Norbert Joos (1960 – 2016)

Again one of the really great high altitude climbers was torn out of his life: The 55-year-old Swiss Norbert Joos fell to death on Piz Bernina in the canton Grisons. According to Swiss media reports, Joos had guided a group to the 4049-meter-high summit. On the descent the roped party of three, to which Joos belonged, fell 160 meters deep. Joos was found dead, the other two climbers, a woman and a man from Italy, survived seriously injured.

Stroke on Kangchenjunga

Joos had climbed 13 of the 14 eight-thousanders, all without bottled oxygen. Only Mount Everest was missing in his list. In 2006, after his fifth failed attempt on Everest, the Swiss said finally goodbye to the eight-thousanders. Two years earlier he had suffered a stroke during the descent from Kangchenjunga. Nevertheless, he tried Everest once more. “I just had to go there again and feel what was possible. Otherwise I would have kept Everest always in mind. Now it’s okay for me,” Joos later said in an interview. He criticized commercial climbing on the highest mountain on earth: “As a real climber you should stay well clear of Everest.”

“Only for young and crazy guys”

As the “most important thing I have achieved as a climber” Joos described the first ascent of Annapurna East Ridge with the first traverse of this eight-thousander from south to north in fall 1984, along with his Swiss compatriot Erhard Loretan (who fell to death in 2011). “Of course, we were very good climbers then, but we were also lucky,” Joos later recalled. “On the basis of my experience to date, I wouldn’t do it anymore. Only young and crazy guys can do things like this.”

Michi Wohlleben (l.) and Ueli Steck

They are on the way. The two top climbers Ueli Steck from Switzerland and Michi Wohlleben from Germany have now scaled the first of the 82 four-thousanders of the Alps, the 4,048-meter-high Piz Bernina in Switzerland. At 10 a.m. they reached the summit, after they had spent the night at the Tschierva Hut at 2,573 meters above sea level. Within just 80 days, the 38-year-old Ueli and the 24-year-old Michi want to climb all four-thousanders of the Alps, which are located in Switzerland, Italy and France – if possible, not on the normal but on more demanding routes.

Stop chasing records

The planned route through the Alps

The two mountaineers will have to climb on their 80-day-trip a total of 100,000 meters in altitude. They want to shorten the descent by paragliding where possible. Steck and Wohlleben will bike from mountain to mountain. It would be just a journey through the summer, Ueli said. “I want to send a message that I address also to myself”, Steck told the Swiss newspaper NZZ. “The message that chasing records is dangerous. If I continue to stay in this movie ‘Always faster, higher and further’, it will end deadly sometime. I know that.”

To Nuptse in fall

In fall 2014, Steck had narrowly escaped the avalanche on the eight-thousander Shishapangma in Tibet that had killed the German Sebastian Haag and the Italian Andrea Zambaldi. In 2013, on his solo climb through the Annapurna South Face, he almost stripped the screw, Ueli admitted. “I even accepted that I probably would not come back alive. And that’s too much “, Ueli told me a few months ago. But the Swiss top climber will not completely say good-bye to the extremes. Next fall, Steck wants to repeat the route of Valeri Babanov and Yuri Kosholenko on 7804-meter-high Nuptse East (in the neighborhood of Mount Everest): in a team with the American Colin Haley, in Alpine style. In 2003, the two Russians for the first time succeeded in reaching the summit of Nuptse East via the South Pillar. They fixed ropes up to 6,400 meters – what resulted in a heated debate about their style of climbing. The route “had been desecrated by bolts and fixed ropes”, criticized US-climber Steve House, who had reached an altitude of 7,200 meters on the same route in Alpine Style in 2002. Babanov countered: “The mountain is waiting, you just need to go there and climb it!”