We are shocked by the message, the climbing community has to recognize the loss of one of its grandest. Ueli Steck’s dead body was found in the Mount Everest area, as the Himalayan Times reports, where he was preparing for a traverse of Everest and Lhotse.
It is hard to believe and words don’t come easy, although one might not be extremely surprised by the message. Yes, in fact, there might not have been many other ways of dying imaginable for a person who loved the mountains and climbing as deeply and amply as Ueli Steck and who was as irresistibly attracted by them. Mountains were his life. But still, the message comes out of nothing and as a shock. Still it is hard to imagine a climbing world without Ueli. In an interview around three years ago, after his fantastic alpine-style climb of Annapurna’s south face, he told me that if he continued on that level, eventually this wold go wrong; »Irgendwann geht das schief.« What a fatal sentence.
Now it did go wrong, although he had seemed to have drawn consequences and did choose his recent project, the Everest-Lhotse-traverse, in particular because he did not want to continue climbing as risky as on Annapurna.

His death leaves questions, at least to me.

Ueli leaves behind a wife, as well as all of us in the climbing community, mourning for one of its greatest lights of inspiration, possibly with a disturbing shade of dark fascination.

I need time to think about his death. You will certainly read more about this in the next days and weeks.