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.”
JOSEPH GUINTO was in the ski club in high school. He was not good, and during most of the club outings, he did homework in the lodge.