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more photos"Climbing is not an attempt to transcend gravity or death, for it is these intractable forces that actually create the endeavors. Without gravity, climbing would not exist. Without death, what matters life?" - Steve House, of Terrebonne, writing about his mountaineering career in "Beyond the Mountain"
Submitted photo
Face to (mountain) face
World-class climber, Terrebonne resident to host book signing
By Markian Hawryluk / The Bulletin
Published: October 27. 2009 4:00AM PSTSometimes the better you are at something, the fewer the people there are who can truly understand your achievements. Nowhere is that more true than in the sport of mountaineering and in the persona of Steve House.
While media attention on climbing usually swirls around the annual circus on Mount Everest, the 39-year-old Terrebonne resident has, over the past decade, climbed some of the most difficult routes in the world, and beyond his fellow climbers, has gone largely unnoticed.
“People's perception is that the highest mountain is the most important. And it's just simply not true, because the highest mountain isn't necessarily the most difficult,” House said. “You don't get (climbing legend) Reinhold Messner calling you the best alpinist in the world for climbing Everest. You get that for climbing Nanga Parbat. That's a technical route, but nobody's ever heard about that outside of the climbing community.”
Nanga Parbat is a 26,660-foot peak in the Himalayas, whose Rupal Face is considered the highest mountain face in the world, rising 15,000 feet above its base. In 2005, House and partner Vince Anderson climbed up the face in a daring eight-day climb with minimal equipment and little margin for error.
The climb, for which the pair won the prestigious Piolet d'Or award for the best climb of the year, had been a 15-year obsession for House. His two attempts at the face became the bookends for his new book, “Beyond the Mountain.” House will discuss the climb and his mountaineering career at a book reading at Central Oregon Community College in Bend on Thursday (see “If you go” on Page E1).
House grew up in the Oregon town of La Grande, but started climbing as an exchange student in Slovenia. At 19, he joined his Slovenian climbing friends on a trip to Nanga Parbat in 1990, when he first saw the Rupal Face. He was enrolled at the time in Evergreen College in Washington State, a college that allows students to design their own programs.
“I got 16 credits to go to Nanga Parbat and keep a journal, which at the time seemed like the greatest scam in the world,” he said. “But it did teach me a lot and set me into the pattern. All of these journals I've had for the last 20 years, allowed me not so much to pick out the descriptions of the details, as get myself in that mind-set.”
The journals helped him remember the order of events or the names of people. The climbing details, he said, he remembers vividly. The routes described in his book are so difficult, his climbing partners believed that nobody other than House could have climbed many of them.
They're all the more impressive given the way House climbed them, a fast-and-light approach to climbing known as alpine style.
Style over summit
Historically, House explained, Everest and all of the other big mountains in the world were climbed with the military or expedition style of climbing. Climbers worked in large teams to ferry supplies to progressively higher camps, attaching thousands of feet of ropes up the route to prepare for the final summit push.
“Alpine style reduces that to just whatever you can carry with you,” House said. “It definitely changes it because you really have to simplify your system, you're much more at the mercy of the mountain and have only your own skills to fall back upon.”
On mountains like Everest, even fairly inexperienced climbers can get to the top because the camps and ropes are put up by Sherpas.
“If the white guys had to go and do that work themselves, none of them would summit Everest,” he said.
House has been an outspoken critic of expedition-style climbing, particular at the elite level of the sport. At one time, expedition climbing may have been the only way possible to climb mountains like Everest, K2 or Nanga Parbat. But as the climbing technique and equipment has gotten better, House, Messner and other elite climbers have proven that even the toughest routes on the biggest mountains can be climbed with a minimum of manpower and impact.
“My main complaint about expedition-style climbing — I've seen this, and taken photos of this and I have documented this — is that all that stuff gets left,” House said. “I don't like to think of myself of criticizing climbing of any style. What I'm a critic of is people not cleaning up after themselves and dumping large amounts of equipment and just abandoning it. If people left that kind of trash on South Sister, there would be a problem.”
Risk and reward
House's style of climbing also focuses not so much on the summit as the route. He tries to find the most direct, most challenging route to the summit. And invariably, those routes are among the most dangerous.
“I think that there is clearly a lot of risk, and anybody who reads my book will understand that I'm quite aware of that,” House said. “That's why of the couple hundred thousand climbers in the world, only a few thousand of them are climbing at a high level in the mountains especially at high altitudes. The further you get out there in commitment, the fewer people are willing to do that, or identify with the rewards and the risks.”
Without the risk inherent in climbing, for House, there would be little reward in completing the climbs.
“The climbing experience is an entirely artificial experience. We create it,” he said. “We're going there to create a situation where sometimes there's a lot of risk of injury or possibly even death. If we weren't getting something out of putting ourselves in that situation — whether that's self-knowledge, whether that's deeper ties with our climbing partners, whatever that may be — then we wouldn't create it, we wouldn't choose that.”
House has other hobbies. He runs, he road bikes, he rides motorcycles. But none of those create the same experience for him that climbing does. Yet for every story of success, for every new route described in the book, there's mention of a friend, a climbing partner, a mentor who died while climbing.
It's a conundrum House addresses in the epilogue of the book, interspersing his thoughts on the risk and rewards of climbing within a recap of a difficult route on Mount Alberta in the Canadian Rockies.
“Climbing is not an attempt to transcend gravity or death, for it is these intractable forces that actually create the endeavors,” he wrote. “Without gravity, climbing would not exist. Without death, what matters life?”
House writes that meaning is found not in the successes but in the struggle, and that each one of us faces our own struggle. It is here, perhaps, that his book has the most meaning for the non-climbing reader. One person's ice axe, he explains, might be another's paintbrush. For some people, the challenge may be in climbing the steepest face, while for others, it could be the easiest route up the mountain.
“It was nice to allow myself that space, to change the tone and allow myself to talk more extemporaneously and philosophically about what climbing is, and why it's important, and how risk fits in, and what is success,” House said. “They're questions we all think about. I don't think I necessarily I answered it, but it's having the discussion that's important.”
House said he wanted to write the book while the stories were “still relevant.” His climbs still rank among the best ever, but eventually another climber will surpass them. Another Messner, another House will put up more daring routes. While the great age of exploration may be over, there are hundreds of unclimbed peaks with thousands of new routes that continue to represent a new frontier in climbing.
Next steps
At 39, House's window for climbing on the cutting edge of alpinism may be closing. He's approaching the age at which few climbers can continue to push the envelope much longer.
“I think I'm still motivated to climb,” he said. “The part that I didn't expect is the more developed I've become as a climber, the more complex the objectives get. The more complex they are, the more there is: the mountains are higher, the expeditions are longer, they're more expensive, your fitness is more crucial, your health is more crucial, the windows for potential success are smaller and smaller.”
House admits that it will be hard to follow up the Rupal Face climb with something bigger and more impressive. For a while after the climb, he felt the pressure. How could he top that climb? His closest friends suggested that he not try.
“I don't look at that way so much now,” House said. “The thing with climbing is you have to be extremely honest about what you can do, because if you overstep that, you fall off, to use the most obvious example.”
It's a reality of the climbing world. However big, however impressive your last climb, people always ask, “What's next?” It's the most common question House faced during his 20-stop book tour in September.
“It's interesting, part of me wants to continue to go on that path and do the next big thing, so to speak,” he said. “But part of me says I can ramp it down a little bit and have more frequent success, because I know how to do that. I just don't know that I'm ready to do that and accept those options.”
Last year, he teamed up with Anderson and Slovenian climber Marko Prezelj to attempt the west face of Makalu, but bad weather preempted the climb.
“I think I'm going to take a break from it this coming summer. I think Marko, Vince and I will do something big, but not something monstrous, but then we'll go back to Makalu in 2011.”
Climbing the west face would be another great feat of mountaineering, but it's unlikely to resonate among the non-climbing public who have never heard of Makalu. The questions he's asked suggest that even some of the audience members at his book readings haven't necessarily grasped the concepts House is trying to convey.
“I like to call on the women because they often have the more thoughtful questions. The men all focus on (the trivialities), ‘What kind of boots did you have? What camera did you use?' They wanted to know the technical details,” House said. “Whereas the women are like, ‘What? Are you crazy?'”
With the emergence of both indoor and outdoor rock climbing, he's increasingly seeing young kids who ask very technical questions about technique. And then there's the inevitable question from those who just don't get it.
“Are you going to climb Everest?”
Markian Hawryluk can be reached at 541-617-7814 or mhawryluk@bendbulletin.com.
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