Published with permission, Rock and Ice magazine,
January, 2004. www.rockandice.com
By Andy Dappen
CHRISTINE BOSKOFF HAD JUST LED A SUCCESSFUL ascent of Gasherbrum II (8,035 meters) and was trekking out from the Pakistani peak in August of 1999 when her liaison officer insisted that the expedition stop at his home. He wanted Boskoff to meet his mother. "He took me to the back of the house where his mother and sister were preparing the meal for our group and, basically, abandoned me there," Boskoff says. The officer returned to the front of the house to mingle with the men.
He had not intended to slight Boskoff--the back-room presence of women was simply the reality of his world. Says Boskoff, "Given his upbringing, he was overwhelmed that a woman would be leading a Himalayan expedition."
He wasn't the first guy in the male-dominated world of high-altitude mountaineering to be surprised by Christine Boskoff's place on top. Since her first forays into the big peaks, in 1995, this Seattle climber has ticked six 8,000-meter peaks--more than any woman alive--and taken charge over one of the country's largest mountain-guide operations.
When I meet Boskoff in Leavenworth, Washington, for a mid-October blitz of Dragontail Peak, she has just returned from Ouray, Colorado, where she's been enlarging an ice-climbing outpost to her business, Mountain Madness, the mountain-guiding firm she purchased in 1997 from the estate of its former owner, Scott Fischer. (Fischer died in 1996 while guiding a summit attempt on Everest.) When Boskoff, 36, hops out of her Range Rover, I'm surprised by how small she is--5 feet 3 inches and maybe 115 pounds. We shake hands and my paw engulfs hers.
Says Scott Morgan, a Mountain Madness client and an occasional climbing partner, "With the blonde hair and thin build, you'd think she was a tennis player, not a big-peak mountaineer."
But a big-peak climber she is, and although she no longer aspires to being the first woman to stand atop all 14 8,000-meter peaks, she is still regarded by many as the best female high-altitude climber alive. In the 11 years since she took up climbing, she's summited high peaks in Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Mexico, Africa, Europe, Asia and North America.
Boskoff has made the biggest impression in the Himalaya and the Karakoram. She's attempted 12 different 8,000-meter peaks (some more than once), topping out on Broad Peak (1995), Cho Oyu (1996), Lhotse (1997), Gasherbrum II (1999), Everest (2000) and Shishapangma (2000). Only Wanda Rutkiewicz, who scaled eight 8,000-meter peaks before she died in 1992 on Kanchenjunga, has surpassed Boskoff's tally.
During the summer of 2002, Boskoff set out with Charlie Fowler to attempt her seventh 8,000-meter summit, making a self-supported alpine-style bid on the South Face of K2. (Boskoff is not one to choose the easiest way up a peak just to bag it.) Ultimately, poor weather and deep snow kept the two below 6,900 meters.
Considering all her expeditions, it's surprising that only a decade ago Boskoff was an electrical engineer and just learning to rock climb. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin in 1991, she went to work for Lockheed Aeronautical Systems in Atlanta, where she soon found the long-term prospects of the job disturbing: "I'd look down the tunnel of time and wonder what I'd have to show for this career."
She quit Lockheed (for the first of several times) in 1992, thinking she'd join the Merchant Marine Academy as a way to travel and pay the bills. Shortly thereafter, she took a rock-climbing course. "As soon as I tagged the top of my first rock wall," she says, "something clicked." She sensed she could travel and satiate her stifled adventurous side through climbing. She went back to Lockheed to make ends meet, but devoted her free time to a new passion.
HIKING IS A FORM OF COMMUNION--while traveling along a trail, you tunnel into the soul of a region. And if you talk as you walk, you can tunnel into the soul of a companion. As Boskoff and I travel the blackness of a cold North Cascades autumn morning, following the narrow beam of our headlamps to the base of Dragontail Peak, I get the six-mile version of her life.
Boskoff talks about her younger years (three older brothers made her tough and athletic), the school years (University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee) and Charlie Fowler, her boyfriend of three years (he's adventurous, committed to his beliefs, gentle and non-materialistic). I pop a trite question about what it's like being a woman in a man's world. Most men accept her at face value because she's strong enough to keep up, she says.
I ask her how long she can continue climbing 8,000-meter peaks, and she says at least another decade or two. She hopes to attempt the West Ridge of Makalu and might schedule a rematch with K2. Which has me wondering aloud whether she's really out of the game to climb all the 8,000-meter peaks. Absolutely, she says--she's now drawn to lower, unclimbed peaks in Asia, improving her guiding skills, and devoting more time to her business.
When Boskoff and her then husband, Keith Boskoff, purchased Mountain Madness in 1997, they were both relative newcomers to climbing, but eager to build a lifestyle around it. Boskoff is forthright with me, but she seems unwilling to reveal too much. Which makes me unwilling to ruin what is shaping into a good day by asking questions that are too personal. Questions like, "What happened to Keith?"
Keith Boskoff was a driven man 18 years her senior. He was upbeat, enthusiastic to the extreme and well loved by almost everyone who knew him. Clients say he was impossible to say "no" to, friends use words like "awesome" to describe him, and guides say they never saw him down.
Still, almost everyone who knew him agrees that the word "manic" pegged him. "I never saw him depressed, but it's hard to believe that anyone who was usually so high didn't have down times, too," says Stephen Shrader, a former Mountain Madness guide.
Apparently he did have his lows, and during one of them in 1999 he took his life at home. It shocked everyone. "There was a sense of shared guilt ... we wondered what we missed and how we could have helped him," says Matt Ward, another former guide.
The person with the best insight--Christine--doesn't field questions about the matter. Says Fowler, "Keith's death is a very private issue for Christine; she doesn't discuss it."
DURING THE APPROACH TO DRAGONTAIL PEAK, Boskoff is not at any moment unusually fleet, but she just keeps going. If I stop so much as to pee, I worry about catching up. Others have felt this angst. Scott Morgan, who runs ultra-marathons, describes a car-to-car, 16-hour climb of Mount Rainier's 10,000-vertical-foot Kautz Glacier. "She'd have done it in 14 hours if I hadn't been holding her back," he says.
Piotr Pustelnik of Poland, a climber with 11 8,000-meter peaks to his credit and the leader of the unsuccessful 1998 Makalu expedition that Boskoff had joined, describes hauling gear around the Makalu basecamp. "Chris grabbed one of her duffel bags and took it to the tent. I wanted to be a gentleman so I took the other bag and tried to lift it. No way. The bag is so heavy I stand there like a fool. She comes back and throws it on her back like it has no weight."
Boskoff, with characteristic understatement, rates herself a mediocre athlete at sea level but at altitude, she says, she feels better and can hang tougher than most climbers. Fowler has been on four 8,000-meter peaks with her and says that her climbing talent and self-awareness only improve at altitude. "She and Peter Habeler raced up [Mount Everest's] Khumbu Icefall in 45 minutes," he adds. "It takes most acclimatized climbers three hours to move through the area."
Wringing such anecdotes out of Boskoff herself is not easy. She doesn't commandeer attention in the manner I'd expect of a promoter selling 800 to 1,000 people on Mountain Madness trips each year, or of a speaker giving motivational slideshows each month to non-profit organizations, or of an employer managing the strong personalities of 30 guides. She lays out the facts plainly.
As we scramble up the glacial moraine leading to the base of the 2,000-vertical-foot walls of Dragontail Peak, I tell Boskoff that the last time I climbed one of the chossy north-face routes on this peak, I had made deals with powers I didn't believe in to deliver me from harm. She chuckles--she doesn't put much stock in deal making or fate. After surviving close calls of her own, she says, she discovered that judgement is powerful insurance. "You learn to pick routes wisely," she says. "You monitor your body and listen to your inner voice. You don't climb if conditions aren't right. You suppress summit-or-nothing attitudes."
Boskoff admits that retreating from K2 in 2002 stung, but says it would have aggravated her more in bygone years. "I used to feel I had to make the goal; I pushed and pushed," she says. "Over time, I've started to back off because so many friends and acquaintances have died climbing. I'm learning to listen when things aren't progressing right."
Boskoff believes another important part of surviving so many expeditions to the highest peaks--peaks where, on average, one person dies for every eight who summit--boils down to climbing as a free agent. Corporations don't pay for her expeditions; manufacturers don't donate most of her gear. "This alleviates pressure tremendously," she says. "I don't have to deliver if conditions are stacked against me."
This low-profile climbing style has kept her from becoming the darling of outdoor-industry sponsors--a situation suiting her just fine. "She just isn't in this for the recognition; she doesn't want to be a poster girl," says friend Jane Bromet Courage. Courage laughs: "She is a good-looking woman--she could dress herself up in hot, sporty outfits, pluck her eyebrows, use some lip gloss and attract a lot of attention. But she won't buy into that. She inspires women to be true to their own image--not society's image. She teases me if I worry about brushing my hair."
We reach the foot of our climb, scramble up several hundred feet of exposed rock, then rope up. Once geared, Boskoff moves confidently up the ice-cold granite. She doesn't profess to be a top technical climber, saying she's comfortable leading traditional rock in the mid-5.10 range and ice up to WI 4. Friends insist, however, that she leads well into the 5.11 range, while on ice she leads WI 5.
Several pitches higher, the angle of the route kicks back and we unrope. It's this relatively easy but unforgiving terrain of scree-covered ledges, friable-rock ramps and awkwardly balanced boulders where Boskoff excels. She moves smoothly and confidently upward, exhibiting a cultivated form of relaxed focus.
Several hours of climbing delivers us to a sunlit summit ridge overlooking the shadowed face we've ascended. For a guide with a client, she notes, the upper 1,000 vertical feet of this climb would be a demanding test of short-roping and short-pitching.
Boskoff thinks a lot about guiding these days. She's been taking mountain-guiding exams from the American Mountain Guides Association (AMGA) to earn her international certification, and encourages her guides to go through the same process. It's a skill she's willing to pay for, and her certified employees command considerably higher day rates.
This is but one change in the recent evolution of Mountain Madness. At the time of Keith's death, Christine had a back-seat role in the business, and seriously considered selling the company.
The financial reality of Mountain Madness, still mired in debt from the Scott Fischer days, was stark. Furthermore, Boskoff felt she lacked the background to keep the company alive. Her friends encouraged her to hold on, not to give in.
Taking an analytical approach--one consistent with her engineering background--Boskoff, then 31, persevered with the business. She streamlined Mountain Madness' staff, standardized contracts, upgraded guiding requirements, and fired a handful of old-guard guides with whom she clashed. Along the way she doubled the company's sales revenue, pulling the company out of debt and earning profits the last two years. Today she employs some 35 staff (many are part time) and organizes trips to all seven continents, making Mountain Madness one of the country's largest guiding operations. "Running this business," she says, "has been harder than any mountain I've climbed."
A high percentage of returning clients and a steady stream of new customers mean business is good for Boskoff. Good enough that she can be out of the Seattle office four to six months a year guiding company trips (she's leading an expedition to either Aconcagua or Antarctica's Mount Vinson this winter, as well one to Everest this spring), marketing with her slideshows, climbing privately, and growing the satellite office in Colorado--where Charlie Fowler happens to live.
Life is good, too. It's a point we both agree upon when we top Dragontail and stare over the white granite horns and the blue-water tarns of the Enchantment Lake Basin. We take, what is for Boskoff, an interminable break and sit long enough to slam down a few energy bars and several gulps of water.
The food is down, a few pictures are snapped, and her short, restless legs are moving again. We make a rapid descent to the cars that spans nine miles of distance and drops 6,000 vertical feet; we beat nightfall by 30 minutes.
Before Boskoff returns to Seattle, we stop at a popular climbers' restaurant in Leavenworth for dinner. I suspect that here, in the home state of her business, she'll be recognized. But no one notices her. I ask whether this is unusual. "No," she says. "I'm actually better recognized in the climbing villages around Nepal and Pakistan."
Boskoff's anonymity could easily be different. As one of the world's top mountaineers and perhaps the only woman running a large guiding business, she could be a household name in the outdoor industry. Refreshingly, attaining celebrity status doesn't excite Chris Boskoff. Like most things about her, climbing is much more personal than that.
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR ANDY DAPPEN LIVES IN THE NORTH CASCADES TOWN OF WENATCHEE, WASHINGTON.
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