Peak Conditions
“The whole thing is, I am not a ski mountaineer. I’m a person who goes ski mountaineering.”
Jamie Laidlaw ’02 was sitting on his bed in a hotel room in Kathmandu, Nepal. There was a point of emphasis in his tone: Of all the topics we’d covered, he wanted to make sure this one was not misinterpreted—“person” comes first, “ski mountaineer” second.
How Laidlaw defines himself is a crucial element to his persona. And an honest one. Among the first things you learn about him is that he has no room in his life for exaggeration or hyperbole, be it yours or his. Not that there aren’t opportunities—Laidlaw, 29, is one of the world’s foremost ski mountaineers, known for notching ambitious climbs and ski descents from the Nepalese Himalayas to the Peruvian Cordillera Blanca—arguably the two nastiest ranges in the world. But while some mountaineers take much pleasure in talking about themselves and what they’ve done, Laidlaw would rather talk about other things.
It’s not only that Laidlaw himself doesn’t exaggerate. He holds the same expectation of others, which can be maddening when you’re a mountaineer. For instance, Laidlaw has a problem with people skiing only a fraction of a peak—namely Everest and K2, the two tallest mountains on Earth—and claiming to have skied the peak for the purposes of media exposure.
“I don’t understand why people can’t come clean,” Laidlaw said. “Just be honest with what you either achieved or didn’t achieve. I think you have to be proud of what you do, no matter what it is. When you claim to do something that you actually haven’t, all you end up doing is demeaning what you actually did.”
His stance is particularly salient when considering the expedition that had brought us to Kathmandu. For the past year, Laidlaw had studied a group of mountains in far western Nepal that is one of the most unexplored sections of the Himalaya Range—a place where 20,000-foot peaks remain nameless, and villagers may not have seen a Caucasian in decades, if ever. Alpinists have long speculated about the region, but its reputation as a lair for Maoist rebels, as well as its dangerous terrain, has made it terra incognita for all but a scant few. Together with ski mountaineers Kris Erickson and Kip Garre, Laidlaw hoped to change that, skiing as many as three large, virgin peaks during a 40-day expedition that would take them through some of the most remote villages in all of Nepal.
The North Face, the outdoor apparel and gear company, put up some cash (the company typically sponsors a handful of major expeditions per year), all two months later we all landed in Kathmandu. Our trip started auspiciously. Two days into our journey, we had made our way west to a small Nepalese village where the sleeping accommodation was a sweltering concrete hovel, sparsely furnished with wooden cots in doorless rooms. Tiny brown insects gnawed us by the thousands that night, but nobody got it worse than Laidlaw. He fled to the dirt ground in front of the building, only to wake up with a stray dog asleep on his head.
The next morning, Laidlaw shrugged off the hell. Covered in red welts that would last for 10 days, he said: “If you want the adventure, if you really want to drop off the face of the Earth, you better be ready to deal with stuff like this.”
