'Steady Ed' reaches the top

About a month ago I read that my old climbing buddy had finally reached the summit of Annapurna and become the first American to reach the top of the world's 14 highest mountains.

Now I read that Ed Viesturs is retiring from 8,000-meter peaks, claiming he's too old and too smart to keep butting heads with storms, avalanches and cold, thin air.

It feels a little strange to see him labeled a "legend" in the AP stories, but I guess it's no different than going to kindergarten with a future movie star or a politician.

"I remember when he was still in knee pants, awkward, shy, kind of dumb…" That sort of thing.

I met Ed the same way I met most of the mountaineers I climbed with during the 1970s — via the bulletin board at the University of Washington, in Seattle. People put little notes up saying they wanted to climb such-and-such a peak and then waited for a call.

Ed was a freshman from Illinois. He had been on a national champion high school swim team and, like today, was in terrific physical condition, but what he really wanted to do was climb mountains.

When I first met him, he told me his introduction to mountaineering took place in Glacier National Park. I know better now, but back then I thought Glacier Park was somewhere in Wyoming. Climbers can be parochial at times, and my mind was focused on climbing in the North Cascades of Washington.

We did some great climbs together, including a number of winter ascents and the first ascent of Mount Rainier for the calendar year 1980. We hauled wooden skis with cable bindings up to Camp Muir and climbed the Gibraltar Chute — where a climber died just last week.

None of the three climbers in our party knew the first thing about skiing, however, so the descent was dangerously comical — aim for a safe spot between crevasses, ski straight at it, fall and self-arrest, then get up and do it again.

Ed and I teamed up with two other climbers on the Price Glacier route on Mount Shuksan, up near the Canada border. This climb is included in a book on the 50 classic climbs of North America. After summiting, we began our descent down the White Salmon Glacier on the opposite side of the peak.

That's when everything went to heck — one of Ed's crampons broke, one of the climbers went insane and drove his partner to run away, and none of our headlamps worked. We hustled out from under the infamous Hanging Glacier and ended up sleeping on the ground in a safe spot about an hour away from our car.

Over time, I saw less and less of Ed as I began working on ships in Alaska. He stayed in Seattle when I traveled to Peru for climbing in the Cordillera Blanca. I ended up getting married down there and slowly dropped out of climbing. The last time I saw Ed was when I joined him on a climb of Little Tahoma, the little bump on the side of Mount Rainier.

I read plenty about him over the years, and I got a hoot out of his cameo appearance in the "blockbuster" hit Vertical Limit — not only the worst climbing movie ever made, but quite possibly one of the worst movies ever made in any genre. Ed played himself with, I'm sure, a good sense of humor — he refuses to join a rescue attempt on K2 because it's too dangerous. Outdoor magazines have relentlessly kidded Ed about his focus on safety over pioneering scary new routes.

Possibly his biggest moment in history came in 1996 during the tragic storm on Mount Everest that took the lives of climbing guides Rob Hall and Scott Fischer. "Steady Ed," as he was nicknamed, was ferrying gear for an Imax film about Everest when the tragedy occurred. His phenomenal cardiovascular conditioning enabled him to help rescue several stranded climbers who survived the event.

The Alpine Theater Project will present "K2," the theatrical version of a script that was later made into a movie, at the O'Shaughnessy Center on Aug. 13-28. Look for the cautious one of the two climbers — that's Ed for sure. The story closely resembles the difficult times he spent climbing on K2.