Ueli Steck, the Swiss Machine who fell at the moment no one was watching

Ueli Steck

Photo: Ludovic Péron / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 4, 1976 Langnau im Emmental
Died	April 30, 2017 (40)
Occupation	Mountaineer
Awards	Piolet d'Or · Adventurer of the Year · George Mallory Award

The only thing wrong with Ueli Steck’s version of mountaineering was that it couldn’t be verified. The Swiss alpinist who set speed records with a precision that invited comparison to a machine — split times, pulse rates, caloric intake — came undone on the one climb where none of those numbers existed. On the South Face of Annapurna, he claimed to have completed the route that had broken two of his previous attempts. He did it in 28 hours. Solo. Without a camera. And with his teammates watching from below, able to see a headlamp moving upward on the face, but nothing more.

Steck grew up in Langnau im Emmental, in the German-speaking center of Switzerland, the youngest of three brothers. One of them, Bruno Steck, became a professional ice hockey player; Ueli took to climbing instead, joining the Swiss Alpine Club at 12 after trying the sport through a family friend. He trained as a carpenter but spent every free day on the limestone of the Schrattenfluh. By the time he was 18, he had completed the north face of the Eiger and the Bonatti Pillar in the Mont Blanc massif. He was not, at that point, particularly fast. What he was, was methodical.

The speed came from training, not temperament. In the years that followed his initial alpine forays, Steck developed an approach that was closer to elite endurance athletics than to the romance of alpinism. Alex Honnold, the American free climber, later described him as “the first to bring Olympic-style training to the sport.” By 2004, Steck and his partner Stephan Siegrist had climbed the north faces of the Eiger, Mönch, and Jungfrau in 25 hours. In February 2008, he smashed his own Eiger north face record, completing it solo in 2 hours, 47 minutes, and 33 seconds — faster than most people drive from Geneva to Zurich.

Mountaineering noticed. In 2009, the Piolet d’Or — the discipline’s most prestigious prize — went to Steck and Simon Anthamatten for the first ascent of the north face of Tengkampoche (6,500 meters), a technically demanding and barely-publicized route in the Nepalese Himalayas. That same year, he summited Gasherbrum II (8,035 meters), his first 8,000-meter peak. He added Shisha Pangma in 10 hours and 30 minutes in 2011, followed by Cho Oyu 18 days later. The speeds he was recording on Himalayan giants were numbers no one had put on those routes before.

The 2013 season cracked the machine. In April, an altercation with Sherpas near Camp 2 on Everest — a confrontation whose precise details remain disputed — went viral and left Steck, by his own account, severely depressed. Six months later, in October, he returned to the Himalayas and completed what he described as a 28-hour solo push up Annapurna’s South Face via the Lafaille route. The problem was the absence of any documentation: no photographs, no GPS data. Serious voices in the climbing world — Rolando Garibotti, Alexander and Thomas Huber, Yannick Graziani, Catherine Destivelle — questioned the claim. Two Sherpas said they had watched his headlamp move steadily upward and fully believed him. The Piolet d’Or committee received skeptical letters but awarded him the prize in 2014 anyway. No definitive evidence has ever emerged either way. The claim remains exactly what it was on October 9, 2013: unverifiable.

Rather than retreat into the controversy, Steck pursued something inarguable. In the summer of 2015, he and Michael Wohlleben completed the #82summits project: all 82 Alpine peaks above 4,000 meters, without motorized transportation, in 62 days. Every summit had witnesses. Every time was logged. That November, he set his final Eiger record — 2 hours, 22 minutes, and 50 seconds, a time the mountain has not seen approached since.

National Geographic named him Adventurer of the Year. For once, there was nothing to argue about.

Steck had met his wife Nicole at an ice-climbing competition. They shaped their lives around the mountains they loved in common. For their honeymoon, he free-climbed Golden Gate — a 3,000-foot 5.13a on Yosemite’s El Capitan — and she was with him. He described pleasure climbing with Nicole in Patagonia, Nepal, and Yosemite as among the most uncomplicated things he did.

In April 2017, Steck arrived at Everest Base Camp with a plan that had no precedent: a continuous traverse of Everest and Lhotse without supplementary oxygen. His climbing partner developed frostbite and the traverse had to be postponed. On April 30, during an acclimatization run on nearby Nuptse, he fell approximately 1,000 meters. The cause was never determined. He was 40 years old.

What his career argues, in retrospect, is something harder to quantify than a split time: that the desire to move without documentation is as old as mountaineering itself, but the moment when the world stopped taking those records on faith was a specific moment in October 2013. The Swiss Machine had always been his own witness. When that turned out not to be enough, nothing else was there to fill the gap.

Tags: sports, athletes, Ueli Steck, mountaineers, #82summits, Annapurna South Face

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