in Base Camp, waiting for him” when he received a call from a friend and fellow Sherpa in Camp 2. A third Sherpa had watched a climber fall approximately 3,000 feet down Nuptse’s north face. (Members of other expeditions witnessed his fall, too.) Climbers soon confirmed it was Steck, having found his body in the Western Cwm between camps 1 and 2.

Nearly a month later, still no one knows what caused Steck to lose purchase on the face, which includes a mix of snow and ice up high. Steck had never climbed Nuptse. People surmised that he slipped, a shocking but hardly impossible fate, even for Steck, who at age 40 professed to be in the best shape of his career. To train for the Lhotse Traverse, he’dwhere they spent three days trekking to Everest Base Camp, just the two of them. On April 16, they carried tents and other supplies from Base Camp to Camp 2, a mission that proved costly for Tenji, who suffered frostbite on two fingers. A couple of days later, Steck came down with a fever. Instead of waiting out their maladies at 17,500 feet, the two men took a helicopter to Lukla, 8,000 feet lower than Base Camp, and spent three nights there. By the time they flew back to Base Camp on April 21, Steck had fully recovered. “After the second or third day he was sleeping fine, and then he was super fast going up,” Tenji said in a telephone interview from Kathmandu. Steck soloed up toward