Seven Summits

The Denver Post has an article by John Meyer about a woman going for the top:

For hours she worked to ascend the southeast ridge of Mount Everest by the light of a full moon, under a crystal-clear canopy of stars. Tibet shone as if etched in quicksilver thousands of feet below. Kim Hess (photo) couldn’t believe how bright it was. It seemed to her as if the world beneath her feet was on fire.
But there was an even more enchanting view awaiting the thirty-year-old climber from Steamboat Springs, Colorado on the mountain’s South Summit, three hundred feet below the true summit of twenty-nine thousand feet. While she was there the sun crested the horizon on her right, and as it rose the setting moon to her left turned orange.
Climbing the rest of the way with that panorama arrayed around her, Hess reached the world’s highest summit at 0504 on 21 May 2016, checking off the fifth peak in her quest to climb the highest point on every continent, known in the mountaineering world as the Seven Summits.
Hess, who grew up in Denver and lives in Steamboat Springs, is hoping to do the Grand Slam of adventure, climbing the highest peak on all seven continents and reaching the north and south poles. She has climbed four of the seven and leaves for Mount Everest on 22 March 2016.
“The summit itself was spectacular, but the south summit for me was kind of that moment when I realized, ‘This is really happening, and I am really going to make it,’ ” Hess said, “With the full moon and the sun coming up, it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
Reaching the summit of Everest can’t help but be an emotional achievement, but there were other factors heightening the experience for Hess. She has now climbed the hardest of the seven. The only remaining summits for her are Mount Vinson in Antarctica at sixteen thousand feet and Kosciuszko in Australia at seven thousand fee.
Her triumph there was the remembrance of tragedy. Hess was at Camp 2 on Everest last year when an earthquake there killed at least twenty climbers. The year before that, avalanches killed sixteen Nepalese climbers. Both tragedies shut down the mountain for climbing for the year, so Hess became one of the first people to climb Everest since 2013.
“Nobody had forged those steps in years,” Hess said. “The higher you got, knowing nobody’s been up there for a long time. There was so much tragedy and sadness tied to that, it was exciting to be a part of something that was finally triumphant and positive, for the mountain and for Nepal. It almost felt like exploring something that hadn’t been explored ever.”
Hess did the other Seven Summits with an older brother, Steven. He was unable to join her on Everest last year, but he made it this year, reaching the summit an hour after her. Both grew up in Denver and attended Cherry Creek High School.
The Seven Summits began as Kim’s dream, but Steven embraced the same goal. “For me, it was always about setting a really big goal and seeing if I could achieve it,” Steven said. “Everest was the big goal, and wrapping the Seven Summits around it was a way to ensure that I was ready for it. To be able to do it with your sister, it’s a real blessing. It makes it that much more special to me.”
The other summits they have climbed are Denali in Alaska, at twenty thousand feet, Aconcagua in Argentina at over twenty-two thousand feet, Elbrus in Russia at eighteen thousand feet, and Kilimanjaro in Tanzania at twenty thousand feet. With the hardest peaks behind them, Hess is starting to feel ambivalent.
“I feel like the journey is kind of coming to an end, which is unsettling, and it makes me feel slightly lost,” Hess said. “I put so much time and energy into trying to accomplish what I was told I never would. I definitely feel, ‘Where do I go from here? What’s next?’ And relief, knowing that the Seven Summits are almost done. I’ll obviously continue to climb, but what’s going to be my next Everest? I don’t know.”

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