Seattle climber aims to set speed record on Everest, and honor fallen wife

ON THE SOFT snow above Everest Base Camp at 17,400 feet, Chad Kellogg is trudging uphill in trail-running shoes. Attempting to reach the summit of the world's highest mountain alone, without oxygen, and in record time, Kellogg is on a mission both physical and intensely personal. But it's not going well.

Abnormally high temperatures this spring afternoon have turned the snow to slush, and for every step he takes forward, Kellogg is sliding half a step back.

Most of the 140 climbers attempting the summit had left in the crisp early morning, wearing heavy plastic climbing boots with crampons. But if Kellogg was going to beat the speed record, he needed to avoid the crowds and go it alone.

So here he is, the hard-packed snow gone with temperatures hovering in the 50s, the trail shoes that had worked so well in practice now costing precious minutes. Feeling like he's hiking up a sand dune, he starts pulling himself hand-over-hand up the fixed lines on the mountain.

It's requiring more energy and time than he should be expending. Too slow, he thinks, glancing at his wristwatch. Way too slow.

Reminding himself of the deeper reason he is here, he touches the cloth pouch around his neck. Inside are his wife Lara's ashes. A month before, he'd marked the three-year anniversary of her fatal fall 1,000 feet down an Alaska mountain. He had vowed to scatter her ashes on top of Everest, in honor of her love for the mountains and her unwavering support for his own pursuit of speed on the slopes of the planet's highest places.

But first, he must make it to the top.

Already, he's close to half an hour behind schedule. He knows he can't lose any more time.

AT 38, CHAD KELLOGG is no stranger to extreme mountain expeditions. In 2003, he entered his first speed-climbing contest, on a mountain in Kazakhstan, and took home the gold medal. Closer to home in Seattle, Kellogg began refining his ultralightweight, ultrafast climbing technique. He set the speed record on Mount Rainier back in 2004. Though someone else has since climbed it even faster, Kellogg made it from the parking lot at Paradise to the top of Rainier and back down in a mind-boggling 4 hours, 59 minutes. Many climbers take that long just to hike to Camp Muir, partway up the mountain.

"Chad Kellogg is one of the most pre-eminent speed climbers in the world," says Vern Tejas, who himself just set a new world speed record for summiting the highest peaks on all seven continents.

Perhaps even more impressive in the climbing world, Kellogg made headlines last winter when he forged a new route by himself up Mount Aconcagua in South America. Chunks of ice regularly plummet without warning from high atop Aconcagua, making the climb particularly perilous.

"Those ice cliffs are like ticking time bombs," says Dylan Johnson, one of Kellogg's climbing partners. "I would not have climbed that route."

The Everest attempt marked new territory. Few climbers try to summit the peak without oxygen, and no one had taken the speed challenge since France's Marc Batard in 1990, when he climbed from base camp to the summit in 22 ½ hours.

Kellogg, who planned to make the entire round trip in less than 30 hours, relished the seeming impossibility of the task.

Yet his athletic accomplishments stand in contrast to his calm reserve. He's a former competitive luger who missed qualifying for the Olympics by one-tenth of a second, yet an introverted Buddhist who rises at 4 a.m. to meditate in silence. Though Kellogg's friends and fellow climbers are quick to call out his impressive feats, they are equally likely to comment on his humble nature. Longtime friend Roger Strong calls him both "a total badass" and "shy."

For Kellogg, mountains are the least of the demons he's faced in the past few years. Three years ago, while climbing with a friend in remote China, he received the phone call telling him of his wife's death. Less than a month after her funeral, he was diagnosed with colon cancer.

After that year, no mountain peak or speed challenge seemed insurmountable. Not even the fastest, hardest charge through Everest's thin air could hurt worse than losing Lara.

FRIENDS CALLED them an unlikely couple, Lara as outgoing and vivacious as Chad was quiet and measured. While Lara earned accolades and admiration for her work as a scientist, Chad was still flying down high-speed ice tracks and figuring out what he wanted to be when he grew up.

The pair connected over their shared enthusiasm for climbing. The attraction began when they joined a Seattle group climbing Ama Dablam in Nepal. Lara was dating someone else at the time, so the romance didn't bloom until a year later, when they found themselves both single and honing their rock-climbing skills on El Capitan in California's Yosemite National Park.

When the two married, Kellogg gave up partying, went back to school for an advanced degree and started his own contracting firm, Kellogg Construction. For Lara's sake, he wanted to be stable and responsible.

He also began to emerge from his shell.

"Chad changed with Lara," says Strong. "He opened up. He blossomed."

Their love for adventure blossomed, too. As Kellogg puts it, they fueled each other's passion for the sport. They constantly tested themselves with new, more demanding mountain summits.

So when Kellogg seized the chance to attempt an unclimbed peak in China, Lara decided she wanted her own challenge and agreed to climb Mount Wake in Alaska's Denali National Park.

As they bid goodbye, Kellogg told his headstrong wife to stay safe, be careful and tie safety knots.

Jed Brown, Lara's climbing partner on Wake, later explained events of the day she died. After summiting, the two of them decided they could descend more quickly without tying the knots at the end of their rope. Instead, they'd rely on their climbing skills and a pulley system to rappel down the mountain face.

Brown, who was just 23 at the time, still doesn't know exactly what happened next. He thinks Lara either misjudged the amount of rope she had left, or was struck by falling debris. As she rappelled down below him, he heard a sudden scream, and then, moments later, a sickening thud.

Just two weeks before her 39th birthday, Lara Karena Kellogg was gone. It took a full week to reach Kellogg with the shattering news.

Strong recalls how his friend seemed when he returned from China, determined to keep control. He didn't show emotion until a couple of days after the funeral, when he and Strong were unloading garbage at the dump. With the truck bed half emptied, Kellogg broke down crying. "I have nothing," he told Strong. "I'm a broken shell."

Then came the cancer diagnosis. Surgery left him idle just four weeks, then he charged back outside, determined to begin hiking again.

Some of Kellogg's friends say he channeled his grief into climbing. He focused on preparing his body for the most grueling mountain summits.

"I was just so angry at life," Kellogg says.

Kellogg also began to explore how hard he could push his body in other ways. He took up ultramarathon running and now regularly covers 20 to 35 miles of Seattle-area trails. He meets with a personal trainer for leg-weight work several times a week and spends most evenings at the climbing gym.

"Chad trains harder than anybody," says Garrett Madison, a Seattle climbing guide with Alpine Ascent.

When Kellogg set his sights on the highest mountain on Earth, he knew that Everest would provide the ultimate physical test. At more than 17,000 feet, base camp sits right on the edge of where the human body can physically recover from exertion. The summit is at a gasp-inducing 29,035 feet. In the six months leading up to Everest, Kellogg covered his bed with a plastic tent and hooked up a generator that sucked out oxygen — creating an altitude chamber where he could acclimate himself to the thin air he'd be breathing on Everest.

While he knew he'd still make careful decisions if confronted with danger, Kellogg was less and less concerned about the risks. He no longer had to worry about whether he'd come home to Lara.

IN LATE March, Kellogg flew to Nepal. For the next seven weeks, he helped carry his gear from Everest Base Camp to the high camps, acclimatizing himself in the process.

On April 23, Kellogg helped his friend Tejas, who was also preparing for an Everest summit, rig safety lines up the Lhotse Face. Climbers would use the ropes later as they attempted the summit push. How appropriate, Kellogg remarked to Tejas, that he was helping make people safe on the very anniversary of his wife's death.

When he wasn't schlepping gear or setting lines, Kellogg simply waited at base camp. As the camp swelled to a city of 800 climbers, Sherpas, guides, cooks and support staff, he spent many hours alone in his tent, reading books and writing trip dispatches he sent out via satellite phone. Despite his training, the altitude made him feel tired, and he didn't sleep well. By mid-May, Kellogg was growing antsy to get moving. All he needed was a window of good weather.

Finally, on May 21, the skies cleared. Kellogg waited out the crowd of several large guided groups, not departing until 4:15 in the afternoon. Under his jacket, he'd strapped on a small ultra-running pack containing lightweight track spikes, Raw Revolution energy bars, a satellite phone, an extra jacket, compression tights and a bladder of water. With the bladder close to his body, Kellogg knew the water wouldn't freeze. All together, the load totaled just 20 pounds.

But from the very start, nothing went right. Kellogg planned to fast hike with a ski pole in one hand and a fixed rope in the other. When it became obvious he couldn't get traction in his trail shoes, he took to pulling himself hand over hand up the line.

Frustrated, Kellogg tried swapping out the trail shoes for the track spikes. Though the spikes worked in training on hard-packed Rainier snow, they, too, held no traction in the Everest slush.

At the first high camp, Kellogg planned to grab a second ski pole he'd stashed in a supply tent. After spending a good seven minutes fruitlessly searching, Kellogg concluded someone had taken it. He'd planned on enlisting upper-body strength with the poles, but now he'd have to rely on his legs alone. The loss of the pole, Kellogg estimated, would cost him another 30 minutes, along with valuable energy.

He left Camp 1 already 45 minutes behind schedule.

From camps one to three, Kellogg's luck improved. Darkness fell, the temperature plummeted, and at last the track spikes gained traction. When he reached the Lhotse Face, a 50-degree pitch covered in ice, he swapped out the spikes for lightweight leather climbing boots he'd picked up at Camp 2 and charged up the slope. Kellogg began to think he'd still have a chance at the record.

At Camp 3, Kellogg applied battery-powered warming pads to his hands and feet. He changed into a down suit, then called base camp to let them know he was forging onward.

But Kellogg's momentum proved short-lived. Most climbers start sucking artificial oxygen above Camp 3, which sits at 24,000 feet. Using only his own lungs, Kellogg took a full six hours to slug his way to Camp 4. He knew he'd worked his body too hard, and that high up, he had no shot at recovery.

Gazing up the mountain, Kellogg could see the headlamps of the climbers lining the trail up the summit pyramid. For the first time that night, he began to seriously worry about the crowds.

At Camp 4, Kellogg's plan took another hit. He planned to meet a Sherpa with boiled water ready to pour in his bladder, but quickly realized he couldn't tell one North Face tent from another in the maze of 50 shelters. By chance, the first tent door he approached belonged to friends Tejas, Madison and Lhakpa Rita Sherpa. The climbers helped Kellogg find a bowl of soup, refilled his water, handed him an ice ax and sent him off in the direction of the summit. Kellogg left with renewed hope.

His optimism didn't last long. Just 3,000 vertical feet above Camp 4, Kellogg hit the first big wave of climbers descending from the summit. With only one rope leading up and down the mountain, Kellogg needed to unclip and step to the side every time a climber motored down on him. In a half-hour, Kellogg gained just 150 vertical feet.

Justin Merle, a Seattle guide with International Mountain Guides, was leading clients up the mountain that day. He recalls being stuck waiting in lines winding up the peak. The number of people ascending Everest on May 22, Merle said, was just too many for a single rope.

"It was tough for us," Merle said. "I can't imagine how hard it would be for Chad."

At 27,250 feet, Kellogg took his last step forward. He could barely move against the crowds coming down, and couldn't afford to spend hours sucking air so thin that climbers called the area The Death Zone. As a dark cloud closed in on the summit, and winds picked up to 30 miles an hour, Kellogg knew his summit attempt was over.

"There are no margins for error up that high," he explains. "I went with safety."

RETURNING TO base camp, Kellogg found himself surrounded by hundreds of ordinary climbers who'd made it to the top. Knowing he could have done the same if he'd taken an easier way, he's OK with his choices.

"My dream was to do it without oxygen," he says, "and I stuck with that." .

Besides, his ambitions didn't die in the soft spring snows of Everest. He plans another attempt at the solo speed record next spring and believes the mistakes he made this year will help him next time. This fall, he and climbing partner Dylan Johnson will attempt to summit an unclimbed peak in China known for fickle weather and a stark rock monolith. The peak sits in the next valley over from the mountain Kellogg was climbing when Lara died. That mountain, he named Lara's Shan, or Lara's Peak.

As for Lara and coming to terms with her loss, before leaving Nepal, Kellogg scattered her ashes in a river near Ama Dablam, the mountain the couple climbed together in 1998. It was during that climb he fell in love with the woman who would become his wife. If her ashes didn't make it to the top of Everest, it felt right that they'd rest near Ama Dablam.

Heidi Dietrich is a Seattle-area freelance writer.