The Explorer’s Club, last week, hosted a lecture by Ueli Steck, who has had our attention for other reasons, on more than one occasion.  He is in perpetual comeback mode, it seems but after the jump read what Steck did while in New York for this presentation at the Explorer’s Club, which we are sorry to have missed:

World renowned Swiss alpinist and record-breaking rock climber Ueli Steck joins us to present his legendary experiences. In this lecture, the “Swiss Machine” – whose rapid ascents of classic routes are just as demanding as three-minute miles – will share stories of his extreme expeditions all around the world. Join us in listening to tales of his rocky adventures and meet the Swiss Superman in person!

Nick Paumgarten updates us, in amusing fashion, on what must be one of his favorite profile subjects:

Uli Steck, the mountaineer known as the Swiss Machine, was in New York last week to give a talk at the Explorers Club. He never knows what to do with himself in big cities. No mountains to climb. You train in basements, lifting free weights in a hotel gym.

He had just spent two months in Tibet. He and his wife, who live near Interlaken, Switzerland, had gone there to climb Shishapangma, the fourteenth-highest mountain in the world—their idea of a vacation—but when conditions proved too much for her Steck joined another group of climbers. A few hundred feet from the summit, three of them were caught in an avalanche. Two were killed.

On his first morning in New York City, Steck managed to find what he called some “good exercise”: the marathon. He hadn’t run at all since August, and finished in three hours and nine minutes. Not much of a result for arguably the fastest climber in the world (he once ascended the North Face of the Eiger, traditionally a two-day affair, in two hours and forty-seven minutes), but he feels that he has nothing left to prove. A recent exception would be his record-breaking twenty-eight-hour solo climb of Annapurna’s South Face, perhaps the most treacherous test in the Himalayas. “I took too much risk,” he said last week. “I was accepting to die up there.” He’d climbed through the night, switching his right mitten from hand to hand (an avalanche had swept the left one away).

Steck’s subsequent vow to cool it a bit (he ended his Explorers Club talk with the self-admonition “Slow down and stay alive”) has not deterred him from devising ambitious excursions, what he calls “projects.” And so, as he battled the headwind through Brooklyn on Marathon Sunday, he kept seeing, to the west, the shiny new tower at the tip of Manhattan, One World Trade Center: the skyline’s highest peak. Two days later, a future tenant of the building suggested to Steck that the two of them climb to the top of it and make a viable claim to a first ascent. Taken together, the marathon and the summit of One World Trade would be an unprecedented accomplishment, an urban analogue to the combination of the so-called Lhotse Traverse and Everest, a feat Steck covets. “This is a good project,” Steck said. The future tenant set about securing a permit.

On the day of the climb, Steck and the tenant met up with the expedition’s third member, Jordan Barowitz, an escort assigned to them by the building’s landlord. Barowitz had brought along a radio, he said, “in case something happens.” Steck is thirty-eight, slight and bow-legged. He had on bluejeans, a light down jacket, and running shoes. When he rounded a corner onto Vesey Street and got his first glance of the building close up—the fearsome east face—he gasped:…

Read the whole story here.