“I’m fine,” she said, in an unconvincing tone.
He stopped and turned, shifting from storyteller to cheerleader. Chris slumped onto a boulder, unlacing her boots.
“Look, this isn’t going to happen overnight,” he told her. “You’ve been sitting in a cubicle at Lockheed for two years. Don’t expect so much from yourself.”
“Dammit, Keith. I said I’m fine so just . . . space, please.” Her exasperation exposed, she reached down and pulled off both boots. In a flash, she threw them beyond the path, watching them roll down into dry brush. Head in her hands, she sat unwilling to make eye contact or admit weakness.
Keith hadn’t seen this side of her before. He leaned on his trekking pole as he reached down to retrieve the boots. “You’ll need these. Like I said, the turnaround point is just up over that ridge.” He handed her the boots with a gentle smile, which she briefly returned. They continued the hike, finishing in silence laced with triumph.
WITH THREE WEEKS TO GO before the Bolivia trip, Chris found herself in Colorado undergoing a crash course in ice climbing from well-known mountaineer Thor Keiser, who would be the lead guide on their climb. Just a year earlier, Keiser and French climber Chantal Mauduit had been rescued by climbing greats Scott Fischer and Ed Viesturs on K2, perhaps the most treacherous of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks. Chris had begun to master the lingo and dig into the personalities in the climbing community. Her time in Colorado was an opportunity to expand these skills.
Keiser took Keith and Chris to climb a classic pillar of ice in the Vail area called Rigid Designator, which rose 115 vertical feet. With a cauliflowered base rising into an upper column of beautiful ice, if Chris topped out on her first visit here, she knew it would be quite an accomplishment in her young climbing career. On day two of their attempt to scale Rigid Designator, Keith had Chris roped, and he stood below her on solid ground, belaying her from thirty feet. The day prior, he’d fought all the way up, while she’d managed to scale only about half of it before stopping in exhaustion and rappelling down. She’d vowed to get to the top before they left Colorado. Confident in her skill, Keith placed a bet with Thor, the loser paying for dinner in Bolivia.
Passing her previous stopping point, Chris paused, adding long ice screws into the frozen wall as she rose. She swung her ice axe, making contact with pale blue and splintering frozen shards that bounced off her helmet. Higher she climbed, taking a moment to rest, turn back, and look at the view. The altitude, often a factor for new climbers, failed to bother her. Her breathing remained smooth, her heart rate low, and her head clear. On a wall of ice at nearly nine thousand feet, Chris felt challenged but strong.
As her breath created puffs of white, Chris came close. With a final, calculated hack into the ice, she pulled herself to the top of the pillar. A hundred feet below, Keith let out a hoot. He and Thor stood amazed at the feat, which had taken only a few hours for a relative novice. Keith gripped the rope in his guide hand, leaning back as she slowly descended.
“You owe us dinner in La Paz, dude,” Keith told Thor, laughing. Almost mumbling to himself, he said, “I’ve got to marry this girl.”
MOUNTAIN GUIDE HECTOR PONCE DE LEON heard Chris laugh. Not just once, but many times, interrupting the intensity of the climb. The clients on his 1993 guided Bolivia trip seemed drawn to Chris’s energy. At altitudes over twenty thousand feet, she seemed untroubled by the difficulties with food and physical limitations that usually worried novice climbers. Keith had expressed concern about her pushing too much, too fast, wondering if she realized how hard the challenge would be. But Chris’s first foray outside the United States showcased her ease in places far from home and high in the clouds. She appeared to be made for life in a tent on a high ridge.
“I just didn’t feel like I was guiding her. Not at all,” Ponce de Leon said. Thor had asked the Mexican guide to help him lead their small group on climbs of several peaks in Bolivia, and he recalled being surprised by their tenacity. “Chris and Keith wanted more than regular clients. They asked for an extension of the normal itinerary. She wanted extra climbs everywhere we went. Her physical and mental strength were outstanding. I was impressed.” Ponce de Leon remembered her laughing a ton, “having a great time . . . she was just all over the place. She was putting up tents and doing things that we weren’t expecting clients to do. After that, I knew I needed to keep track of her.”
Guides often gripe about high-maintenance clients, but Chris brought 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