At the end of our month in western Nepal, the results were mixed. We had successfully navigated some of the most difficult-to-access terrain in Nepal, but due to logistical constraints on the way in—a four-day rainstorm, having base camp set much too low due to tepid porters—the skiing was pared down to three days. On one of them, Laidlaw, Erickson, and Garre completed a 5,000-foot climb and ski descent of a frighteningly steep couloir at 18,000 feet. Laidlaw later lamented that it wasn’t a true Himalayan objective. Not radical enough.

We spent our last night camped in an airport that had been blown apart by Maoist rebels four years earlier, when the civil war was still raging across Nepal. Each of us nursed a warm beer.

Seeking an objective evaluation of the trip, I asked Laidlaw if he felt as if he’d won or lost. He paused for a few seconds, as he tends to do while considering a question. How a mountaineer elects to represent his achievement often dictates the achievement’s significance in the eyes of sponsors and other climbers.

Eventually he said, “I feel like I was getting beaten up and beaten up, then threw one big punch at the end to pull even.”

Already he and Erickson and Garre were plotting their next expedition, thinking as much as two years ahead. But when I asked where he thinks that will be, Laidlaw had shifted into a different mindset, thinking about home and the life forever waiting for him to return.

“It’s funny,” he said. “I talk about all these trips I want to do, but what I really want more than anything is to buy that property with Megan.”

Devon O’Neil ’01 is a freelance journalist based in Breckenridge, Colorado.

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