right to “the psychological edge.” “Will you do it again?” someone asked. “Next question,” Mailhot snapped.


In a bow to the paddling contingent, the Rowing Club had also invited a kayaker to speak, a 44-year-old flatwater star named Greg Barton. At the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, South Korea, he’d won two events in one day, the 1,000-meter doubles and the 1,000-meter singles, each by a margin of less than a foot. Barton preached the gospel of positive thinking, spiced with the occasional sarcastic zinger. “A lot of people came up to me after the second race and complimented me on my good luck,” he said, “and I was like, ‘Yeah, after 18 years of training, today’s my lucky day.’ “


I should not have been surprised, then, to discover that the kayaker bearing down on me the next day, as I flailed my way south from Halibut Point, was the legendary double gold medalist himself. Yet I was surprised enough that I lost track of the waves now rolling in on my beam—a dangerous blunder in a narrow boat. Before I quite realized what was happening, one rose up in an oddly shaped peak and slapped me on the side of the head. The boat rolled to starboard and I pitched face first into the green Atlantic.


When I surfaced, Barton was a few feet away. “Is everything all right?” he asked. “Do you need any help?” “Maybe a few lessons,” I said, trying to remember the approved technique for hoisting myself back into my boat. “But no, really, I’m fine… . Please, keep going.” “Well, OK,” Barton said doubtfully. “There’s a chase boat right behind me.”

THE HALFWAY POINT of the Blackburn Challenge is the narrow channel between Cape Ann and Straitsmouth Island. I reached it at the two-hour mark, called my bow number to the committee boat that was anchored there, crammed a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup into my mouth, and rowed on.


The second half of the race should have been much easier than the first. I was heading southwest now, with a tailwind and a following sea, and in theory I should have been able to surf merrily down the waves like the kayaks that were now passing me with annoying regularity. On rough days at home, I’d practiced the technique and actually gotten pretty good at it. But here, every time I’d get up to planing speed, the boat would invariably veer off course and stall. It felt sluggish and unresponsive, and I began to fear that I was somehow taking on water and might even be sinking.


Two anxious miles later, having spied a pocket beach amid the rocks, I turned for shore. There, I removed the little cork drain plug in the bow and swung the boat up over my head, expecting a torrent of water to rush out. Nothing—bone-dry. Then I saw the problem: The boat’s skeg, or fin, essential for maintaining a straight-line course, was flopping loosely in its groove on the stern. During a pre-race check that morning, it had seemed a bit wobbly, so I had pulled it out and reseated it with some “miracle adhesive.” The miracle, I suppose, was that the skeg was still attached at all.


What to do? It was either leave the boat in the dunes and make the long walk of shame back to Gloucester, squelching along in my reef socks, or get back in and claw away with my hamburgered hooks, like old Howard B. himself. “Well, all righty then,” I said (I’d reached the point where I was talking to myself out loud), “if you’re gonna put it that way …”


The Blackburn wasn’t quite done with me. I struggled badly rounding the jetty at Eastern Point, the entrance to Gloucester Harbor. The tide was still ebbing furiously and the course lay once again upwind, and for a few minutes I amused some onlooking fisherman by not making any headway at all. Then, suddenly, I broke free of the current’s clutches. The high steeples of Gloucester drew closer with every stroke, and as I came up under the lee of the land, the waves began to diminish.


Flat water! I took a “power 20″—20 strokes at full throttle—and looked over my shoulder just in time to see the mountainous form of the Ocean Club, a 145-foot floating casino bound for international waters. Given the way my day had gone, I half expected something terrible to happen—another capsize or a broken oarlock. But I was a Blackburn veteran now, or almost. I turned to port, cranked smartly on the oars, and got the hell out of the ship’s way.


Five minutes later, I was dragging myself and my shell up on the beach in downtown Gloucester. Most of the early finishers were still there. Dana Gaines and Joe Holland, rowing a wooden double scull, had posted a 2:36, the fastest time of the day. They were followed by two six-man outrigger canoes, another double scull, and Greg Barton, the first solo finisher, just five minutes back in 2:41. One of the two smooth-stroking guys had won my category, sliding-seat racing singles, in a time of 3:05, but Kinley Gregg, the lone female sculler, had overtaken the other for second place in 3:09. My time was 4:04. True, I’d beaten a few of the fixed-seaters. But overall I’d finished 90th, and in my category I was DFL—dead last.


I spent a few minutes pretending to tinker with my boat, then joined the circle where the other sliding-seaters were trading stories. When my turn came, the fat guy in the life preserver—he was still wearing it—looked at me and laughed. “Ah,” he said. “Your first Blackburn.”

The post Blackburn and Blue appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Strel, 49, doesn’t look like Aquaman: At five foot 11 and 230 pounds, he’s a potbellied fireplug. But for 58 days on central Europe’s Danube, in 2000, 68 days on the Mississippi, in 2002, and 24 days on Argentina’s ParanĂĄ, in 2003, Strel—wearing a wetsuit and goggles, swimming freestyle, and escorted by a support team in kayaks and a motorboat—stroked an average of 12 hours and 40 miles a day. Along the way, he racked up world records for the longest nonstop swim (313 miles over 84 hours, set on the Danube) and the longest continous swim (the 2,360 miles he stroked down the Mississippi).

On all three rivers, Strel allowed himself just one daily creature comfort: a bottle of Slovenian wine called Cvicek, half of which he drank during onshore lunches to wash down his energy bars, the other half with dinner at a hotel. “I like it,” he says, “because it doesn’t get me drunk right away.”

Even with a buzz, marathon swimming is rough. One dark morning on the Danube, Strel collided with a barge and was trapped underwater for more than a minute. On day 41 of the Mississippi swim, lightning struck a buoy three feet from Strel, blasting him halfway out of the water. (He kept going.) Two weeks later, a stomach infection forced him to switch to the backstroke so he could roll to one side and barf.

Strel says he first began dreaming of epic swims as a young boy. At 23, he quit teaching guitar and began racing in open-water swimming events, but didn’t feel “psychologically mature” enough to take on extreme distances until 1997, when, at 42, he raised $50,000 to make a 48-mile crawl from Cape Bon, Tunisia, to the Italian island of Pantelleria.

Thousands of miles and millions of dollars in sponsorships later, Strel says the swimming will continue until his body falls apart. “It’s taken me over like a drug,” he admits. He’ll get his next fix this summer in China, where he plans to swim 2,610 miles of the Yangtze—and down ten gallons of Cvicek along the way.

Walking the Seven Seas

RĂ©my Bricka: Stalking the 7 Seas

RÉMY BRICKA FIRST CROSSED the Atlantic Ocean in 1972, sailing luxury-class aboard France, a 1,035-foot passenger steamer. For his second trip, he decided to walk.


The French-born Bricka, then 38, left the Canary Islands on April 2, 1988, with his feet lashed to a pair of 14-foot fiberglass pontoons. Behind him, he towed a raft outfitted with a coffin-size sleeping compartment and carrying fishing tackle, compass, sextant, and three portable water desalinators. Walking 50 miles a day with a precarious upright rowing technique that made him look like a drunk nordic skier, Bricka aimed for the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, subsisting on fish and plankton he scooped up from drifting schools.


Strange as it seems, given these foolproof preparations, there were problems. Two of Bricka’s desalinators bonked halfway through his stroll, so he supplemented his hydration with a daily quart of seawater. Two months in, a Japanese trawler plucked him from the Caribbean near Trinidad. Emaciated and hallucinating (“I saw trolls attack my legs!” he recalls), he’d dwindled from 160 pounds to 110.


The feat—a 3,502-mile hike over open ocean—earned Bricka a Guinness world record but grabbed few headlines in France, where he’s famous for another form of performance art. Clad entirely in white, Bricka tours the country with two dozen instruments strapped to his body and a pet dove and rabbit riding shotgun on his shoulders. He’s known to one and all as L’homme Orchestre, or the One-Man Band.


So far, the only person to challenge Bricka’s water-walking record is Bricka himself. In April 2000, he left Los Angeles, planning to walk the Pacific and arrive in Sydney in time to crash the Summer Olympics. Stoeffler, a French deli-foods company, donated an 11-pound tub of sauerkraut and put up $100,000 for equipment, including freeze-dried meals, an Iridium satellite phone, and a GPS unit.


En route, Bricka ran out of food and his Iridium service shut down. A cyclone packing 50-foot swells thrashed his raft. Using a handheld messaging device, he e-mailed a plea to his wife, in Paris: “Come pick me up now or I’ll have to hitchhike.”


Ten days later, an American tuna boat found Bricka 500 miles south of Hawaii. He’d failed, but it was a grand failure: The oompah man of the sea had covered 4,847 miles in 153 days.

Jogging for 27,705 Miles

Genshin Fujinami Ajari: Jogging for Buddha

“THE ONLY ADVICE I GOT before setting out was to keep my feet warm,” says Genshin Fujinami Ajari, a 46-year-old Buddhist monk in Japan. “Of course, the day before I started, it snowed. I thought to myself, Oh, this is going to be tough.”


Well, nobody ever said enlightenment was easy. Last September, Fujinami, a member of Japan’s devout Tendai sect, finished the ultimate ceremonial slog: a seven-year, 27,705-mile series of laps around the five peaks northeast of Kyoto. He’s only the 49th monk since 1585 to complete the Hieizan Sennichi Kaihogyo, or “Mount Hiei Thousand-Day Circumambulation Practice”—and when you break down what he did, it’s easy to see why so few have triumphed.


For 100 consecutive days in each of his first three years as a pilgrim, Fujinami rose at midnight, prayed, ran and walked 18 miles (stopping 250 times to pray), did chores back at the monastery, ate, and hit the sack. In years four and five, he upped his total to 200 consecutive days. Year six saw him complete a 37-mile course every day for 100 consecutive days, then endure the doiri—seven days without food, water, or sleep while sitting upright and chanting 100,000 mantras. In year seven, he trekked 52 miles a day for 100 straight days, usually from 1 a.m. to 5 p.m., then 18 miles a day for 100 consecutive days.


Fujinami looped Mount Hiei through sweltering humidity, typhoons, and snowstorms, wearing only white cotton layers, straw sandals, and (when needed) a straw raincoat. He also carried a rope and a knife—so he could hang or stab himself if he failed on his quest. (Records don’t indicate whether a Tendai runner has ever killed himself, but you’re required to be ready to take this step.)


“The fourth, fifth, and seventh years were the toughest times,” says Fujinami, who hasn’t visited his family since 1996 and won’t for another five years. “No. The sixth year was the toughest, actually, because of the doiri. But also the seventh year: The distance was extended, so that was the hardest part, also.” Pause. “Actually, there was no year that was easy.”


“But,” chirps the saintly master of the severe practice, “I’m thinking of going back to walking the 100 days this year. Why? Because it’s so beneficial to my appreciation.”

Running Seven Marathons in Seven Days on Seven Continents

Sir Ranulph Fiennes & Dr. Michael Stroud: Marathon Madmen

ON JUNE 7, 2003, famed British explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes, 59, suffered a heart attack so severe that he underwent immediate double-bypass surgery and didn’t come to for three days. And yet on October 21, 2003, with only two and a half months of training under his belt—and post-op wires still in place to keep his chest cavity shut—Fiennes and his longtime comrade-in-extremes, Dr. Michael Stroud, 48, stashed a defibrillator in a duffel, flew to Chilean Patagonia, and set out to complete seven marathons on seven continents in seven days.


“Originally, I’d rung Mike up to see if he might have any interest in climbing Everest,” says Fiennes, a gallant gent who insists you call him “Ran.” “But when he learned you can’t do it in under three months, he proposed the marathons instead, to keep it short and sweet.”


Short and sweet? Only for a pair who in 1993 spent 95 days dragging 500-pound sleds across Antarctica. On the marathon trip, air transport alone would have crushed most mortals: 11 flights, 45,000 miles, and 75 hours in the sky.


British Airways helped by comping the men with first-class seats, but Fiennes and Stroud still had to make their flights if they were going to stay on track. Twice, they had only six hours to land, get through customs, run a marathon, and catch their next plane. Their itinerary took them on an east-north-west horseshoe, from Tierra del Fuego, in Chile, out and back to the Falkland Islands (a last-minute substitute for Antarctica’s South Shetland Islands, where a storm had halted flights), then on to Sydney, Singapore, London, Cairo, and, finally, New York, for the only formal, everyone-else-is-doing-it marathon of the lot. They ran their first marathon in 3:45; they crossed the finish line in Central Park in 5:25. Both men nearly quit after the heat and humidity of Singapore, where Stroud started passing “brown muck” in his urine.


“Myoglobin,” he recalls. “My muscle-tissue destruction had reached 500 times the normal rate.” A gastroenterologist, Stroud is one of the world’s leading experts on physical responses to extreme conditions. He says he and Ran made fine guinea pigs for his research, which, he points out, suggests that some runners may not require extended periods of recovery.


“The day after we returned, I went straight back to work,” he says. “Not a problem.”

Heinz StĂŒcke: Pedaling the Planet

Heinz Stucke: Pedaling the Planet

IN 1962, 22-YEAR-OLD tool and die maker Heinz StĂŒcke rode out of Hövelhof, Germany, on a three-speed bicycle, with $300 in his pocket and a plan to see the world. After 42 years and 300,000 miles, there’s still more he wants to see. Sometime in the early eighties, after two decades with no fixed address, StĂŒcke decided to extend his trip to every country on the globe.


“It was clear that I wasn’t going to stop,” he says. “One day I said, ‘I am going to drop dead on my bicycle.’ ” So in 1996, when he notched his last country—the Seychelles—he just kept going.


At first, he pedaled simply to “see around the next corner.” But as the years piled up, he was driven as much by not wanting to return home, citing “the fear of going back to the factory, and to the very small-minded people in my village.”


StĂŒcke, a compact man with a friendly smile, says he averages 68 miles a day, lugging 80-plus pounds of gear. He’s spent around $130,000 in all, funding his travels with sales of an autobiographical booklet and photographs, and occasional donations—including, in 1963, $500 from Ethiopia’s emperor at the time, Haile Selassie. Along the way, he’s been hit by a truck in Chile’s Atacama Desert, chased by an angry Haitian mob, beaten unconscious by Egyptian soldiers, detained by Cameroon’s military for “slandering the state” (“I have no idea what I did wrong,” says StĂŒcke), and attacked by bees while bathing in a river in Mozambique. But even when Zimbabwean rebels shot him in the foot, in 1980, StĂŒcke never considered quitting. “In the middle of Africa, you don’t have a choice, anyway,” he says. “You don’t go to the nearest airport and fly home.”


Now 64, StĂŒcke has set up temporary shop in Paris to sort through souvenirs, photos, and letters he accumulated during his days on the road. Since 2001, finances have limited his travels to half the year, but he’s chasing the 22 or so remaining territories—like Greenland and Christmas Island—that he needs to capture the title of world’s most traveled person.


“It is not my real ambition, but it is something to keep your eyes on,” he says of the record. “Which is what we all need, isn’t it?”

Hiking Britain Naked

Steve Gough: Go Nude

“THERE’S A PART OF ME that says, Don’t be stupid,” Steve Gough confided to a reporter from the Glasgow-based Sunday Herald shortly before he strode into the hamlet of John o’Groat’s, at the northern tip of Scotland, this past January 22. “Just sort of go home and sort of be normal. But part of me thinks, Go on, Steve, go on.”


Seven months earlier, in June 2003, the rangy ex–Royal Marine turned New Ager, then 44, had departed Land’s End, Cornwall, on a bold mission—to walk the 900-mile length of Britain wearing naught but boots, a hat, and a rucksack, regardless of weather—and John o’Groat’s was the end of the road. The man Fleet Street calls “the Naked Rambler” had been arrested 14 times, spent nearly five months behind bars, had his nose broken by a gang of thugs, and suffered public excoriation at the hands of his estranged common-law wife, Alison Ward, for deserting their two children, ages six and seven. (Her tart assessment in the Scottish Daily Record: “I think he was struggling with the anonymity of his life.”)


There’s no law in the UK against public nudity (Gough was arrested for breaching the peace, among other charges), but in recent years emboldened nudists—including one who chained himself to a gate at Prime Minister Tony Blair’s London residence—have adopted the language of the American civil rights movement, aiming to “stop the segregation” of people who prefer to let it all hang out. In line with this loosely knit group, the soft-spoken, occasionally stuttering Gough insists he’s neither streaker nor naturist but an advocate of “the freedom to be yourself.”


“If there was a catalyst, it was one summer when I was looking after my children,” says Gough, speaking by telephone from his girlfriend’s London flat. “They’d strip off and run around naked, and I thought it was great. But I started to notice how often other adults would suggest, in subtle ways, that they put their clothes back on. It really galvanized me. I realized that most of us are damaged in that way from childhood—taught to feel shame.”


What’s next for Gough? A documentary, a book deal, and, no doubt, ongoing legal hassles. “The walk hasn’t ended,” he insists. “The question—do I want to be me or what others want me to be?—didn’t end at John o’Groat’s. It continues.”

Vacation in War-Time Iraq

Derick Williams & Harvey Gough: “Baghdad Sounded Like Fun”

“THERE I WAS, OUTSIDE the Palestine Hotel, sitting in front of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle and sipping an Amstel tall boy,” recalls 35-year-old Texan Derick Williams of his first hours cruising wartime Baghdad, in April 2003. “Then somebody started shooting at us. It was a little surreal.”


Probably so. At the time, Baghdad had just fallen and was rife with looting and potshots. Some 135 U.S. soldiers had been killed and another 495 reportedly wounded. Williams wasn’t in town as an aid worker, journalist, or human shield—he was a freelance risk enthusiast, making him a prime candidate to be shot or arrested. But Williams, a burly Dallas home restorer, didn’t mind at all. “I went for the adventure,” he says, “and I just felt like everything would be OK.”


Williams was traveling with a partner, a 65-year-old Army vet, superpatriot, and burger-joint tycoon named Harvey Gough, who was on a quest to find a Saddam Hussein statue to match the one of Vladimir Lenin perched outside his Dallas restaurant. (“I went because Tommy Franks said I couldn’t,” scowls Gough. He served with the original leader of Operation Iraqi Freedom during the first Gulf war, when Franks was an assistant division commander in the First Cavalry.) After flying to Jordan, the two hired a driver and a Chevy Suburban and bluffed their way into Iraq, claiming to be from a Texas food bank. Their first stop was an isolated airstrip called H3, which was guarded by U.S. Special Forces in tricked-out dune buggies.


“They were big, buff guys in caps and sunglasses, and their guns were drawn,” Williams says. “They were really edgy.”


Other highlights from the five-day tour included browsing for AK-47s at the Baghdad souk and whistling their way into the heavily guarded HQ of the Army’s V Corps. Their hairiest moment came during a day trip to Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit, when Gough tried to swipe a flag from an abandoned police station. A pissed-off mob chased him away. “That was Harvey’s thing,” sighs Williams. “These guys thought he was being disrespectful, and I thought they were right.”


In the end, Gough didn’t find his statue, but Williams certainly scored a lifetime of adventure. “I’d do it again,” he says. “In a second.”

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Viertel might not recognize La CĂŽte Basque today. There are McDonald’s now, and shopping malls as hideous as any in Orange County, and an autoroute, the A63, that rumbles with trucks headed north from Spain. And of course there are surfers, so many that in the summertime you can forget about finding an uncrowded break.

As ye sow, so shall ye reap, and all that.

And yet in the fall, if you drive just south of Biarritz on the old Route Nationale, it is sometimes still possible to stumble upon the swells of yesteryear. At least that’s the way it feels when I pull into the parking lot at Lafitenia, a woodsy, secluded cove with a long, hollow, right-handed point break. Back in the midseventies, Lafitenia was a mandatory stop for American and Australian surfers on the Endless Summer circuit, a hard-partying band who eventually morphed their vagabond act into today’s World Championship Tour. A quarter-century later the place is, fittingly, the site of the Silver Edition Masters World Championships, a ten-day-long blowout that’s part surf contest—it’s the official world championships of seniors surfing—and part class reunion.

Sponsored by Quiksilver Europe, whose headquarters is nearby, the early-October event features 32 of the biggest names from surfing’s storied past. The two favorites, for instance, in the 35-to-40-year-old “grommet” category (“grommet” being a mildly derisive term for an adolescent surfer) are Aussies Tom Carroll and Cheyne Horan, who not so long ago were starring on the regular circuit. (Carroll, 36, won the world title twice; Horan, 39, was a four-time runner-up.) But the real royalty here are the men competing in the over-40 division, the ones who launched pro surfing as a viable sport in the late 1960s and 1970s. They’re a mostly Australian bunch that includes Wayne Lynch, the 47-year-old mystical guru whose preference for surfing on unorthodox board designs back in 1968 helped kick off the shortboard revolution; Peter Townend, 46, whose methodical compilation of contest outcomes from around the globe resulted in the crowning of the sport’s first world champion (himself, by sly coincidence) in 1976; and Wayne “Rabbit” Bartholomew, 45, the brash loudmouth who led the Australian Invasion of Oahu’s North Shore in the midseventies, and got most of his teeth knocked out in the process.

But if you had to pick one ĂŒber-kahuna out of this august lineup, it would probably be a diminutive 51-year-old American named Jeff Hakman, otherwise known as Mr. Sunset. As a teenage surf prodigy on Oahu’s North Shore in the mid-1960s, Hakman mastered the fearsome break at Sunset Beach. He eventually became one of the premier big-wave riders and a tireless competitor who pushed the sport into a new, contest-oriented era. His real legacy, though, began after he retired from professional surfing in 1977 and founded Quiksilver USA, an offshoot of the surfwear brand that originated in Australia, thereby blazing the path for the marketing juggernaut that is today’s surf industry. Hakman might have ridden that wave forever, all the way to tens of millions of dollars and a big house in Del Mar. But the need for an intense physical rush stayed with him after he’d left pro surfing behind, and when heroin and the high life replaced big waves as his ride of choice, the result was a 15-year off-and-on struggle with addiction, during which he nearly lost everything, including his life. It’s a very different kind of legacy—with many semipublic wipeouts—and one that is still unfolding.

The past seems both near and far away as Jeff Hakman trots down to the beach at Lafitenia, a board under each arm. His hair is gray and close-cropped now, and there are some worry lines at the corners of his eyes, but he’s the same height and weight as in his prime (five-foot-seven, 150 pounds), and he’s still got the flat stomach and bouncy legs of a kid. And the smile, too: a big, boyish, gummy grin.

It’s a sunny, blustery afternoon on the Bay of Biscay, and the swell, though sizeable, is bumpy and confused. Hakman deliberates for a few minutes before choosing the longer of his two boards, a gun-shaped seven foot, two inches, and then launches himself through the nasty shore break. He sets up a bit outside the normal takeoff, hoping for something bigger and cleaner to roll through. After missing the first wave, and then the next, he settles for a choppy, flat one that backs off suddenly. It’s a dicey takeoff, but he pops quickly to his feet, takes the step in stride, and pulls a deep, classically round bottom turn, his trademark.

“Et voilĂ  c’est parti!” says the French emcee over the public-address system. “C’est Monsieur Sunset mĂȘme, Jeff Hakman.”

A little cheer goes up in the hospitality tent, and the monster-lensed photographers down on the beach start to fire away. But Mr. Sunset doesn’t do much with the wave. The judges are looking for snaps and big cutbacks, all the showy point-scoring maneuvers of professional surfing today. Hakman just swoops easily down the line, pulling more classical curves, his long arms winging wide and his hands dangling loosely.

No one in the crowd seems disappointed with this performance. Indeed, there’s a smattering of applause as Hakman kicks out at the end of his ride. “He doesn’t rip anymore,” notes one French journalist admiringly. “He floats now. But underneath, you can still see the same style.”

Masters surfing has only been around for a few years and isn’t nearly as big a phenomenon as, say, the Senior PGA. In spirit, it’s closer to seniors tennis—less an opportunity for a second career than a chance to do some character acting. Still, it is entertaining to watch yesterday’s heroes disport themselves on the waves, and most of them can still rip. In the over-forties, Rabbit Bartholomew and Michael Ho, the quiet Hawaiian Pipeline specialist, handily win their first-round heats, as does Oahu-raised Bobby Owens, who now runs the Patagonia store in Santa Cruz (and who apparently spends a lot of time on the water, testing product). Six-foot-four Australian Simon Anderson, who was the first to market the three-finned surfboard, astonishes the crowd by throwing his legendary snaps on a board no longer than he is. Also drawing cheers is 49-year-old Reno Abellira, a former Hawaiian champion who has such a low center of gravity that he can still fit his slipper into extremely tight tubes and exit clean. Even the amiable Australian Ian Cairns, 47, a one-time big-wave star known as Kanga, who now sports an extra 30 or so pounds around his midriff, has no problem taking off in a mean beach break. Moreover, he seems to enjoy himself when he does. His wife videotapes him, and his old mates slap him on the back and offer him a “tinnie” of beer when the session’s over. It’s a feel-good experience all the way around.

From a spectator’s point of view, however, the most interesting competition at the Masters probably takes place off the water. A lot of attendees refer to the event as a “gathering of the tribe,” and the opening-night dinner, at a rustic Basque inn up in the foothills, has the feel of a giant potlatch, with old friends table-hopping, the Hawaiian contingent strumming away on their guitars, and heartfelt, boozy toasts to and by the hosts from Quiksilver Europe.

Still, as the days go by, it’s hard to dismiss the idea that there are two overlapping clans within the tribe. Most conspicuous are the guys with haircuts and mortgages and good jobs, usually in the surf business. After a period of wondering what he was going to do with his life, Rabbit Bartholomew, for instance, wound up running the Association of Surfing Professionals, the sport’s world body. Cairns is a surf-contest promoter who lives in southern California. Others are entrepreneurs, like Paul “Smelly” Neilsen, president of one of the biggest chains of surf shops in Australia. Then there are the apparel executives. Peter Townend is the global marketing director for Rusty, a California board and surfwear maker. Michael Tomson, a skinny 44-year-old guy who favors fatigues and T-shirts, is a former South African star who founded his own clothing company, Gotcha, 22 years ago in a rented house in Laguna Beach, California. Today, Irvine-based Gotcha is consistently ranked in the five top-selling surfwear brands internationally.

The other clan consists of the guys who are still mainly surfing, paddling, and “living the life.” For the most part they’re the seekers, slackers, and free spirits who tend to avoid the straight life, such as it is, for as long as they can. One day, talking to Reno Abellira, I ask him what he is planning to do after the contest. He’s going to California, he says vaguely, “to clean out an apartment and maybe sell a car.” Glen Winton, the notoriously reticent Australian star who became known as Mr. X, is disarmingly candid about his career ambitions. “Right now I’m working as a security guard at a shopping mall,” he says, “but what I really want to do is to become a judge.”

“So you’re going to law school and all that?”

“No, no,” Winton says, laughing. “I mean a surf judge.”

Hakman is the one guy who doesn’t quite fit into either category. Between heats, he moves through the competitors’ enclosure, mingling easily with members of both clans. There’s a lot of smiling and shoulder slapping, remembering swells and epic parties. But you also see an extra beat of watchfulness from his fellow surfers, an uncertainty as to who exactly Hakman is today. Sure, he’s now got homes in two of the world’s most beautiful places (Biarritz and Kauai), a lucrative but not-too-demanding job as the marketing guru—his actual title—for Quiksilver Europe, and, even more remarkably, a reborn career as an advertising icon for the company. But you still get the sense that, for some people, Hakman may have gotten a little too far out there to ever really come back.

In the contest program, Hakman is listed not as American, but Hawaiian. Although he was born in Southern California and learned to surf in Palos Verdes, his father, an aeronautical engineer by profession but a passionate “waterman” at heart, relocated the family to Makaha, on the North Shore of Oahu, when Jeff was 12. Makaha was a rough town in those days, and haoles like Hakman could face a brand of hostility that made the “Valley go home” localism of Palos Verdes seem tame by comparison. “Even today,” Hakman says, “the tourist board will tell you, ‘Uh, don’t go there.'” But Hakman had no problem mastering the vibe. “I’m not aggressive,” he explains. “I always try to bend and flex around.”

Within a year, Hakman was a regular in lineups up and down the North Shore. But he created his first real sensation in January 1963, when he and his father decided to paddle out at Waimea Bay on a 20-foot-plus day. Waimea is the North Shore’s biggest regular break—double-high freight trains of moving water that, should you blow the takeoff or get caught inside, can hold you under for 30 seconds—and at that time only a few grown men had dared to surf it. It’s impossible to overstate the raw courage of that moment: Hakman was barely 14-years-old, and small for his age to boot, weighing in at under 100 pounds and not yet five feet tall. He shakily rode one wave, and wiped out on the second. Then, with the rest of the lineup looking on in disbelief, he paddled into another one, rocketed down the face, and made the bottom turn, and then kicked out into the channel. “It really wasn’t that hard,” Hakman recalls nonchalantly.

The wave that truly appealed to Hakman was at Sunset Beach, a notoriously hard-to-read break halfway up the North Shore. “It intrigued me and scared the shit out of me at the same time,” he says. “Things move around a lot, depending on the size and direction of the swell. It’s not like Pipeline, where there’s one definite takeoff spot. It’s faster and steeper, and there’s so much more water. You can’t halfway commit. You gotta put yourself right in the guts of it.” By the time he was 15, Hakman knew the wave as well as anyone; it was, he says, “my backyard.”

Two years later, in 1965, Hakman was invited to compete at Sunset in the inaugural Duke Kahanamoku Invitational. Dreamed up by a Honolulu nightclub promoter, the Duke was a new kind of surfing competition. It boasted an international field consisting of the 24 best surfers in the world. There was a television crew from CBS to film the event. And there was cash—not prize money, but appearance fees—for the contestants. It was, in other words, the precursor of modern professional contests.

The surf was an unruly eight to ten feet the day of the finals. Paddling out to the point, Hakman caught the first wave and then realized that the next set was coming from much farther left, on the outside. He got there first and came away with what one of the judges would later recall as the best ride ever seen at Sunset: a screaming tube that went on and on through several different sections of the wave as Hakman crouched in a cheater-five—the toes of one foot wrapped over the nose of the board. A few waves later, he pulled a similar stunt, and the judges had no choice but to give the world’s first pro tournament title to a 17-year-old kid.

Hakman was characteristically modest about the moment. “I was overwhelmed,” he says in Mr. Sunset, a recent biography written by Australian journalist Phil Jarrat that includes a portrait of surfing’s formative era and selections from Hakman’s extensive photo archives. When Hakman was pressed by his surfing pal Fred van Dyke to make a speech, Jarrat writes, he only managed to get out, “Ah, thanks everybody. I’m ah, stoked! Is that OK, Fred?”

Thus began a ten-year period when Hakman was arguably the best competitive surfer in the world. “They called him Surf Chimp because of his short legs and long arms,” says Gibus de Soultrait, editor of the French magazine Surf Session and, as the French often are, an avid student of obscure American subcultures. “He always took a high line on the wave that gave him a lot of speed, and being so small and having a low center of gravity, he never fell. That helps when you’re surfing Sunset with no leash.

“Hakman was more competitive than his main rival in those days, Gerry Lopez,” de Soultrait continues. “Gerry was a soul surfer, into the mystical side. Jeff was always a guy who wanted to win. The two of them were at the heart of the old debate about surfing—is it a sport or is it an art?”

If it was a sport, it wasn’t a particularly organized one at the time. There was no official circuit, no overall points title, and very little prize money. Income, such as it was, came from endorsement deals with surfboard manufacturers, travel stipends from surf filmmakers, and all the other scams that enterprising world travelers dream up. In Hakman’s case, that occasionally meant small-time drug-trafficking schemes—something that seemed like little more than heart-pounding capers at the time but, in retrospect, ultimately helped grease his slide. “It was acceptable to take a couple of ounces with you and sell them when you got somewhere, to pay for the plane ticket,” Hakman says matter-of-factly. “The people who were doing it weren’t bad people. Now it’s much more organized, and the street scenes are so hard, but back then I thought those people and that life were glamorous.”

Yet as Hakman worked the “international beach scene,” both partying and purveying, he was mulling more conventional business ideas. One day in 1975, at a contest in Queensland, Australia, he had to borrow a pair of board shorts at the last minute. They were of a tight-woven poplin and cut with a much wider yoke than anything he’d worn before, and they closed with Velcro and a snap instead of ties. Plus they had a cool name—Quiksilver—and a catchy logo in the shape of a wave. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, these are pretty good,'” Hakman says. “Gerry [Lopez] and I took ’em back to Hawaii and told Jack Shipley, Lopez’s business partner [in a surfboard and sandal business], to import some.” Shipley did, and even though he had to sell the Quiksilvers at $17 a pair—$5 more than the going rate for board shorts—he sold out all 100 pairs in two weeks.

That winter, still pondering the boardshort business, Hakman wound up at a place called Ulu Watu, in Bali, then the hot new surf spot. Drugs were a big part of the scene in Ulu Watu; the surfer who showed Hakman the place liked to quaff psilocybin mushroom milkshakes before every session in the waves. Hakman was taken aback when he found a bunch of his friends smoking heroin through foil, but by the time he left Bali, he admits in Mr. Sunset, he too “had a nice habit going.”

Jeff Hakman’s apartment in Biarritz is half a block from the CĂŽtes des Basques, the clifftop promenade where Peter Viertel got his big idea back in 1956. It’s an austere neighborhood of high walls and carefully trimmed topiary, a bit sedate, perhaps, for a surf legend and a legendary partyer. Then again, Hakman is a family man now. Six months a year he and his Australian wife of 12 years, Cherie, and their two children, Ryan, 17, and Lea, 7, live here; it’s just a few minutes’ drive to Hakman’s office at the Quiksilver Europe headquarters. The other half of the year they’re in Hanalei Bay, Kauai, where Hakman doesn’t do much except surf.

The big sun-drenched apartment is empty today. Cherie and the kids have gone back to Hawaii so as not to miss the start of the school year. Hakman will rejoin them in a few days, when the contest is over, but in the meantime he’s alone with a stack of surf videos, a big bowl of vitamins and food supplements in the kitchen, and on the dinner table, a copy of a book titled Yesterday’s Tomorrow: Recovery Meditations for Hard Cases.

Hakman is a fundamentally shy man, but part of the recovery process, he knows, is being able to share one’s story. And so, half-reluctantly, he begins talking. A year after that fateful stop in Bali, he explains, he made his bid for the Quiksilver name. It happened like this: Preparing for his annual Australian swing, he asked his board shaper to install an extra-thick fin, hollowed out to keep down the weight. Shortly before his departure, he filled it with three ounces of cocaine—not to use himself, but to trade for heroin, which was much cheaper than cocaine in Australia. By the time Hakman showed up for the 1976 Bells Beach Classic, the preeminent surf contest of the Australian season, he was already strung out. Yet two amazing things happened that week, although Hakman is a little shaky on the details. Not only did he win the tournament, the first time a non-Australian had done so, but he also somehow persuaded the owners of Quiksilver Australia to grant him licensing rights to their name, logo, and board-short design for the U.S. market, in exchange for 5 percent of the new U.S. company and 5 percent of its sales.

Hakman had been talking to a surfer friend he’d met in Ulu Watu, a USC business school graduate named Bob McKnight, about the Quiksilver idea. With the license secured, the two of them set about building a business. They began a series of mad drives up and down the coast between their makeshift factory in Orange County, the fabric suppliers in Los Angeles, and all the surf shops they could talk their way into. There was no time to surf, and Hakman forgot about heroin for a while, too. But then the old urge returned, and before he knew it a friend was showing him how to shoot it intravenously.

For the next couple of years, insists McKnight, now the CEO of Quiksilver USA, in Huntington Beach, California (the new location of its headquarters), he had no idea about Hakman’s heroin habit. “Either I was naive,” McKnight says, “or he hid it incredibly well.” Whatever the case, the company grew, slowly at first and then with startling speed. By the early eighties, annual sales were approaching five million. Hakman began to have a lot of pocket money, and his taste for heroin grew apace; at one point, he says, it was costing him $500 a day.

Hakman is surprisingly unemotional as he tells the story. There’s no self-recrimination or wistfulness. Instead, there’s almost a sense of wonder, as if he were describing a particularly phenomenal day on the North Shore. He doesn’t look to blame his addiction on anything, and he won’t take the easy way out and say it was a need for adrenaline inherited from his big-wave surfing days.

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say letting go of the belt is like dropping into 30-foot Waimea,” he says. “That instant of dropping down a big gnarly face—it’s very close, equally potent, but not the same. On the other hand, the same thing that got me addicted definitely made me a good surfer. You know, once you get a direction, you go and commit.” He pauses again. “I thought I could handle it,” he says. “But every addict thinks that—that they’re different.”

Early on, Hakman had begun selling small numbers of shares in Quiksilver USA to pay for drugs. After 1980, though, the trickle became a deluge. “At 30, I thought I was going to live happily ever after,” he says, his eyes moistening for the first time. “I still had about a 33 percent share in the company.” He stops and rubs his face with his hands, regaining control. “By ’82, it was all gone. The third partner in the company finally said, ‘Jeff, you gotta leave. This isn’t working at all.’ I went, ‘That’s understandable.’ I had a six-month-old son and about $3,000, total.”

Hakman stops again, thinking it over. “The last 10 percent I sold for $100,000,” he says, the barest note of regret in his voice. “It’s worth at least $15 million today.”

Midway through the third day of the Silver Edition competition, the swell begins to drop, from eight feet to five feet at first, and then all the way down to three. Even so, the men compete that day, and the third round turns out to be a good outing for Hakman; he finishes second to Wayne Lynch. But day four dawns sunny, calm, and flat, and the contest is postponed until further notice.

What do old surfers do when there’s no surf? Pretty much the same thing young surfers do. They play video games, smoke pot, and laugh their way around the hotel golf course, and they eat, drink, and tell stories—competitively, of course.

One day after breakfast, Joey Buran, a stubble-headed Californian who became a minister about 15 years ago, regales a small but appreciative crowd with tales of an epic day at Waimea Bay when he barely escaped death by scratching his way over set after set of monster waves. Once he found himself safely outside, however, he realized there was no practical way to get back in. The sun beat down. Buran started to have sharky thoughts. Eventually he began sobbing and praying for a miracle, whereupon a lone figure on a jet ski appeared. “And you know what the guy did?” Buran says. “He came speeding up, turned and threw me a shaka”—Buran rocks his outstretched thumb and pinkie in the Hawaiian salute—”and kept right on going.”

A day later, at a raucous competition dinner, Hakman, sitting midway down the table sipping mineral water, ventures a story of his own. It’s about a hitchhiker he once picked up in the midseventies, driving a lonely road in the Australian countryside. The guy was, without a doubt, one of the rudest people he’d ever met; every time Hakman tried a conversational gambit, the hitchhiker came back with the same response: “None of your fucking business.” Suddenly there were flashing lights and a siren—the police. Hakman pulled over. Panicking, the hitchhiker dropped his bag, jumped out of the car, and sprinted into the woods with the cop in hot pursuit. Hakman looked at the suspicious package lying on the seat next to him, considered the‹delicacy of the situation, and took the only reasonable course of action: He peeled out and sped off into the night.

There’s a brief silence. “OK, OK,” says Dave Kalama, a Hawaiian tow-in star who’s been flown in by Quiksilver to do water safety for the contest. “What was in the bag?”

“None of your fucking business,” Hakman says, flashing that big gummy grin.

Everyone laughs, less out of amusement than relief that Hakman isn’t dropping some real-life bombshell from his past. This is, after all, a guy who got hepatitis from dirty needles in the late seventies and who was high for the birth of his son in 1982. Two of his shooting buddies subsequently died of AIDS. One day around the same time, when he was at work at his Quiksilver office in Costa Mesa, California, a Mercedes pulled up out front and six gun-packing gangsters stormed upstairs into his office, not so gently inquiring as to the whereabouts of several ounces of missing drugs. All good stories, perhaps, but not particularly funny. For some, the tales bring back memories of those in the old circle who died from drug overdoses, a not insignificant number that included several of Hakman’s own friends, his brother-in-law, and, in the early seventies, two of the best young surfers in Hawaii, Rusty Star and Tomi Winkler.

There are a couple of reasons why Hakman didn’t join them. “He wasn’t ultimately self-destructive,” says Bob McKnight. “Every time he got to the bottom, he had that instinct to straighten out. Hakman’s very street-smart, instinctual, with a total survivor mentality. His dad is like that too—the guy is a frickin’ aquarium diver, out in deep water every day still. Jeff was trained to be like that.”

The other reason Hakman survived is that his friends and family members watched out for him. And he found a savior—or a savior found him.

Half a mile up the road from Lafitenia, just across the A63 autoroute, is the Quiksilver Europe “campus.” One look at the tasteful, neomodernist lines of the new corporate offices and you know that surfing’s mystical power to sell stuff has only increased by crossing the Atlantic. For the most part, what Quiksilver sells is clothing—casual sportswear with a youthful design flair. (Its “technical” pieces, like the trademark board shorts and wetsuits, actually constitute a small fraction of its business.) According to EuroSIMA, the industry’s trade association, surfwear is now a $1.2 billion business in Europe. Quiksilver Europe’s share is about $150 million, which makes it about half the size of Quiksilver USA. For now.

“Europe has more surfable coastline than Australia,” says Harry Hodge, the 50-year-old man who brought Quiksilver to Europe and the company’s president. “There’s Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain, Portugal—even Sardinia and Italy now. And I can tell you they need board shorts in Italy. Badly.”

If there’s one person responsible for the resurrection of Mr. Sunset, it’s Harry Hodge. Born and raised outside Melbourne, “Hollywood” Hodge (he bears a passing resemblance to the actor Don Johnson) was a surfer and a journalist whose lifelong dream was to make a surf film “as good as Endless Summer.” In the end, he did make his movie, Band on the Run, but it cost him everything he owned and was, he admits, “a complete commercial failure.”

Hodge fell into a yearlong depression, but he eventually rallied and found a marketing job with Quiksilver Australia. In 1984, offered a chance to launch a new license in France, Hodge did the unthinkable—he looked up Hakman, with whom he’d partied during the glory days in Costa Mesa, and asked him if he wanted a chance to start over as a one-quarter partner in a new company called Quiksilver Europe. “I had no reservations at all,” Hodge says. “Hakman knew the business. And I was young.”

Hakman was nearby, at Burleigh Heads on the Gold Coast of Queensland, where he and Cherie had retreated after the debacle at Quiksilver USA. He had come a long way down in the world, clerking in a surf shop and teaching Australian kids and Japanese tourists to surf on his lunch hour, and when his old peers from the pro ranks came through, they could barely look him in the eye. But Hakman wasn’t unhappy.

“I loved teaching the kids,” he remembers. “I’d take an eight-year-old out, and after two hours he’d be laughing and smiling and riding waves, just stoked…

“So when Harry said, ‘Do you want to do this Europe thing?’ I didn’t know. It wasn’t like I was over the addiction. I was healthy and I’d cleaned up, but those little sensations were still prickling.”

Armed with a war chest of $200,000 Australian that they’d raised themselves, Hodge, Hakman, Hodge’s girlfriend Brigitte Darrigrand, and a fourth partner, John Winship, set off to conquer Europe. “Brigitte’s parents put their house up as collateral, and then a banker here was somehow convinced and gave us a loan,” Hodge says. “Two years later we had a line of credit of 70 million francs, with no tangible assets.” Meanwhile, Hakman was slowly slipping off the wagon. “I was good—well, so-so—for about a year,” he recalls. “Then you just run into certain people, and sooner or later you’re in trouble.”

In late 1986 the company accountant came to Hodge scratching his head. “I’m looking at these gas receipts of Jeff’s,” Hodge says, “and he’s bought enough fuel in the last three months to have driven around the world a couple of times.” Hakman had been putting $20 of gas in his car but charging $100 on his card and pocketing the difference. Hodge and Darrigrand, furious at the betrayal, told Hakman that if it happened again, he was finished. “I got caught with the gas cards, then I got clean,” Hakman says. “It’s always the same cycle.”

In 1988, unable to pay off their line of credit, the four partners started looking for help. They found a bittersweet solution in a buyout offer from Quiksilver USA. “We basically sold the whole company, with an earn-out clause which we hit, for ten million,” says Hakman. “We got stock options, but it’s not the same as owning it. People say, ‘God, you sold the company, how stupid!’ But it was that close to being nothing. We had the fashion and we had the image, but none of us had a financial background.”

With the sale complete, Hakman found himself with about $800,000 in the bank and not quite the same interest in running the business. Soon he was looking up old friends. “I was functioning, but it was a schedule from hell,” he says. “I had to see my contact twice a day. I couldn’t go to work without it, so I had to get him out of bed in the morning. Then I had to find him again at lunch. The problem wasn’t when you were high. It was when you couldn’t score. You’re sweating, your nose is running, your voice is cracking. You’re falling off your chair.”

Hakman shakes his head, remembering the day the end came. “May 10, 1990,” he says. “I got up, and I felt horrible. I turned to my wife and said, ‘I don’t think I’m in control.’ I broke down and admitted it: I was scared.” Cherie went to Hodge and told him Jeff was using again, and neither of them knew what to do. Rather than fire Hakman, as he’d promised, Hodge got on the phone. “I remember him yelling,” Hakman says. “‘Where’s the place Elton John went? I want that place!'”

In his six weeks at Galsworthy Lodge, outside London, Hakman was subjected to an unsparing scrutiny and, perhaps more important, allowed to see the spectacle of other outwardly assured men and women paralyzed by their addictions. “Really elegant, refined people, guys in nice suits with good accents, who were helpless,” he says. “Way worse than me.”

“We both knew that we couldn’t keep living like that,” Cherie says. “I can’t look back and say that it was easy, but we know what it is like to be human. We’re lucky. A lot of people don’t survive. We got through it, and the other end of all this has been great.”

For close to a decade now, Hakman says, he’s been clean.

The final weekend of the contest is at hand, and thanks to his decent showing in round three, Hakman now needs only a second-place finish in the last heat to make it through to the quarterfinals. The flowing, powerful Bobby Owens takes the early lead, as he has all week. Then Reno Abellira, who’s been floundering at the back of the pack alongside Hakman, suddenly comes alive with a couple of nifty tube rides. But Hakman’s first few waves look pretty good, too. In the spectator enclosure, the Quiksilver crew follows Hakman closely. “If he’s not careful,” says Hodge sarcastically, “he could wind up in the main event.”

Abellira and Owens each get another wave, and Hakman slips into third place. Then, with two minutes left in the heat, a final set rolls in. Hakman almost takes off on the first wave, but it starts to break around him and then closes out entirely. He pulls back and spins to grab the second wave, but it’s breaking too far to the left, and he can’t quite paddle into it. The buzzer sounds, and that’s it—he’s out of the contest.

For Hakman, it’s a victory nonetheless—one more step in the rehabbing of a legend. First, there was his job, which he describes as “sort of being Mr. Quiksilver, internationally,” and which amounts to telling surfing stories at sales meetings, hanging out at trade shows, and offering an occasional design critique. Then there was the biography, which Hodge talked him into cooperating with as an act of therapy and as a way to recover his story.

Since its publication, the book has become something else—a strangely effective piece of marketing. (Though it has yet to find a U.S. distributor, Mr. Sunset has done surprisingly well, selling more than 20,000 copies overseas and over the Internet, and the Hollywood production company October Films has optioned it for the screen.) Just as Nike is quick to lap up anything that seems remotely cool about the NBA and The North Face leaps to outfit the next wave of mountain daredevils, Quiksilver can’t help but stake out its territory. That means signing up obvious stars, like Kelly Slater, and hosting events like the Silver Edition Masters. But it also means reaching out to subversive heroes and prodigal sons like Jeff Hakman, because there’s something authentic about them that no amount of white bread can match.

“We’re not just some guy who looks like Jimmy Buffet with a parrot on his shoulder,” says McKnight. “You get our guys together, Jeff and the other Hawaiians, and it’s really real, man.”

The next day, with Hakman looking on from the beach, the contest wraps up. Cheyne Horan edges out his old nemesis Tom Carroll in the under-40 finals, thereby claiming his first-ever world masters championship. (Later the same afternoon, he proposes to his girlfriend in a scene that he calls “way heavier than the final.”) In the over-40 final, Rabbit Bartholomew manages to catch the wave of the tournament, a perfect, near-closeout tube ride. After what seems like ten seconds, he bursts out of the far end, pumping both fists, making the claim. The judges do what they must—they give him a perfect ten, and the victory.

The awards ceremony is held at Lafitenia, and afterward there’s a pretty good party that doesn’t end until past midnight. It’s an idyllic scene: Hawaiian guitars, cold Buds (a delicacy in France), and the sun dipping low over the sea, just like in Southern California. One might expect Hakman to skip out on the party, especially as it gets loud, but he winds up staying, hanging out with Hodge and the Hawaiians on the deck. He even has a beer. Though Hakman never had a real problem with alcohol, you can almost hear 12-step people everywhere gnashing their teeth. A beer! It’s tantamount to starting up the heroin again! To the Aussies, though, it’s just funny. “Hakman’s having a beer!” Hodge yells. “Someone get a camera!”

Hakman has another beer, or two. He laughs at the jokes and tells a few of his own, but it’s hard to figure out if he’s truly having a good time. Maybe he is. But I have my doubts. Between jokes he gets a faraway look in his eyes, and soon he’s backing out of the party. It’s ironic, really. The guy who started the party is the first one to leave.

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

Stephen Koch Attempts to Snowboard Everest

Power grab; Stephen Koch carving turns at 21,000 feet on Everest’s north face

Keeping the flame burning; clockwise from above, Koch lighting incense at the Team’s base camp shrine: Koch, Henderson, and Chin at camp; Lakpa and Kami staying warm; Koch begins the North Face descent.

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 șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű 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.

TEN DAYS LATER, with weather conditions looking promising, they tried again—this time from a newly established camp at 20,000 feet. The four climbed solo and unroped, with axes and crampons. “It was beautiful climbing at first,” Koch says. “About 20 feet of vertical, then it backed off to 70 degrees, then 60, then 50. At midnight the moon came up over the ridge, and there was this great silvery path.”


By morning, the picture had changed. The snow was knee-deep and unconsolidated, and it seemed increasingly unlikely that the team would reach a protected bivouac spot at the foot of the Hornbein by their 1 p.m. target time—much less the summit. They discussed trying to get above the 8,000-meter mark. Kami, the younger Sherpa, “was ready to punch it,” Chin recalls, “but Lakpa has a family, and even though he would never say anything, I could tell he was not as comfortable.”


Koch, for his part, needed to weigh not only his own decade-long commitment but his obligation to his sponsors, including the beverage company SoBe and fabric manufacturer Toray/Entrant. On the other hand, he felt “something I’d never really felt before: responsibility not just for one person, but four.”


At 9 a.m., when the group finally reached a consensus to turn around, Koch’s altimeter read 22,454 feet—a hefty 6,581 feet below the summit. On the descent, Koch went ahead and snowboarded what he could of the North Face’s “steep and deep powder.” But back at camp, the thrill had worn off. “I felt incredible disappointment, incredible relief, sadness,” he says. “It was just kind of every emotion in my body going off at that moment.”


Three months later, Koch seems at peace with his decision, even pleased at having undergone a “healthy ego check.” His Seven Summits quest, he claims, is over. Yet it’s clear the Hornbein still has a strong pull. “It is huge, truly the ideal line on the world’s highest mountain,” Koch says. “Someone’s going to succeed on this route. I just hope it’s someone who has vision and does it in good style.”


Will that someone be Stephen Koch? “If the fire inside burns again for the Hornbein, I believe I could succeed,” he says. “It might take more than one expedition, but eventually…”

The post Facing the Fall Line appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

THE FIRST DETAINEE seems strangely unperturbed. His breathing is calm and his black eyes gaze unblinkingly, revealing nothing. Still, it doesn’t take long to establish his identity. At seven inches tall, with a striking black band behind his eye, a white shoulder patch, and orange tinges on his flanks, he’s unmistakably a mature male masked shrike.

Net gain: Sami Backleh removes a bird from a mist net at the Palestine Wildlife Society’s ringing station in Jericho, aided by Anton Khalilieh.

Logging in: Anton Khalilieh, left, and Sameh Darawshi record data on a mature male masked shrike, captured at the Jericho ringing station.

Migration nation: Yossi Leshem, generally considered the father of migratory-bird studies in Israel, at the Latrun Tank Museum.

A mixed flock of waders at an Important Bird Area on the southern shore of the Sea of Galilee

Wings over the promised land: a freshly banded barn owl at Kafr Ruppin, a kibbutz in the heart of the Jordan Valley

“A very aggressive bird, eating eggs and small reptiles,” says Sami Backleh, gently extricating the creature from the mist net he rigged a few minutes ago. “An odd thing that I have seen is that it sometimes hangs dead lizards near its nest. Why, I don’t know.”

Backleh slips the shrike into a cotton sack and closes it with a drawstring. Removing two other birds—an olivaceous warbler and a yellow-vented bulbul—from the 30-foot-long net, he heads for his base of operations: a folding card table in the middle of a weedy lot. There he’s joined by two colleagues, Anton Khalilieh and Sameh Darawshi, returning from other nets with a similar harvest of songbirds.

Brushing their breakfast crumbs off the table, the three jeans-clad 24-year-olds set about weighing, sexing, and aging their catch, carefully entering the results in a ledger. To test for body fat, they blow delicately on each bird’s chest feathers to expose the soft flesh underneath. This is a key measurement in the study of bird-migration patterns: A hollow at the base of the neck, where fat is stored, means the bird is in need of refueling, while a pronounced protuberance signals that it is ready to move on.

The last step is ringing (or banding, as it’s known in the United States), in which each bird is fitted with a small metal anklet. Backleh holds one up for my inspection before crimping it on the shrike’s foreleg. It’s just a little aluminum clip stamped with an identification code and the words WILDLIFE PALESTINE.

Wildlife in Palestine? To those steeped in bad news from this tiny, accursed corner of the world—whether they know it as Palestine, the West Bank and Gaza, or the occupied territories—it can be a shock to learn that much of anything is thriving here, wild or otherwise. But hyenas and four kinds of gazelle haunt the parched wadis of the Judean Mountains, and ibex still gambol in the Gilead Mountains of Jordan. And for a few months in the spring and fall, the valley between the two ranges—the cosmic trench drained by the River Jordan—becomes one of the birdiest places on earth. To date, Backleh’s employer, the four-year-old Palestine Wildlife Society, has set up only one ringing station on the West Bank—this one on the outskirts of the ancient city of Jericho, 850 feet below sea level and a few miles from the Dead Sea, the lowest spot on earth. But the operation is part of something larger and more ambitious, if not utterly improbable: an international migratory-bird project that links conservationists, researchers, students, and birdwatchers in Israel, Jordan, and the West Bank. It’s one of a very few regional programs and perhaps the only one in the environmental arena aimed at bringing Jews and Arabs together to work for a common goal.

By 8:30 a.m., the temperature has risen to about 90 degrees and the Dead Sea has disappeared behind a scrim of bluish haze, so the team decides to knock off for the day. In the last batch of captives, however, there’s one specimen that Backleh singles out for special attention. To my eye, it’s just another little brown bird—maybe a wren?

Backleh resists the urge to laugh. “A wren is an insectivore,” he says, cupping the bird in his hands. “So, a completely different beak. This one, you see, has a powerful beak for crushing seeds. It is a sparrow—the Dead Sea sparrow. In Latin, Passer moabiticus.”

I give the bird a second look. It’s tiny—just 13 grams, according to the scale, less than half an ounce—but subtly colored, with delicate gray cheeks and crown, a black throat, and a white-and-yellow streak above its eye. “In its plumage it is beautiful, no?” asks Backleh. “Also in its characteristic calls.” He whistles, inexpertly trying to mimic the bird’s song, then stops and grins.

Letters and e-mails from abroad reporting the capture of a Wildlife Palestine bird still generate a fair amount of excitement. In 2001, a distance record was set when a tagged reed warbler was retrapped in Poland. But perhaps the most significant message from a foreign land came on February 17, 2003, when a Passer moabiticus from Jericho was netted 50 miles up the Jordan Valley in the small Israeli kibbutz of Kfar Ruppin. It was a symbolic thing—a sort of dove-of-peace moment—and also a tangible reminder that from an ecological standpoint the two places are really one. But to the Palestinian birders, it was something more: a sign that their homeland, though not yet sovereign, was beginning to take its place among the nations of the world.

Backleh brings the sparrow up to eye level, studying it closely. “It is the smallest of the sparrows but, I think, the most beautiful,” he says. “I love the Dead Sea sparrow very much.”

He smiles and makes a quick upward motion of the hands, and the bird is gone.

IT IS ONE OF NATURE’S most astonishing spectacles: Every spring, more than half a billion birds fly north from Africa to breeding grounds in Europe and Asia, and every fall they return. A few strong fliers can cross the Mediterranean in one go. But the vast majority of the 500-odd species that make the trek are obliged to do so overland—passerines (small perching birds) because they need to stop and eat, raptors and other big soaring birds because they depend on thermals, spiraling updrafts that don’t form over water.

The choke point for most of this traffic is the isthmus between Africa and Asia, a region currently shared (if that’s the right word) by Israel, the fledgling Palestinian political entity, and Jordan. This slender land bridge is furrowed by two parallel mountain ranges and, between them, the cavernous Jordan Valley, itself a northward continuation of Africa’s Great Rift. The valley is a perfect avian sluiceway, its high temperatures and steep walls spinning off thermals while its wetlands offer abundant cover and forage, and for millennia a feathery tide has ridden it back and forth, indifferent to the human dramas playing out below.

Lately, though, flying conditions have deteriorated. The problem is not so much the fighting between the Israelis and the Palestinians (although numerous Israeli fighter jets have wiped out, and been wiped out by, migrating birds) but unrelenting habitat destruction caused by burgeoning numbers of humans. “Ideally, both Arab and Jewish environmentalists should join together in a call for policies to promote zero population growth in all sectors of Israeli society,” writes Israeli environmental lawyer Alon Tal in his 2002 book Pollution in a Promised Land. “But this would amount to heresy. For Jews, the ingathering of the Jewish exiles remains the raison d’ĂȘtre of the State. For Arabs, population growth holds the key to greater political influence and autonomy.” Against this gloomy backdrop, a few remarkable characters stand out. One is Yossi Leshem, an indefatigable 55-year-old ornithology professor at the University of Tel Aviv and former president of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, the country’s answer to the Sierra Club. Another is 43-year-old Imad Atrash, a former Cub Scout leader and high school environmental education teacher from the predominantly Christian Arab town of Bethlehem, who in 1999 helped found the Palestine Wildlife Society.

In 1995, with the bitterness of the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, beginning to fade, Leshem and Atrash met through the promptings of an American aid worker. Along with Jordanian partners from the conservation group BirdLife International, Atrash and one of Leshem’s protĂ©gĂ©s, Dan Alon, hatched a bold scheme, calling it For Birds and People in the Jordan Valley. The top priority was habitat preservation—securing a pathway of green “stepping stones” where migrating birds could land and refuel—and there were additional plans for educational, research, and ecotourism programs. But beyond that was something much more daring: a concerted effort to move the peace process along.

“Conservation is a great common language, and that’s really what this is all about—to keep these people talking, whether it’s about the birds or the air or the water,” says Larry Morris, president of the Quebec-Labrador Foundation, a Massachusetts-based conservation group that was an early and enthusiastic supporter of the Jordan Valley project. “It gets to your gut—even if it’s just an infinitesimal step, it’s better than them blowing themselves up.”

THE PROPOSAL GATHERED steam faster than anyone had expected. In 1998, USAID kicked in an initial grant of $1.5 million, and the European Union eventually offered 2.5 million euros—after all, it was their birds they were protecting. And then in September 2000, just days before the principals were to gather in Amman, Jordan, and officially announce the launch of the project, Ariel Sharon, then the chairman of Israel’s right-wing party, Likud, took a provocative stroll past the Al Aqsa Mosque, on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, and the second intifada broke out.

Last spring I met Atrash and Alon in New York. They were there fundraising, doing a sort of tag-team presentation for American philanthropists and foundations and, yes, sharing a hotel room. They admitted that political events had slowed their progress—but insisted the project was up and running.

I was intrigued and skeptical. Was the Jordan Valley project for real or merely a clever scam for acquiring shiny SUVs? Even if those involved were sincere, in a place where every conceivable strategy for making peace had so far reaped only mistrust, rage, and violence, was it possible that a joint conservation program could work—and not only that, actually become a catalyst for political change?

With the help of Courtney Kealy, an American photographer living in Beirut, I set up an itinerary to visit the Jordan Valley. We would track the spring migration, starting in Jordan on the shores of the Dead Sea. From there we would follow the birds north into the valley, swinging up through the West Bank and into Israel before arriving at the Jordan’s source, beneath the snow-capped heights of Mount Hermon, the hulking 9,232-foot massif where Israel, Lebanon, and Syria converge. Our journey would necessarily end there, at one of the most heavily fortified borders in the world.

Though I’d traveled in the Holy Land once before, on a post-college ramble nearly two decades earlier, nothing prepared me for what I encountered once we arrived. In a taxi on the road from Damascus, Syria, to Amman, a scrupulously polite Syrian engineer assured me that the World Trade towers had been felled not by Saudi hijackers but by the CIA itself—everyone knew that. Later, in northern Israel, a young Jewish mother with a baby in her arms told me flatly that there was no such thing as a Palestinian. “They are all from Lebanon and Jordan,” she said. “They only came here because of the prosperity that we created.”

But against that high wall of fear and prejudice stood an amazing thing that I had all but forgotten from my earlier trip: the land itself, as ancient and remarkably sculpted, and in places as wild, as the American Southwest. The Jews and the Arabs have their claims on it, and anyone who travels there must necessarily grapple with a tangled knot of colonial and even biblical history. But to visit in the spring or fall, when millions of birds are pinwheeling through the heavens, is to realize that there are other, much older claims here, too.

IF THE JORDAN VALLEY PROJECT has a “flagship” bird, it’s probably the white stork. It’s big—nearly six feet, wingtip to wingtip—and beautiful, with a bold black border on its snowy wings, a slender red beak, and long red legs. And it’s a great migrator. From as far south as South Africa these giant waders return each spring to the towers and steeples of Northern Europe, their arrival the very symbol of rebirth and renewal. In the animal-as-fundraiser category, the white stork is right up there with the panda.

My first sight of one comes in the Wadi Araba, the vast sandy wash south of the Dead Sea. I’m standing in the shade of a thorny jujube tree with Sharif Hussein, a research officer in BirdLife International’s Jordan office, when he points out a flock of them circling across the valley. “Watch how they ride the thermal,” he says. “When they get to the top, they’ll turn north and start gliding, losing altitude and looking around for the next lift.”

A lithe, diminutive 27-year-old, Hussein tells me that he is one of only two academically trained ornithologists in Jordan, a country of five million people. Along with a colleague, Ibrahim Al-Khader, 35, a plant taxonomist by training, Hussein’s job is to identify IBAs—Important Bird Areas—and figure out ways to keep them from being paved over or plowed under. Hence our itinerary today, an IBA-hopping drive north along the eastern shore of the Dead Sea and into the Jordan Valley proper.

By the standards of the Arab world, Jordan is an environmentally progressive country. Its first conservation organization, the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature, was founded in 1966 by hunters who’d seen much of their country’s once-abundant game disappear. In that same year, the last Syrian desert ostrich died, steeling a Rooseveltian determination to prevent other endangered species like the oryx and the Nubian ibex from meeting the same fate.

Today there are about a dozen environmental NGOs headquartered in Amman, along with a newly established Ministry of Tourism and Environment. Which is not to say that there aren’t looming ecological problems. As we cruise north along the Dead Sea, I’m amazed to see how far the water has dropped in 20 years. In fact, there are two Dead Seas now—the larger northern one and a smaller, shallower southern one, ringed by chemical plants. In 1900, the annual inflow to the Dead Sea from the River Jordan was 1.2 billion cubic meters; by 1985, it was down to a tenth of that. Today it’s a mere trickle, a consequence of mechanized irrigation and increasing human settlement upstream. Until recently, Al-Khader says, most of the pumping took place on the Israeli side of the river, “but the Jordanians are catching up. Agriculturally we are, if not high-tech, at least mid-tech.”

The disappearing Dead Sea is a graphic illustration of the changes humans have wrought, but it’s by no means the only one. A century ago, at least two of everything roamed here: African and Asian species of lions, ostriches, and antelopes. As recently as the 1940s, cheetahs were seen loping through the hills behind Jerusalem. They’re gone now, along with most of the rest of the historical megafauna and the great forests of oak and cedar that once covered the mountains on both sides of the valley. The birds are still here, but one wonders for how much longer.

Near the northern end of the Dead Sea is the Baptism Site, Jordan’s newest tourist attraction and, not coincidentally, a promising IBA. A trail runs down to the tamarisk forest on the floodplain of the River Jordan, which forms the border between Jordan and Israel. On an old, dry river bend stand the ruins of an ancient chapel that Jordanians say is the site of Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist. Following Hussein through the thickets, we arrive at the river itself, a shallow ribbon of warm, brown, nitrogen-laden soup about 50 or 60 feet across.

It’s a unique spot—the only place along the entire 200-mile Israel-Jordan border where the general public can dip its hands in the River Jordan. That lack of access might be bad news for would-be baptizers, but it’s certainly been a good thing for the birds. “It’s one of the benefits of the military occupation,” Al-Khader says, smiling wryly. “This whole corridor stayed green. Same situation in the Golan Heights and Southern Lebanon. Conservation-wise, there’s lots of potential.”

Though Israel has a well-developed system of national parks and nature preserves—an impressive 20 percent of its land enjoys some form of protection—there’s a long way to go before conservation becomes a real priority in any other Middle Eastern country, including Jordan. One of the biggest problems becomes obvious as we stand in the unfinished pavilion by the river: no tourists. In the hour or so we linger there, just one family makes the pilgrimage to the water.

At the pavilion, there’s an elaborate stone water fountain, but when I go to take a drink nothing comes out of the faucet. Al-Khader shakes his head. “That’s been broken since the intifada,” he says, glancing across the river. As an Arab of Palestinian extraction—his father emigrated from the West Bank to Kuwait in 1959—he naturally sides with the Palestinian cause. But in this case I get the distinct impression that his dismay is directed at Palestinian and Israeli alike, as if to say, Can’t you two just get it together, so we can get our water fountains working again?

IF THERE’S ONE CRIPPLING OBSTACLE the Jordan Valley project faces, it’s the near impossibility of regional travel. I’d been hoping to see Jewish and Arab birders gathered in one place, banding birds side by side. That was, to put it mildly, naive. Currently, the closest place all the principals can meet is Turkey. Under certain conditions, some Israelis can travel to Jordan (the two countries established full diplomatic relations in 1994) but certainly not to any other Arab country. The Palestinians have it pretty bad, too. In Jericho, Sami Backleh tells us of his last trip to Kfar Ruppin, the birdwatching station in northern Israel. Despite having the proper travel permits and an official letter of invitation, he was pulled off two buses a total of six times for impromptu security checks. “I can’t describe what that is like, to be searched like that, again and again,” he says. “I love Kfar Ruppin, and the people there are my friends, but I don’t know if I can go back.”

We get a pretty good feel for checkpoints ourselves, first on the way to Jericho from the Allenby Bridge border crossing, a three-mile trip that takes three hours, and then, a few days later, on the 25-mile drive from Jericho to Bethlehem. That requires eight hours, four taxis, and, when the last, crucial checkpoint turns out to be closed, an illicit trek across a rocky hillside. When we finally arrive at the Palestine Wildlife Society headquarters, in Beit Sahour, just down the hill from Bethlehem, Imad Atrash throws his arms around me in a hearty embrace. “Ah, my friend,” he says, grinning broadly. “Now you see how we are suffering.” Atrash’s crow’s-feet and “classic Arabic mustache,” as he calls it, give him a warm, avuncular air—so much so that I’m a bit taken aback by the fierceness of his political agenda. Bundling us into his Isuzu king cab, Atrash first drives us out to see the new fence at the edge of town, a ten-foot-high assemblage of electrified grillwork and razor wire. Part of the “security barrier” that Israel is currently constructing to encircle the West Bank—Palestinians call it “the apartheid wall”—it effectively separates Beit Sahour from the communal pasture that once surrounded it.

Atrash points to a neighboring hilltop called Jebel Abu Ghneim, which once also belonged to his village. There, Israeli bulldozers have scraped away the trees and topsoil to make way for a complex of some 6,000 apartments—dwellings that, needless to say, are for Israelis, despite the fact that they’re being built on the Palestinian side of the Green Line, the original 1948 demarcation between the newly independent state of Israel and the tattered remains of the British protectorate of Palestine.

“It’s unbelievable,” Atrash says, in a phrase that is to become something of a refrain.

Later, he elaborates. “First thing, they say this wall is for the terrorists, but, believe me, anyone who wants to blow himself up—this won’t stop him. Second thing, I do not defend the bombers; violence is not an answer. But if I am under this kind of pressure, I will eventually explode. Any man will.”

Our third day in Beit Sahour dawns windy, hot, and white. It’s the hamsin—which means “fifty” in Arabic—the sand-laden sirocco that blows in from the Egyptian desert and can, legend says, last for 50 days. Atrash seems unfazed as he picks us up in the Isuzu, nattily attired in a safari vest, jeans, and Reeboks. And sure enough, as we head out of town, the sky begins to regain its blueness. Our destination is one of Atrash’s favorite spots, and one of the last nesting grounds of the endangered lesser kestrel: the great medieval monastery of Mar Saba, on the eastern slopes, the desolate badlands where the Judean Mountains begin their long march down to the Dead Sea. After the roadblocks and rubble of Bethlehem, I’m not expecting anything much. But Mar Saba is spectacular, like something out of Tibet—a vast, Byzantine monastery carved into the sandstone flanks of a deep gorge, marred only slightly by the fact that the creek running in the depths below appears to consist mostly of untreated sewage. (“The settlements,” sniffs Atrash.) In its heyday, the fifth century, he tells us, 5,000 monks lived here and in the surrounding cave-pocked cliffs; now there are just ten.

“When I was in university and getting too noisy, I used to love staying with the monks,” Atrash says. “I would just sit, reading and relaxing. F5.”

“F5?”

“You know, on the computer—the function key number five: Refresh.”

Atrash drives with one hand, the other alternately holding his still camera or his video camera, a hunter shooting everything that moves. A crested lark, purple and lavender geraniums, a family of camels, an old man in a traditional headdress gathering sweet pea shoots for his sheep—it’s all fodder for his lens. He waves to everybody, and everybody waves back. It dawns on me that perhaps his real mission isn’t simply to document what’s out there, the vanishing wildlife and the culture, but to figuratively show the flag, driving his commando truck all over the hinterland and spreading the word that “the nature,” as he calls it, belongs to the Palestinians, too. It’s all about the information. Tromp over the land and draw the maps, trap the birds and take the notes. The message is simple: Actual physical knowledge of one’s land can be a source of real power.

Atrash nods when I ask him about it, then frowns. “My people sometimes say, ‘Why are you worrying about the plants and the animals?'” he says.” ‘Who do you want to protect—us or the nature?’ I admit it is a tough question. They want to survive, and they don’t see how we can protect them.”

AFTER A WEEK OF THE WEST BANK, Jerusalem seems pretty First World. There’s hot water, Starbucks lattes, and high-speed Internet. But walking the narrow passages of the Old City, there’s also a hostile vibe. Promiscuously armed Jewish settlers march in de facto militias, and the Muslim Quarter is closed off entirely. Only Arabs can go in, a policeman tells us at a checkpoint.

At the American Colony Hotel we huddle conspiratorially with journo types fresh in from a tour of duty in Iraq. No one really believes we’re doing a story about birds. We’re obviously CIA. Still, whenever the debate about the Eternal Question—how to arrive at a just settlement between Arab and Jew—reaches its inevitable dead end, it is immensely satisfying to remark, “Are you aware that tomorrow is the peak of the honey-buzzard migration in the Jordan Valley, and about 100,000 of them will be in the air?”

We rent a car and, delighted to be road-tripping American style, drop down to the Mediterranean coast on Highway 1, the main road from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. Israel looks and feels like California; there are housing developments and big-box megastores, and the traffic is terrible. At a place called Latrun, halfway to Tel Aviv, we turn off and pull into the parking lot of a sprawling tank museum. An Isuzu Trooper is parked nearby, its sides plastered with raptor decals. From it bounds a rangy, bespectacled figure with frazzled hair and a bulging shoulder bag: Yossi Leshem.

“This is where the Jordanian armored brigades made their stand in the 1948 war of independence,” Leshem says as he walks us into the museum grounds. “Ariel Sharon was wounded here.” He turns and points to the hills behind him. “We’re at the foot of the mountains leading to Jerusalem. This was the reason for the battle, but it’s also the reason for the birds.” As if on cue, a flock of two or three hundred white storks appears, spinning up on a thermal and then gliding off to the north.

In the early 1980s, Leshem was an unfocused grad student marking time in the biology department of Tel Aviv University. Then he made a startling discovery. During the previous decade, Israel’s storied fighter pilots had run into a lot of birds. There had been 35 “severe” bird strikes—collisions, that is, that caused more than $1 million in damage. Five aircraft had been lost, and one pilot was killed. Leshem, a raptor specialist, was the first to see what the problem was: low-altitude training flights that conflicted with ages-old bird-migration routes. He was initially laughed off by the air force. “What can you do?” a colonel told him. “If you fly, you’re going to hit birds.” But in the spring of 1983 he got a frantic call after a particularly horrific collision between a buzzard and a Skyhawk in which the $8 million machine was destroyed. (The pilot ejected and, despite a broken neck, survived.) The detailed maps that Leshem developed for the air force—”Bird-Plagued Zones,” he titled them—became the basis of his doctoral thesis and resulted in a 76 percent reduction in bird strikes in their first year of use. Leshem parlayed his sudden fame—he’d become something of a folk hero in Israel—into a high-profile career as an environmental crusader. Eventually he became president of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, where he enlisted celebrities and politicians like Al Gore and former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres to trumpet the cause of migratory birds. He also turned his charm on the superintendent of the Latrun Tank Museum, a general, arguing that the site would make an excellent birdwatching station.

“I said to the general, ‘You are telling the story of the past, and I am telling the story of the future,’ ” Leshem says, chuckling. “He gave me nine acres. Now almost as many students as soldiers pass through.”

A big draw for kids is the ability to follow individual storks, cranes, and raptors, more than 100 of which have now been fitted with miniature radio transmitters. “You give them a bird to follow, let them name it, and then watch them track it on the Web site,” Leshem says of the educational initiative, dubbed Migratory Birds Know No Boundaries. “Their animal lands in Syria in the morning, traverses Jordan, penetrates the Palestinian Authority, and then lands in Sinai that afternoon. Emotionally, it’s very powerful.”

In the fall of 1998, there was an unprecedented gathering of 5,000 schoolchildren at Latrun—equal numbers of Jews, Palestinians, and, most crucially, Leshem says, Israeli Arabs, who functioned as translators and go-betweens. “We had more events planned, some of them on the West Bank, but after the intifada began, we had to cancel them,” Leshem adds ruefully. “Nobody wanted their children going to the West Bank.”

If reaching kids is one sagging pillar of the Jordan Valley project, another is ecotourism. Israel has long been known to serious birdwatchers; prior to the first intifada, some 30,000 foreigners a year came just to see the famous raptor migration in Eilat, on the Red Sea. (Up to 100,000 eagles, hawks, and falcons a day sometimes fly past.) The idea, Leshem tells us, is to persuade some of the same deep-pocketed visitors to return and follow the migration more closely, hopping from station to station along with the birds.

To see one such station in action, Leshem sends us north two hours to a small kibbutz in the Jordan Valley, 23 miles south of the Sea of Galilee. Like a lot of its fellow kibbutzim, Kfar Ruppin, population 400, is fighting for its survival. The problem is not security but economics. Communal goodwill, it seems, is no match for large-scale agribusiness. For the moment, only one operation on the kibbutz is making any money: high-salinity fish ponds in which carp, tilapia, and mullet thrive.

Birds were supposed to be Kfar Ruppin’s other mainstay. Hard by the River Jordan, with its fenced and mined DMZ, Kfar Ruppin is an avian Disneyland: Francolins wander through the wheat fields, pelicans and ospreys hang around the fish ponds, and bee-eaters and rollers dig nests into the soft clay banks. Two years ago, a surreal flock of 42,000 storks circled down to roost for the night. As for us, we spend a pleasant couple of days lounging in the hostel, driving the fields and border roads at dawn and dusk with Kfar Ruppin’s head ringer, Kobe Merom. The birdwatching is spectacular but a little sad at the same time. It’s the height of the migration, and we’re the only people here to see it.

AT KFAR RUPPIN, we’re about 825 feet below sea level. From here, though, the Jordan River rises quickly toward its source, on the flanks of Mount Hermon, in the hotly disputed Golan Heights, which Israel seized from Syria during the Six- Day War, in 1967. If we were storks heading for Europe, we’d be over Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley in half a day.

Dan Alon is waiting for us in the parking lot of a supermarket on the south shore of the Sea of Galilee, the great freshwater lake that lies beneath the Golan. A bearish 36-year-old and head of the Israeli Ornithological Center, Alon is Imad Atrash’s Israeli counterpart in the Jordan Valley project—a quiet, eminently patient man who seems the perfect foil for his charismatic and sometimes impolitic partner.

Heading north in his Subaru Forester, Alon leads us to our ultimate destination, the Hula Valley, the great basin that lies at the foot of Mount Hermon. Once a malarial 10,000-acre swamp, the Hula was drained in the 1950s to create farmland and “to show that Zionism was rising up and fighting a successful battle with Mother Nature,” as Alon puts it.

The problem was that the peat soil, once dried, quickly blew away in the wind. “It was once one of the best places in the Middle East for migration, and then the whole thing became an environmental disaster,” Alon says. The ensuing uproar spurred the foundation of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel. Ultimately, in 1992, a part of the valley was reflooded, and the birds began to return.

As a grad student and budding environmental warrior, Alon had fought two epic battles over the Hula. The first was against the valley’s farmers, who were convinced that redeveloping bird habitat would lead to huge, crop-destroying flocks. “Already, they were losing 2.5 million shekels a year in corn and chickpeas to the cranes,” Alon says. “I really suffered. They thought I was just a green coming from Tel Aviv to tell them what to do. ‘Let us shoot them,’ they kept saying. It took a lot to build up trust.”

Alon’s idea, which became his master’s thesis, was to feed the birds directly, by scattering corn near the lake with a mechanical sower. “The farmers were skeptical, but when we started the program, it took the cranes less than three days to figure it out,” Alon recalls. “It was classic learned behavior. Is it natural? No. But it wasn’t natural before—they were eating the same agricultural produce then, too.”

On this late April day, there are a few hundred cranes in the meadows of the Hula—stragglers behind schedule or too weak or old to follow the main flock north to Siberia—along with flocks of roseate spoonbills and pratincoles and a gorgeous pallid harrier floating over the reeds. “You should see this place during the autumn migration,” Alon says. “There will be 400 species here, and up to 60,000 cranes. People feeding them out of their hands. Last winter, we had 150,000 visitors.”

Thus began Alon’s second crusade—fighting a developer who, cognizant of the birds’ appeal, had convinced the regional authorities that a 900-room hotel with a marina was just the thing the Hula preserve needed. The story raises a knotty, if hypothetical, issue: Is it possible that well-intentioned efforts like the Jordan Valley project might ultimately be self-defeating?

Over lunch in a nearby shopping mall, Alon sighs and turns up his hands. “The main aim of the Birds and People program is not to bring peace but to preserve nature,” he says. “But for sure, good relations between people is part of the package. If they can meet and do things together with no shooting and no problems, then that’s half the battle.”

“On the other hand,” he continues, “if there is peace, then development will surely follow, and that will bring its own problems.” Alon shrugs, then smiles. “I guess that will be the second half of the battle.” With that, he climbs into his Forester and starts punching numbers into the dash-mounted cell phone. By the time he leaves the parking lot, he’s working on a deal to preserve the next IBA. The image stays with me, an upbeat end to a bittersweet trip.

LOOKING BACK, we were lucky to see the Jordan Valley when we did. After the biggest winter in a decade, the sound of running water was everywhere and wildflowers dotted the hillsides. In the political arena, too, things seemed to be looking up. At the time of our visit, the Palestinian Authority had yielded to American pressure and named a pragmatist, Mahmoud Abbas, to the newly created post of prime minister. No bombs went off while we were in Israel, and the battered peace plan known as “the road map” seemed to be back on track.

Since then, however, the picture has changed. Abbas has resigned in frustration, and at press time his replacement, Ahmed Qurei, seems on the verge of doing the same. The suicide bombers have returned with a vengeance, and so has the Israeli military presence in the occupied territories. Construction of the security barrier continues, and the road map lies discarded like yesterday’s newspaper. In this tragic, all-consuming struggle over the land, there’s one question that rarely gets asked: If and when the dust settles, will there be anything left worth having? Through it all, the bird guys are sticking with it, e-mailing one another, traveling to meet up and raise money, keeping the conversation going. They’re patient people, realists who know from watching the natural world that change is a mysterious thing that comes at its own pace, if it comes at all. But they’re dreamers, too.

“No matter how many joint projects you make, that will not be enough incentive for the political decision makers to change course,” the Palestinian Authority representative, Sami F. Musallam, warned when we paid him a courtesy visit on our first day in Jericho. “I don’t say we should stop these programs. On the contrary. But it’s only when the decision makers decide to make peace that you will see a mushrooming of these programs and the layman joining in.”

“Now it is only the courageous who do this,” Musallam said. “The pioneers.”

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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.

Stephen Koch at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, January 5, 2003

Cold feet: Koch at Granite Falls, in Teton National Forest.

One way down: Koch plots his Everest finale on Jackson Hole’s Rendezvous Peak in January.

Total commitment: Koch makes his pioneering descent of Talk Is Cheap, March 1, 1995.

“I just want to swing ’em”: Koch in full quest mode at Jackson Lake, in Grand Teton National Park, not far from the site of his near-fatal avalanche accident in 1998

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.”

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.

AT SIX-TWO, 185 POUNDS, Koch is big by the standards of the climbing and snowboarding worlds. With his linebacker shoulders, jutting jaw, and skinhead-short blond hair, he could be a cartoon character: Sergeant Rock in snow camo, or “El Gringo con Carne,” as he was dubbed on a 2000 snowboard-mountaineering expedition in Peru that we’d both joined. He exudes nervous energy. The first time I set foot in his Jackson apartment, a few weeks before Christmas 2002, I find him on hands and knees, madly scrubbing at a spot of mud left by a careless visitor. About the only time you’ll see him relaxed is on his snowboard, where he moves with serenity and perfect balance—a classic old-school rider.

A big key to Koch’s success is that while he is a physical machine, he’s also a social animal. He makes a point of striking up conversations with total strangers. He asks waitresses to show him their tattoos. He makes unnervingly direct eye contact, flashes his cat-who-ate-the-canary smile, and then crushes your hand in his. He’s a big hugger, which can be corny, but it’s usually charming, too. On McKinley a couple of years ago, conniving to meet two women climbers on vacation from jobs at Sony Music, he approached with a pressing technical question: Could they help him fix his broken Discman?

In a Huaraz, Peru, disco, I’d gotten a glimpse of Koch in full roar, stripping off his shirt when the beat picked up and clearing a huge swath on the dance floor. When I catch up with him in Jackson, he isn’t in quite the same form—his right knee is still tender from ligament surgery two months ago. But it’s party season, and Koch never misses a party. Toward midnight of my second night in town, we find ourselves in the Old Yellowstone Garage, a Jackson restaurant where the local oral surgeon is hosting a lavish holiday fte. Koch is dressed nattily, as usual—crisp chinos and a long-waisted Cuban shirt—and he works the room like a seasoned pro. Having been a fixture at the elite local outfit Exum Mountain Guides for more than a decade, he’s a well-known figure in Jackson, and most people have heard about his upcoming Everest plans. One woman in a black sleeveless blouse, however, has not. When he brings her up to date, she crosses her arms in disbelief.

“You can do that?” she asks. “Isn’t it, like, way too steep?”

“Not really,” says Koch. “I mean, I’ve been on steeper stuff here.”

If Koch has any doubts about the project, he doesn’t let on. Mark Newcomb, 36, a Jackson ski mountaineer and likely Everest teammate this summer, marvels at Koch’s ability to radiate confidence. “I can’t just go tell somebody I’m going to ski Everest,” Newcomb says. “I have to say, ÔWell, I’m going to try, but it might not happen.’ Stephen isn’t like that. He can look somebody in the eye and say, ÔI’m going to snowboard Everest.’ ”

Overhearing the conversation, a balding thirty-something PR executive and amateur climber joins in. “What route are you doing?” he asks Koch.

“The direct North Face,” says Koch. “The Hornbein.”

“Wow,” says the man, his eyes widening. “We were on Cho Oyu last year, and we got a good look at it. It’s steep—you’ll have to rappel some sections.”

Koch shakes his head. “I don’t think so. I’m going at the end of the summer, during the monsoon. It should be filled in.”

“And you’re going to climb that thing with all that snow?”

“That’s the thing that everybody forgets—like Marco,” Koch says of Siffredi’s attempt. “He went up the North Ridge and dropped in from above, and I really think that was part of the problem.” Siffredi used oxygen and support Sherpas, Koch explains, but he wants to do it “by fair means”—no oxygen, no Sherpas—and in true “alpine style”: straight up, straight down. “That’s the purest way,” he says. “And also the only way you know for sure what the snow is like.”

“Wow,” the man says again, shooting Koch a sideways glance.

Talk to Koch’s oldest friends in Jackson and you often see the same look. Most express support for the project, but it’s not hard to read the worry in their eyes. “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, 49, a fellow Exum climbing guide and a veteran of many Alaskan epics. “Which isn’t the best place to be, psychologically, on a project of that scale.”

Others are less charitable. “I wouldn’t want to be in his position, I can tell you that,” says John Griber, 37, another snowboard mountaineer from Jackson. “If I go to Everest, I don’t have any obligations. If I’m 200 feet from the summit and need to turn around, I can turn around. Can he?”

When I report the comments to Koch, his face tightens. “When you get up there on the mountain, there are no sponsors,” he says. “And anyway, nobody could possibly put more pressure on me than I do.”

ONE DAY IN THE LATE 1980s, Jackson photographer Wade McKoy was shooting at Corbett’s Couloir, the dramatically corniced chute near the top of Jackson Hole, when Koch showed up. “This kid on a snowboard told me he was going to air it and could I take a few pictures,” McKoy recalls. “I didn’t see him again for months, until one day he came up to me and said, ÔHey, I saw my picture in TransWorld Snowboarding, but not my name.’ I said, ÔThat’s because I didn’t know it.’ And he was like ÔWell, that’s not good.’ ”

It’s not hard to trace Koch’s “powerful need for attention,” as he puts it, to his childhood. Koch grew up in San Diego, the fourth of five children of an aerospace engineer—his dad designed rocket wings for General Dynamics—and “a very religious mom,” a devout Catholic who sometimes organizes prayer support meetings when her son goes on an expedition. Seven years younger than his twin brothers and three years younger than his sister, Stephen often felt the kid brother’s sense that he was missing out on the action. A natural athlete, he made up for it by showboating in his favorite sports: skateboarding and surfing.

There’s a tradition of contemplative public service in the Koch family: One of the Koch twins is now a Benedictine monk in California; Stephen’s sister, who lives in Oregon, counsels compulsive gamblers; and his younger brother did a stint with Teach for America. Koch himself might have wound up a doctor—he sometimes supplements his paltry guiding income by working as a freelance masseuse—if he hadn’t been such a disaster in the classroom: “Hyperactive, the class clown, with ADD and all the rest of it,” he says.

When Koch was 12, his family moved to Denver, where he became a proficient mogul skier, and then on to Boston midway through high school. “The thing about my family is that we were just so conformist,” Koch says. “There was no model—not even any aunts or uncles—for living a different life.”

In 1987, fresh out of high school and with no particular plans for college, Koch bought a one-way plane ticket to Jackson, where the idea was to learn how to snowboard and to benefit from Wyoming’s legal drinking age of 19. He got a job baking cookies in Jackson Hole’s cafeteria, thus obtaining a season ski pass, and took a snowboarding lesson the first day the mountain was open. “That was it,” says Koch. “I picked it up instantly.”

“He was just a punk—a partying snowboarder,” recalls Tom Turiano, 36, a mountain guide who first got Koch interested in going off-piste. In June 1989, with just two seasons—but more than 200 days—of snowboarding under his belt, Koch set out to climb 13,770-foot Grand Teton with Turiano, hoping to become the first to snowboard it. “I had virtually no climbing experience,” Koch says. “I’d never roped up in the mountains before, and I barely knew how to self-arrest.” At first he lagged behind, tired and nervous. “When we got up on the east face,” he says, “I got a big second wind and took over breaking the trail. We started down and did two rappels in the Stettner Couloir, and I was like ÔWhy am I doing this? This is turnable terrain.’ I climbed back up and put the board back on.”

“After that, he was the shit,” Turiano recalls. “He was on the cover of both newspapers, everyone loved him, he made a lot of friends.”

That fall, Koch moved to Chamonix, France, curious to see the legendary valley surrounded by “the equivalent of 15 Grand Tetons,” as one Jackson climber put it. He washed dishes, modeled skiwear for a Swedish photographer, bought a valley ski pass, and found an Aussie girlfriend. “Chamonix was the sixties for me,” he says. In terms of mountaineering, it was grad school. Koch saw the exploits of his French counterparts—legendary extremistes like Bruno Gouvy, Jean-Marc Boivin, and Patrick Vallencant—up close and did several climbs with another French standout, snowboarder Alain Moroni. “I realized that a lot of people in Chamonix were making a living doing this stuff,” Koch says. “They were known to the general public; they were in the press. I was like ‘OK, it’s possible to make this happen.’ ”

“I remember going into a bar with Stephen and watching this film of Gouvy jumping off a helicopter onto the tip of the Dru, snowboarding it, and then breaking out his paraglider and flying down to the valley,” recalls Greg Von Doersten, 39, a Jackson photographer who visited Koch in Chamonix. “It was superhero stuff—that whole idea of enchainement, of hopping off one thing and flying to the next. If you saw that and you were young and ambitious, you had to say, ‘Wow, the possibilities are limitless.’ ”

As long as you stayed alive. While snowboarding alone, Koch had several very close calls. Then one day he heard that the great Gouvy himself, clad in his skintight Marlboro speed suit, had hopped out of a helicopter atop the Aiguille Verte, taken a couple of crisp practice turns above the Whymper Couloir, and promptly lost his edge and tumbled 3,000 feet to his death.

“Gouvy once said something about the grass being greener, the sky bluer, after one of these descents,” says Von Doersten. “But you looked at him and you had to think, ÔOK, but you also started this machine that you couldn’t stop.’ ”

KOCH LEFT CHAMONIX in the fall of 1990 and, except for one glamorous hiatus, has lived in Jackson ever since. His current residence is a two-story condominium on a quiet street corner, equidistant from the brew pub and Snow King, the local ski hill. It’s a comfortable place, but he doesn’t own it; unlike many of his contemporaries, he missed out on the real estate boom of the early and mid-nineties. Though he professes to be happy with the mountain-bachelor lifestyle—a dependable 18-year-old Toyota pickup, a garage stacked with gear, a few bottles of wine in the rack—he’s always looking for the next big opportunity.

In 1995, one of Koch’s Exum clients offered to introduce him to Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone and Men’s Journal, who was vacationing in Sun Valley, Idaho. “He went up there and hung out with Jann for the weekend,” says Wade McKoy, who has been on four of Koch’s Seven Summits expeditions, “and the next thing you know, Men’s Journal is helping pay for our Denali trip.”

With the Alaska trip scheduled for June 1996, Koch went off to Nepal that spring on a wildly audacious project: a climb of 27,923-foot Lhotse, Everest’s slightly shorter but much steeper neighbor. Since Lhotse shares a base camp with Everest, Koch brought his snowboard, thinking that if things went well, he might sneak onto Everest sans permit and “poach” a first descent.

His first day in camp, a teammate introduced him to New York-based climber Sandy Hill Pittman, who had recently separated from her husband, media executive Robert Pittman. (They divorced in 1997.) She was there to climb Everest with a guided group from Mountain Madness. The two had spoken previously on the phone—Koch had called Pittman, who was pursuing her own Seven Summits quest, for logistical information—but this was their first face-to-face meeting. They got to know each other as part of a group of climbers bonding over a bottle of Jack Daniels, Koch recalls, and subsequently began a romantic relationship.

It was a relationship that was soon overshadowed, first by the events of May 10, 1996, when eight Everest climbers and guides perished—including Scott Fischer, the guide for Mountain Madness—and then by the controversies and recrimination that followed. In Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer’s chronicle of the Everest disaster, Pittman is introduced as “a millionaire socialite-cum-climber” and a “shameless” publicity seeker. “Fairly or unfairly,” Krakauer wrote, “to her derogators, Pittman epitomized all that was reprehensible about [the] popularization of the Seven Summits and the ensuing debasement of the world’s highest mountain.” To Koch, the criticism of Pittman was unfair and disproportionate—”as if she invented the idea of guided climbing,” he says scornfully.

On Lhotse, Koch made it to nearly 26,000 feet—Camp 4—before being stopped by exhaustion and dehydration. He was descending the mountain when the big storm hit Everest. Once back in the United States, he escaped to Mount McKinley to collect the third of his snowboarding summits. Afterward, Pittman invited him to New York to be her houseguest, and Koch wound up staying more than a year and a half.

“Stephen offered me tremendous support after 1996,” Hill, who has since remarried and now goes by her maiden name, wrote me in an e-mail. “He had been there, and he knew what had really happened and that so much of what was written following was exaggerated and fabricated to sell books, magazines, and movies.”

One of Koch’s reasons for moving to New York was to find backing for his Seven Summits Snowboarding Quest, but his efforts failed to produce the funding he sought. “If all the media frenzy of 1996 hadn’t happened, he probably would’ve found sponsors for his Everest trip then,” Hill wrote in her e-mail, “but I remember people telling him, ÔOh, Everest—that’s an old story already . . . everyone’s doing it now,’ as though what Stephen had in mind could be pulled off by some weekend snowboarding teenager.”

Nevertheless, Koch stayed in New York, telling himself a gym was a gym—he could train for big peaks anywhere. In the climbing world he became known as “someone who can hang in high society,” as he puts it. But he did pull off one successful expedition during his New York sojourn: In January 1997, he, Wade McKoy, and climber Scott Backes went to Kilimanjaro to attempt the highly technical Hein Glacier route. “I was in the best shape ever,” Koch says. “We did a new ice route on the way up and just killed it.” Not long afterward, Koch’s relationship with Hill ended, and he returned to Wyoming.

Back in Jackson, Koch began focusing on another long-dreamed-of objective, the Northeast Snowfields of 12,922-foot Mount Owen in Grand Teton National Park. Early one morning in April 1998, he made his bid. “It’s a beautiful big face and a gorgeous line, and that’s really all I was thinking about,” he says. “I didn’t have a turnaround time, didn’t realize how warm a day it was—I had blinders on.” Koch heard the roar of the avalanche a few seconds before it hit him, but there was nowhere to shelter. It swept him some 2,000 vertical feet, hurtling him over several cliff bands, breaking his back, lacerating his liver, tearing the ligaments in one knee and completely dislocating the other. Miraculously, he wasn’t buried. Sliding on one hip, his other leg flopping uselessly, he worked his way downhill to a relatively secure spot, then spent the night waiting for rescue in his warmest garment—a long underwear top. A friend alerted park rangers that Koch was missing, but it wasn’t until the next morning, 23 hours after his accident, that a rescue helicopter found him.

Being Sandy Hill’s boyfriend hadn’t helped Koch’s credibility in the mountaineering world. The accident on Mount Owen seemed to confirm his dilettantism. “It led to a lot of skepticism about Stephen in the local climbing community,” recalls Angus Thuermer, a climber and the editor of Jackson Hole News at the time. “It was a pretty elementary mistake. But I’ll say this: I’m not sure anybody else would have survived.”

IT’S 5:30 IN THE MORNING, and the floor of Koch’s otherwise tidy living room is a sea of gear: ropes, slings of climbing hardware, axes and crampons, headlamps, batteries, and little packets of Gu. Five minutes later, it has all disappeared into a small daypack. Fifteen minutes after that, having heaved a snowmobile into the back of a friend’s pickup truck, we’re rolling west out of Jackson toward Teton Pass and the Idaho state line.

Koch had ligament surgery in October, his fourth procedure on the right knee and his sixth overall—the lingering legacy of Mount Owen. Today, nine weeks later, is a big test: his first day of ice climbing. Koch’s knee is still volleyball-sized, but if he’s worried, he doesn’t show it. “Check this out,” he says, grabbing his lower leg and pulling back on it. It travels a good inch rearward in the socket before stopping with an alarming clunk. “That’s the PCL, the posterior cruciate ligament. Not really there anymore. But this way”—he pushes his leg side to side—”this is what I care about, and it’s pretty good.”

When Koch talks about Mount Owen, he tends to emphasize the positive. The accident, he says, was a “giant wake-up call” that set him on a new path. “Too much to do,” he told the Jackson Hole News from his hospital bed a week after the accident. “People to love. Babies to have. It’s a sign I’ve got more work to do on this earth—helping others, especially, since I’ve been helped so much.”

Spend some time with Koch, however, and you begin to suspect that the opposite is true—that his life hasn’t changed at all. On the expedition to Peru, in 1999, we’d teased Koch for what he called his “homework”: a book his first serious girlfriend since Hill, Tina Flowers, had given him, called Getting the Love You Want. Koch dutifully read it, and on his return to Jackson even got engaged to Flowers, an athletic, outgoing woman with a successful housecleaning and housesitting business. Then things fell apart. “I don’t really know why,” Koch says. He sighs, then hastens to smooth things over. “But it’s good. We’re still friends.”

“Basically, it was a major decision to go with his career over wife and family,” says Tom Turiano. “But deep down he wants a family, and he knows he blew it with Tina.”

If Koch has found any comfort since Mount Owen, it’s been in his climbing—a sport he’s approached in a different way from his snowboarding. In Peru, the team was shocked and dismayed when Koch quit the expedition before we had even approached our main objective, a ski and snowboard descent of the West Rib of Huascaran—an act that, at the time, seemed monumentally selfish. But in retrospect, Koch’s lame-sounding explanation—”I just want to swing ’em,” he said, miming the action of his ice axes, “and not carry the board all over the place”—may well have been genuine. Over the years, and in between his Seven Summits expeditions, he’s racked up a fairly impressive list of ascents, most notably the last of the three Alaska routes he did with Marko Prezelj—a 48-hour, nonstop push up an unclimbed rib on the southwest face of Mount McKinley.

“I think Stephen has made a natural evolution to alpinism, to making the full commitment,” says Jack Tackle. “I’d like to see him evolve to the point where he could just decide what’s important to him. My sense is, it’s not snowboarding.”

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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