Stephen Koch

I am posting this PC because I think it is funny and hasn’t been seen much. I also want to give props to its very talented designer, Matthew Speakman. Matt is temporarily living and working in PA until his return to Jackson. Matt took an old photo of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, the first two people to stand on top of Mount Everest, and inserted Jimmy Chin’s and my head into the photo. We actually look a lot like them, which helps make the postcard all the more fun.

The Postcard was from my expedition to the north face of Everest in summer 2003 where I attempted, along with Jimmy and two Sherpa, to climb and snowboard the Direct Hornbein Couloir. In hindsight it was a fairly audatious project, but at the time I believed it was possible to take one of the greatest climbs of all time (Loretan and Triollet’s climb of the north face during the monsoon, without oxygen, where they butt glissaded down the entire face in a few hours) one step further by repeating it and carrying a snowboard and then snowboarding down.

Matthew also designed my websites, which can be viewed through his website, www.alpinestart.com. I think I will eventually have my site up again and make the blog accessible through my site via /blog or something. I am new to all this blogging and don’t know the advantages or disadvantages of having my blog be off of my website or a stand alone thing through Wordpress, like it is at the moment.