lightness to the team. Still a beginner in the world of climbing, she inhaled everything about it. Wrapping her arms around the sport, she was learning that climbing wasn’t always comfortable. It was full of snow, cold temperatures, and potentially sleepless nights in thin air. But she relished the hardships that scared away many mountaineers. In South America, Chris hit her stride while Keith and the guides watched with admiration.
Their climbing journals shed light on this glorious experience:
[Chris] It’s my first time in a third-world country. I’m with Keith and I’m loving it. What could be better? This is like everything I dreamed mountaineering to be and then some. I think this trip is going to be a turning point in my life. Actually, Keith was it first. I love him dearly. He thinks I’ll be the next [pioneer climber] Kitty Calhoun. I have to prove myself and be tough and aggressive and show no pain. I think I’ll find out what I’m really made of.
• • •
[Keith] Chris is like a wide-eyed kid. She loves this place and appreciates the culture and the atmosphere more than any woman I’ve ever met. She is amazing, unusual and loving. If we do K2 in 1995, she’d be the first American woman. Anyway, one step at a time.
LESS THAN A YEAR AFTER taking to climbing and mountaineering, Chris closed out 1993 by summiting 19,341-foot Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania with Keith. He had proposed to Chris on a hike, and she said yes enthusiastically. They raised glasses of whiskey after their summit, toasting the future, and married the next year in Atlanta. The wedding was attended by Robin and Joyce Feld. Their daughter’s wedding cake was made of bagels and bananas, a far cry from the traditional buttercream version the Felds had envisioned for their baby.
“I kept going to Atlanta by myself to see them,” Joyce recalled. “They were full of adventure and I liked adventure myself.” Adventure for the newlyweds included a honeymoon in Asia. It was October 1994 and 22,500-foot Ama Dablam in postmonsoon Nepal called to the pair, who sought to become the first American couple to summit that peak. Completing their goal on October 25, Keith and Chris were jubilant, deciding to remarry at the base of the mountain in the village of Pangbouche. Music blared from speakers set up by villagers. Once word had spread that an American couple planned to marry, the village came alive. A Buddhist monk provided blessings. Chris and Keith became instant celebrities, draped in traditional Nepalese clothing. They danced to local music that spilled into Michael Jackson. Chris’s hair was caked with celebratory yak butter as Ama Dablam rose in the distance.
Ama Dablam—technical to ascend and stunning to behold—was the highlight of their mountaineering career so far, both as individuals and now as a couple. Mountaineers who summited the highest peaks in the Himalayas often visited historian Elizabeth Hawley in Kathmandu after their expeditions. With sharp attention to detail, Hawley questioned them closely to confirm their ascents. She spent decades verifying the achievements of climbers and recording them in an extensive database, which is still used today (Hawley continued her work until her death in 2018 at age ninety-four). With their summit of Ama Dablam, Chris and Keith received their first mention at her hand:
Ama Dablam in the post-monsoon. A total of 50 men and women summited Ama Dablam this season, including Americans Keith Boskoff and Mrs. Chris Boskoff.
—Himalayan Historian Elizabeth Hawley, American Alpine Club Journal
THOSE WHO CLIMB FREQUENTLY BECOME aware of a spectrum concealed in the upper echelon of the sport. Therein lies a vast array of attitudes about the element of danger. In perilous conditions, often the most compelling for elite climbers, the margin of safety is thin. It can be an illusion. The point where the reality of safety ends and the illusion begins differs for each individual. Reducing the risks in elite climbing is an effort involving speed, efficiency, and safe practices. When all three of these systems fail at the same time, extreme danger surfaces. Putting yourself in the same situation over and over again and walking away can feel like a gift of survival, when really the odds are no different than they are at a Las Vegas blackjack table. Or as one Seattle mountain guide explained: “It’s like an all-you-can-eat buffet for some of these climbers. Those first four plates taste delicious, but it’s that last piece of bacon that might send them over the top.”
Chris had been climbing a few years with some success, and she found the exhilaration of the sport addictive. In Appleton, she frequented a new climbing gym whenever she was home visiting her parents. The locals, unaccustomed to a climber of her caliber, gave her a wide berth. “When she came in, it was pretty much all business. She was totally on a mission,” remembered Paul Kuenn, who owned Vertical Stronghold, the Midwest’s first climbing gym north of Chicago. “People would generally let her do her thing, but they’d definitely stare. Every now and then I’d overhear someone saying, ‘Man alive, that woman has been on the wall for over two hours and she hasn’t put her feet down.’ She crossed from one end to the other.”
Kuenn had arranged the holds so Chris could travel 170 feet sideways by going around the bouldering area, changing directions, and coming back without stopping to break. “This is Wisconsin, so there weren’t exactly tons of people who knew who she was as her ascents became bolder,” he said. “But eventually she was in all the climbing magazines. It’s funny, she really didn’t care about any of that. She wasn’t into celebrity. She’d come to the gym and bring her mom to watch. The two of them together—decent, humble Midwesterners.”
CHRIS AND KEITH CONTINUED TO scrape together vacation time, finding long weekends to flee Atlanta for greater challenges throughout 1994 and 1995. On one such getaway, New Hampshire was the destination. Relative to the mountains of the Greater Himalayas or the Andes, Mount Washington in the White Mountains of New England pales at 6,289 feet. Yet its proximity to the intersection of several storm tracks makes it one of the deadliest mountains in the United States. Catching storms from every direction, the mountain faces brutal gusts that can come out of nowhere. Small outbuildings at the peak are chained to prevent destruction. In 1934, a wind speed of 231 miles an hour was clocked at the mountain’s observatory, a Northern Hemisphere record that still stands.
Wind buffeted Chris and Keith as they began their attempt on Mount Washington’s northern face. “Ready, Chris?” Keith called. He stood a distance from her, on a wall of steep ice.
Unanchored but roped to Keith, Chris looked down, double-checking the toe straps on her crampons. “Yeah, one sec. I wanna make sure I’ve got these tightened.” A blast of air trapped her words, carrying them away before reaching Keith. Leaning over, she caught a glimpse of the rope, furiously uncoiling. Reacting immediately, Chris jumped hard on her ice axes with her body to arrest Keith’s slide. He had been caught by the gust, knocked off balance, and was plunging down the ice in a near free fall. Digging into the ice with her crampons and tools, Chris stopped his fall, hoping the axes would hold.
A sharp pain rocketed through her hand, radiating up her arm. Sensing that the axes were holding firm, she peered down and saw her husband’s face—a look of horror as he lay flat against ice. His fall had been stopped. Silently, Keith made his way back to her, relying on his crampons and pulling only gently on the rope as he heard his wife’s cries and saw it wrapped around her hand.
“Keith, are you okay?”
“I’m okay. Don’t move. I’m coming to you. Don’t move your hand.”
Her left hand gripped the ice axe, her right hand was limp against the handle of her second axe, bones crushed underneath skin. “I think I broke my hand, Keith. Dammit.”
“You broke your hand but you saved your husband,” he said. “You saved my life, you ridiculous woman!”
The chill of the snow was no match for adrenaline. Chris and Keith held
