Team Geared Up

DUBLIN (Geared Up Blog) - Quite an incredible time to climb it in. Check out Ueli Steck at his website to keep up to date with any future challenges he is going to set himself.

It takes a lot to climb to the top rung of the mountaineering ladder. Mountain Hardwear athlete Ueli Steck, 30, of Switzerland has done that and more in the past few years to emerge as one of the best alpinists in the world.

Though he has climbed throughout the Alps since he was young, he first hit the scene in 2001 by putting a new route up the Eiger North Face called The Young Spider with teammate Stephan Siegrist. He followed that the next year with a heroic winter ascent of the East Face of Mt. Dickey in the Alaska Range, calling his route Blood from the Stone. In 2004, again with Siegrist, he tackled the north faces of three Alps classics in secession–the Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau -in just 25 hours. A year later he made even more headlines with his solo, no ropes ascent of Excalibur, rated a 6b on a difficult and exposed 350-meter wall on the Wendenstöcke. He kept his Herculean pace going the same year with his “Khumbu-Express” expedition in Nepal’s Everest region, resulting in the first solos of the Cholatse’s north face (6,440 meters) and Tawoche’s east face (6,505 meters).

After all that, you’d think he might give his crampons a break. But last year, he again pushed the mountaineering world to new heights with a first ascent of 7,772-meter Gasherbrum II; an epic third solo ascent of the Matterhorn from the Hornli Hut to the summit in a record 25 hours; and a first solo of the Eiger North Face’s The Young Spider, the first repetition of the route he put up with Siegrist in 2001. „The whole thing was just a question of willpower,„ he says of the 1,800-meter mixed rock and ice route.

This January he mixed alpinism with altruism, leading a group of young Swiss climbers, 12 boys and girls between 18 and 22 years old, to Patagonia in an expedition sponsored by the Swiss Alpine Club.

Also keep your ears to the higher ground for a new route on Annapurna this spring, which he says at this point “is still a little hush hush.”