Paragliding enchainment

I started taking paragliding lessons last summer. There's a much larger body of knowledge to learn and master than I imagined. I would almost compare it to learning to fly and getting a private pilot's license.

Steck died last April after suffering a fall on Nepal’s 25,791-foot Nuptse, where he was climbing alone in preparation for an Everest bid. We may never know what happened that day, but his posthumously published English-language biography, Ueli Steck: My Life in Climbing, offers revelations about the climber’s later years. One troubling takeaway: Steck’s relationship with risk had changed dramatically since 2008, and not for the better. At his darkest moment—which coincided with one of his most remarkable climbing achievements, in 2013—Steck makes clear that if he did not have a death wish, he also did not care if he lived.

My Life in Climbing isn’t a canon-worthy work of mountaineering literature so much as it is a bound collection of what feel more like journal entries. It first hit European shelves in 2016 as Der Nächste Schritt, or The Next Step; Mountaineers Books released the English translation in February 2018. Billi Bierling, assistant to the late Himalayan climbing historian Elizabeth Hawley, was just wrapping up the translation when she learned that Steck had died.

What the book lacks in overall narrative grace, however, it makes up for in the access its 224 pages give into the mind of one of the planet’s best mountaineers. We see Steck race up summits in order to be back at a mountain hut before the cake sells out. We see him team up with über-athlete Kilian Jornet for a leisurely ten-hour door-to-door ascent of the Eiger from the valley floor—a 10,000-plus-vertical-foot day. All the while, death swirls around him. On a 2014 climb in Tibet, two friends are swept away in avalanche on Shishapangma, just feet from where Steck is standing. “I felt like crying,” Steck writes rather flatly.