Google-map all you want, but nothing can prepare
you for the actual sight of the Lhotse Face. It rises - or
descends, depending on your perspective - on the south side of
Mount Everest, 20-something-thousand feet above sea level. At
roughly 100 feet wide and 3,700 feet long, it is the longest rock
face in the Himalayas. For much of the length, the incline is 50
degrees. • Math: Fifty degrees is 20 degrees steeper than the
staircase in your house. Fifty degrees is 19.5 degrees steeper than
the steepest street in San
Francisco (not crooked Lombard but Filbert between
Leavenworth and Hyde, in case you were wondering). Fifty degrees is
40 degrees short of 90 degrees, and 90 degrees equals falling off a
cliff. • Some Everest climbers climb down Everest by way of the
Lhotse Face, clinging to safety lines; others climb up the world's
tallest mountain this way, scaling what is usually a sheet of blue
ice so thick that even a well-swung pick sometimes won't penetrate.
Almost no one ever skis the Lhotse Face because (a) almost no one
has ever skied anywhere on
Mount Everest and (b) because you'd have
to be a totally outer-limits nutbar to want to ski down a
100-foot-wide, 3,700-foot-long sheet of blue ice that is 40 degrees
away from a scene in a Road Runner cartoon. Make one slip here,
catch one bad edge, and you will absolutely, positively be killed
dead.
All of which makes you really wonder about Kit DesLauriers. In
October 2006, DesLauriers, a 37-year-old from Jackson Hole,
Wyoming, skied the Lhotse Face after having spent almost three
weeks climbing to the summit of Everest. Having not been killed
dead in that effort, she had capped her personal and professional
quest begun in May 2004 to climb up and then ski down the highest
peak on each of our planet's seven continents. (She saved the
biggest, Mount Everest, for last.)
Before DesLauriers, no one had ever accomplished a climb/ski of all
the so-called Seven Summits. Indeed, almost no one had, or has,
ever even tried it. That's understandable. For one thing, it's,
like, really hard to get to seven continents in one lifetime. For
another, it's, uh, totally dangerous to ski down peaks that are
20,000-plus feet above sea level because you run into things like,
say, the Lhotse Face. "If they were
skiing the Lhotse Face at sea
level, I'd think that was amazing," says Kevin Flynn, a Rochester,
New York, advertising executive who has climbed Everest and several
of the other Seven Summits and lived to write a book about it. "But
doing it more than 20,000 feet above sea level, with the oxygen
issues at that altitude, is just crazy. If one of them had fallen
and died, you'd say, 'That was a really stupid thing to do.' Since
they were successful, you can say, 'They came out rock stars.' But
there's a pretty thin line between being a rock star and being an
idiot."
The funny thing is that DesLauriers is neither an idiot nor a rock
star, nor is she a totally outer-limits nutbar. You could be
excused for thinking that someone who for two and a half years
willingly and repeatedly faced down death might be covered in
tattoos and fain to speak in the rapid-fire language of an Olympic
half-pipe champion, all "dude" and "rad" and whatnot. But
DesLauriers isn't at all like that. She's tattoo-free (as far as
one can tell in casual company and without asking), calm, and
exceedingly pleasant - though at times, quite blunt. And she didn't
climb and then ski down the Seven Summits to gain immortality or to
land a spot in a Carl's Jr. hamburger commercial. She did it
because, as a successful competitive skier and sports model with
corporate backing from the North Face, she had the means to try.
And also because she loves to ski. Simple as that. "This wasn't
something I was going out to do just to attract fame and become a
rock star," DesLauriers says from a home in
Jackson Hole that's
surrounded by mountains. "This was a personal pursuit."
You want to know how sane she is? Consider that when she was on the
Lhotse Face, she was the most afraid she'd ever been in her life.
DesLauriers kept telling herself out loud, as she made repeated
turns - one must not barrel straight down a sheet of ice on a
50-degree slope, after all - to make the maneuver "like your life
depends on it." She told her husband, Rob, who was skiing alongside
her (he was a member of the climbing/skiing team that had made the
climb to the summit) that she didn't want to die. "Good," he said,
and then he skied away.
Like the Lhotse Face, Vinson Massif can
also be a scary place, one that doesn't exactly make sense. The
16,864-foot-high mountain stands, literally, at the end of the
world -
Antarctica - on an unforgiving, moonlike terrain, where
temperatures can suddenly plunge to minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
It's the hardest of the Seven Summits to reach. Flights must be
reserved months in advance, and to get there, visitors must pony up
for a $250,000 personal insurance policy. It's required in order to
make the trip from the tip of
Chile to Antarctica.
In December 2005, DesLauriers and her team made that trip. Flynn
happened to be making his own trip, as well, with a group of his
own - but his team only intended to climb up and back down Vinson
Massif. "I did it the easy way," he says. Despite the danger, Flynn
says, the DesLauriers team seemed relaxed. "I thought what they
were trying to do was awesome," he says. "But they got trapped up
there."
By "up there," he means at about 13,000 feet on Vinson Massif. Just
a day before they were to head for the summit, Kit and Rob got
stuck in a sudden, brutal storm, with winds exceeding 70 miles per
hour and temperatures plunging to at least 50 below zero.
DesLauriers can tell you all about nearly running out of supplies,
about the storm stopping just in time to allow them to get to the
summit before having to abandon the climb. She can tell you all of
that. But you're not going to really understand it, because unless
you've been there, done that, you probably don't know that under
such conditions, Vinson Massif isn't just difficult and dangerous;
it's otherworldly. Toss some water into the air there, and it will
instantly crystallize. You'll never see water turn to ice in midair
while schussing down the slopes in Jackson Hole.
Which is one of the reasons DesLauriers set out on her Seven
Summits adventure. She wanted to see things she couldn't see at
home in Jackson Hole, things she hadn't seen while growing up and
moving with her parents from
Westport,
Massachusetts, to Long
Island,
New York. By the time she visited Telluride with her family
during a ski vacation, she was already an avid skier, having fallen
in love with the sport on her very first downhill run at the age of
14. DesLauriers decided to move to Telluride on her own in 1991,
and when she wasn't skiing, she was hiking. When she wasn't hiking
or skiing, she was volunteering for her county's search and rescue
teams or working as a stonemason. Yes, a stonemason. One imagines
she could crush walnuts with her back muscles.
She has even modeled for sports-apparel and sports-equipment
companies. That led to a 1999 expedition in Siberia, where she met
Rob DesLauriers while he was making a mountaineering film on Mount
Belukha. "I was the talent," she says. The two married, settled in
Jackson Hole, and immediately set upon opening Teton Mountain
Lodge, which Rob runs. After three years of hard labor, they left
on vacation. Whoa.
Hockey stop. Actually, she prefers not to refer
to it as a vacation.
"'A lifestyle' is better," DesLauriers says. "Whenever you get a
spare minute, what you do with your life then is your lifestyle."
Okay, so they took a lifestyle trip to Mount Aspiring, a
9,950-foot-high mountain in
New Zealand, and DesLauriers became the
first woman to ski from that summit. A year later, another, er,
lifestyle trip took them to
Denali National Park for climbing and
skiing
Mount McKinley, the highest peak in
North America, and, at
20,320 feet, the third-tallest mountain in the world.
The Seven Summits challenge had begun. But DesLauriers didn't
realize it at the time. "Denali was definitely a one-off," she
says. "It wasn't until April of 2005 that I got the idea to do the
other six."
Then things moved quickly. Two months after conceiving the Seven
Summits plan, DesLauriers was in
Russia, climbing to and then
skiing down from the top of Mount Elbrus. By September, she was in
Australia, doing the same at Mount Kosciusko. In December came a
two-for-one trip to Vinson Massif in Antarctica and Mount Aconcagua
in
Argentina. The following summer and fall would see her first at
Mount Kilimanjaro in
Tanzania and then at Mount Everest.
All of this, as Flynn puts it, "is
awesome." But reasonable people - i.e., the kind of people who
would scream in terror if they saw water turn to ice in midair -
might ask, how come I didn't hear about Kit DesLauriers while she
was going after these Seven Summits? Why wasn't she talking to
Larry King after every stop? Or, at least, why didn't she have a
blog? The answer to those questions tells you a little something
about Kit DesLauriers.
"I can count on one hand the number of people who knew I was doing
this as it was happening," DesLauriers says. She pauses. For a
two-time freestyle skiing champion - have we not mentioned that? -
there's nothing freestyle about the way she speaks. She chooses
words carefully. "I didn't want to put my friends and family in a
two-year state of fear," she says. "I was also aware that there may
come a time that I may choose not to continue if it didn't feel
right."
She didn't stop, of course. Indeed, DesLauriers didn't stop
anything during her two-and-a-half-year Seven Summits quest. "This
wasn't all-consuming," she says. "I went to
Bolivia. I climbed and
skied during this project." Competitively, even. In 2004 and 2005,
DesLauriers won consecutive titles on the women's World Freeskiing
Tour. It's likely that you didn't catch those events on TV, because
the sport is about as television-friendly as the
NHL. Worse, even.
In most events, competitors are dropped by helicopter onto unkempt
mountainsides and left to carve out their own paths in runs that
are a minimum of 2,000 vertical feet. The winner is whoever gets to
the bottom with the best combination of solid, mistake-free skiing;
a fast time (which contributes to the ability to ski with fluidity
and aggressiveness); and a difficult ski line.
DesLauriers might have won a third straight title in 2006 had she
not fallen while freeskiing for fun the day before competition
started at the February finals. Not realizing that she had suffered
a concussion, she tried to ski in the competition anyway but ended
up falling again. It was the first fall of her competitive career.
"I had just gotten back from Argentina in December, and I was
planning for Kilimanjaro in June and Everest in August, and I
didn't even know if I wanted to be there," she says. "I wasn't
totally focused."
Understandable. Especially when you add the fact that a number of
DesLauriers's competitors were 10 years her junior - likely the
types more disposed to abuse the word dude. I ask DesLauriers how
she keeps up with skiers who are so much younger. She pauses. The
silence goes on too long for my comfort. Finally, she says, "Well,
the record should show that it's not me who is keeping up with
them." Good point. "It was interesting to be competing with a lot
of younger women," she adds. "Most of them didn't care. But some of
them seemed like they had a bit of a chip on their shoulders
[about] competing with this 30-something woman. You have to embrace
where you are with your age. That's why I was able to do what I did
in these competitions. I already knew what I was capable of. I had
a mental strength and confidence. I wasn't trying to figure [it]
out.
"You know, I get women at my ski camps, and they say, 'Oh, I can't
do this. I'm too old.' And I say, 'Hey, you're 45. You know what?
You better put the bar down on this ski lift before I push you off.
Because I don't plan on being old when I'm 45.'?"
Okay, so now
I'm afraid. Not Lhotse Face
afraid, but still. Of course, it probably should be no surprise
that she can be tough. Here's a woman whose year-round training
includes five 100-mile bike rides during summer months and five or
more 15-hour climbing days. It's as if she's going to Everest in a
couple of weeks, though that may or may not be the case. "I am
always training, and people ask me, 'What are you training for?' I
say, 'I'm training for life.'?" The life of DesLauriers has
included rappelling from rescue helicopters, recovering bodies from
the aftermath of avalanches, saving at least one injured climber
from certain death, and even adopting a 14-day-old wolf cub. Oh,
plus all that Seven Summits stuff.
She’s Batman. Or Batwoman. Whichever.
But talk to DesLauriers for a while, and something else becomes clear. She’s a lot more at ease than your average Dark Knight. Peaceful, even. Maybe that just happens to anyone who does a lot of yoga or who has had an audience with a Buddhist lama or has climbed Everest. Maybe there’s something about standing on the very top of the world that puts a person in touch with stuff the rest of us can’t quite grasp. Or maybe it works the other way: Maybe it’s being in touch with that stuff — knowing who you are, what you’re doing on this planet — that allows a person to climb so high and, in her case, ski so fast, in the first place.
Either way, DesLauriers — who these days is leading expeditions to Prince William Sound, writing a book about her ski trips around the world, and telling her story to corporations, school groups, and ski seminars — is just happy that people are getting something out of her accomplishment. And she has a message for them: Whatever your lifestyle is, live it, whether that means working less and reading more books or daring to ski the Lhotse Face. “Life is full of calculated risks,” she says. “But that shouldn’t keep you from doing what you want to do.”