He beat the beast

The lung-busting is finally over. Ed Viesturs’ long-running quest to become the first American to climb all 14 of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks -- 26,240 feet and higher -- ended in triumph May 12 when he topped his arch nemesis, avalanche-belching Annapurna.

It was a last act fit for a drama primer. Viesturs, who has topped Everest six times, was inspired to take up the climbing life by Maurice Herzog’s “Annapurna,” the heroic tale of the first ascent of the mountain, which was also the first 8,000-meter peak ever climbed. Though Herzog lost most of his fingers and toes from avalanche-induced frostbite on that climb in 1950, his harrowing adventure triggered high-altitude wanderlust in a boy from the pancake terrain outside Rockford, Ill.

With 13 of the 14 tallest peaks conquered, Annapurna was all that stood between Viesturs and the ultimate badge of mountaineering skill, a feat he’d chased for 16 years, one only 11 others have accomplished and that some say has cost dozens their lives. This would be Viesturs’ third tangle with Annapurna. Ferocious weather defeated him once, and avalanches drove him off the second time. He’d grown wary enough of Annapurna’s dangers that he admitted he would rather take on K2, a taller and more difficult peak, over the slide factory here.

Though best known as a postcard Himalayan backdrop for trekkers traipsing Nepal’s Annapurna Sanctuary, this wall of glacier-draped slopes may be the most vengeful rock of the big 14. Scale its flanks, and the 10th highest mountain in the world, at 26,545 feet, has a habit of turning into something a bit less picturesque, say, a supersize tombstone. Annapurna has one of the highest fatality-to-climber ratios of the top summits.

“It’s a nasty mountain to be on,” said Viesturs, 45, just hours off the plane from Nepal. But that’s where he found himself two weeks ago, and the beast was raging again. Viesturs and longtime climbing partner Veikka Gustafsson, along with four Italians -- Silvio Mondinelli, Mario Merelli, Mario Panzeri and Daniel Bernasconi -- sat pinned in their tents at High Camp, some 22,250 feet up the mountain. Gale-force fury had turned their quarters into windsocks. As the Annapurna express roared into a third frozen night, Viesturs was wide awake, having gotten barely any shut-eye in three nights. The battering wind was to blame, but also altitude and nerves. He had told friends that Annapurna might be too dangerous for him.

Annapurna’s rap sheet offers plenty of supporting evidence. The peak has killed legendary climbers such as Anatoli Boukreev, known for his rescue exploits on Everest during the “Into Thin Air” disaster in 1996, as well as Alison Chadwick and Vera Watson, on the 1978 expedition that put the first women on top of Annapurna. After watching a salvo of avalanches explode down around her, the leader of that team, Everest veteran and author Arlene Blum, changed her summit plans. “I stopped being interested in reaching the top. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be there or whether it was safe or justifiable to be there,” said Berkeley-based Blum, author of “Annapurna: A Woman’s Place.” “If we had known how dangerous Annapurna was, we would have chosen a different mountain.”

After midnight, Viesturs’ tent stopped shaking, heralding a break in the weather. It was decision time. They had a very low high camp. Would the weather hold for the long 4,000-foot push to the summit -- and back? He would have to go up now or, with supplies dwindling, turn around. Again. His gut said go. At 1:30 a.m. he and his team began the assault. As they clawed up 40-degree slopes packed with snow as hard as a tabletop, they were left exposed to the beast’s most feared wrath: a bulge of ice cliffs that surrounds the rock at 24,000 feet, and bombs anything under it with avalanche debris.

“It’s almost like Russian roulette,” said Viesturs, who lives on Bainbridge Island, Wash., with his wife and three kids. “You’ve got to hope that the mountain is quiet and stable enough when you’re passing under this stuff.”

The team survived the gantlet, but high winds slammed them again, bringing bitter temperatures. The brutal conditions forced Italian leader Mondinelli, a veteran of 10 8,000-meter summits, to turn back. The rest battled on. The Italians had played a key role on the expedition, fixing ropes and breaking trail. Gustafsson kicked trail the final stretch, when every breath was a conscious effort to override withering exhaustion. Above 26,000 feet, known as the Death Zone, the air has only a third of the oxygen it does at sea level. Starved of fuel, both body and mental function start shutting down.

After 11 continuous hours of clinging to the ice in whipping wind, Viesturs, Gustafsson and the three remaining Italians finally staggered along snow bumps to Annapurna’s slanted summit. “It was one of the hardest days of climbing I’ve ever done,” croaked Viesturs, his voice still raspy from the siege of altitude. “The slope was steep the whole way. There was no place to stop and sit. I had to dig deep and power through it.”

That meant overriding the body with the mental side of climbing. His weapon: a trick he’s used on many peaks. “I thought, ‘OK, it’s one day in my life. I can push myself. If it’s eight hours, 11 hours, I’m just going to keep going because it will be worth it. This is just one day of my life. Suck it up.’ ”

He also relied on a technique that’s come in handy throughout his climbing career, breaking the action down into mini-goals. “I’m going to go to that rock,” he said, “and then I’m going to stop. Nibble away all day and you’re on top.”

But still with nowhere to sit, the climbers crouched, bracing themselves with one leg on the downslope, inches from the knife-edged drop down the other side. Viesturs, head literally in clouds swirling around him, wasn’t complaining about the seating arrangements. “It was so cool to be on top of this mountain that at some points I thought I never would be able to climb, and also the fact that it was the last [of the 14]. Sixteen years ago I had started this, and the moment I had been dreaming about was right here in front of me.”

More remarkable than the feat itself might be that Viesturs has done it while maintaining all body parts. He’s never been injured or frostbitten. This despite the fact that he has insisted on climbing in the traditional alpine style, carrying his own gear and using his own lungs -- no supplemental oxygen. His cautious approach has made climbing 8,000-meter peaks seem almost routine. Yet the Top 14 are exponentially more difficult than the better-known Seven Summits circuit (the highest mountain on each continent).

“It’s a huge achievement,” said Todd Burleson, owner of climbing school-guiding firm Alpine Ascents International in Seattle, who has summited Everest (twice) as well as Makalu, the fifth-highest mountain. “It’s not a one- or two-year thing; it’s a lifelong journey. It’s amazing he’s climbed these peaks without any accidents. There are 100 to 150 guys who have tried this, and they’re all dead. Going back to these mountains over and over and not getting hurt is really an accomplishment.”

Steady Ed, as he’s known, has done it with the risk-taking propensity of a notary public. Before crunching up Annapurna, he watched the mountain for several days. When no avalanches barreled down, the expedition got underway. He was always cautious, he said, but the ’96 Everest tragedy (when he helped rescue survivors and found the bodies of his two close friends Rob Hall and Scott Fisher), having kids, and the one time he didn’t heed his instincts, on K2, made him more conservative.

Viesturs was making a final summit push on K2 with Fisher and another climber when it started snowing. There was still seven hours’ climbing ahead. His gut told him to turn around. The snow would pile up and make it lethal on the way down, but the others wanted to keep going. “I just kept delaying the decision,” he recalled. “We go to the summit, and the conditions on the way down are extremely dangerous. I was so mad at myself. I said, ‘Ed, don’t ever second-guess your instincts again.’ If it feels wrong, it is wrong. I felt we were going to get avalanched and that we were going to die going down.”

Critics say Viesturs hasn’t blazed much in the way of new routes on his conquests. His success -- which goes beyond the Top 14 to a starring stint in the Imax film “Everest,” multiple sponsorship deals and a motivational speaking business -- has recast the image of the premier mountaineer from bruising daredevil, a style represented by Italian climber Reinhold Messner, the first to scale the 8,000-meter peaks, to risk manager. Messner has been the reigning icon of high altitude for his brash exploits in the ‘70s and ‘80s. But the Italian has also been called reckless. He lost his brother and a number of toes on Nanga Parbat, the ninth tallest peak.

“There’s nothing flashy about Ed,” said Gil Friesen, a venture capitalist and former record industry exec who was an early believer in and sponsor of Viesturs. “He’s humble and clear and climbs very safely. What he does involves not only risk management but strategic thinking, always thinking ahead.”

That longer range now includes retirement -- from 8,000-meter peaks. “I’d like to tone it down,” Viesturs admitted. “The creep of age, the wear and tear, the mental stress of being on these high mountains where there’s no chance of rescue. I’ve been doing it long enough.”

He still plans to climb, though, because of the mountain experience itself -- the team effort, the aerial views without a tray table. “If I didn’t enjoy the process, I couldn’t have done summit after summit. There’s got to be more to it. You’ve got to kind of revel in the whole process ... the travel, the planning, the camaraderie, being in a place where you all love being. If the mountain said, ‘You’re not going to the summit this year,’ at least we can say we had a good time trying.”

Unless, maybe, that mountain is Annapurna.

Joe Robinson can be reached at joe.robinson@latimes.com.