Steve House Presentation, Keene Valley, NY
The first full day of the 2010 Adirondack Mountainfest culminated with a presentation by elite mountaineer Steve House to a packed auditorium at Keene Central School.
By all accounts the climbing earlier in the day was outstanding and the weather couldn’t have been better. I sure would have loved to have tagged along for some of the fun, but I am still nursing a rib injury from – get this – slipping on some ice in a driveway back in Boston. Oh, the irony.
Steve started his presentation with some pictures and stories from the day’s climbs. It is pretty cool to have someone of his stature enthusiastically talk about something he was doing right in our new backyard. I am sure I will get used to that eventually, but for now it puts a big smile on my face.
One of the things that struck me about Steve was how unassuming he was. I always expect elite athletes to be these alpha dog, type-A personalities… but Steve was very mild-mannered. Down-to-earth. He even alluded to a little bit of introversion when he mentioned that public speaking doesn’t come easy to him. Regardless, he delivered an energetic, sometimes funny, and deeply honest presentation about his climbing life.
Experiences shaping the person was a theme throughout his presentation, but one of the things I found particularly interesting was when he described some of the climbs from his teenage years. Steve is known and respected as someone who puts emphasis on the value of a route and the methods used to climb it. He dislikes siege style tactics, and hasn’t been afraid to voice his thoughts on the subject.
“There is and should be repulsion at the idea that people leave camps and ropes and trash in the wilderness and permanently deface the rock by bolting it,” he says. “It trashes the resource and changes the experience of everyone who comes after.”
It was these early experiences that shaped his opinions on the topic of alpine style climbing, and this stuck me as a particularly insightful part of his talk since in a lot of ways this is what has defined his climbing career. Reinhold Messner even wrote the following as an intro to Steve’s book, Beyond the Mountain:
He climbs the right routes on the right mountains in a time when everyone is climbing Everest.
Steve’s self-awareness and introspection was something else that came across over the course of the event. He described his feelings after a failed attempt on Nanga Parbat, and then a successful attempt the following year… a climb that won him the Piolet d’Or, which is like the Oscars of climbing. He talked about how the entire experience forced him to reexamine a lot of things in his life. Fear, courage, relationships, failure, success… and what it was he wanted out of climbing.
Here is a long, but sort of interesting video I found where Steve talks about the gear he took on Nanga. You can get a sense for his speaking style (and what I meant by unassuming), and at the end he breaks out the Golden Ice Axe, which is the award for the Piolet d’Or.
After the presentation Steve stuck around to talk with people and sign some books – we got to introduce ourselves and chat a little bit before heading back home for the night.
We really enjoyed the two events we were able to make this weekend – Erik Weihenmayer’s outstanding presentation being the other – and as far as I could tell, Mountainfest 2010 seemed like a success. I am really looking forward to being able to particpate a bit more next year.
