Kitty Calhoun Expected to Die at 30. She Advanced Alpinism Instead

The dictionaries have it wrong: The summit isn’t the top. It’s only halfway. And what we do after the summit is even more important than what we did before. Few know this better than Kitty Calhoun, one of the greatest alpinists of her generation. Calhoun has survived so many epics—both on ascent and descent—that it’s hard to sum her up in just a few.

Perhaps Denali’s Cassin Ridge (VI 5.8 AI 4) in 1985 is a good place to start. After a rare female ascent when she and her partner ran out of food—common for Calhoun, whose climbs notoriously scrimp gear and food—stormbound for five days, their descent turned into a fight for survival fueled by only two cups of water per day per person.

Or maybe her visionary attempt at the first ascent of the North Face of Thalay Sagar (6,904m) in 1986? Calhoun survived eight days at 40 below, four without food, her “team” one other climber, Andy Selters—no radio, oxygen, basecamp support, or chance of outside help—while experimenting for the first time with a handmade portaledge anchored off ice screws on a vertical ice wall thousands of feet up.

What about when Calhoun became the first American woman to summit Dhaulagiri (8,167m) in 1987, after barely surviving an avalanche on ascent? Or tackling the immense West Pillar of Makalu (8,481m) in 1990—known for knife-edge ridges, breathtaking exposure, and 10,000 feet of some of the hardest technical climbing anywhere–where Calhoun became the first woman and only the fourth climber to top out?

For Calhoun, the list goes on at the risk of making the extraordinary sound mundane.

Asked to explain his daughter’s legendary determination, Calhoun’s father had replied, “The only thing I can think of is that a first cousin on her mother’s side was a tightrope walker with the Wallendas.” (Note: This was a high-wire circus act who performed without safety nets.) Meanwhile, Calhoun’s usual answer has been, “It’s hard to explain, even to me.” In Calhoun’s 2013 TEDx talk, she queried the audience, “Have you gotten me figured out yet?”

Maybe it’s time.

Born into a prominent Greenville, South Carolina, family that dates back to 1700, Calhoun, the eldest of four, was groomed for a traditional role of debutante, sorority sister, and Southern belle. But by high school Calhoun was already off course.

Although total annual snowfall in Greenville rarely tops one inch, skiing became Calhoun’s passion starting at age 5 when her father introduced her to the North Carolina slopes. Calhoun recalled, “We were at a little ski area when we got separated by an ice storm. At least that was how I remembered it. My dad was probably only a few feet away. But by the time he found me my eyelashes had frozen and I was crying. He tried to knock the ice off and when he couldn’t, he took me inside the lodge to warm up by the fire.”

There’s great gentleness in Calhoun’s voice as she recalls their special bond. “I was his little buddy.” Calhoun’s father, who died in 2009, was the greatest influence in her life, teaching her skiing and tennis, running with her when she started high school track, always her biggest cheerleader. Years later, when Calhoun declared her major in recreational management and post-college plans to immediately drive west to climb and live in her car, he proudly started a scrapbook collecting news clippings about her. ”As long as you’re happy,” he would say to her.

Despite her petite 5’3” frame, growing up, Calhoun competed in tennis, track, and was co-captain of her high school’s field hockey team. An honor student elected “the girl most likely to succeed,” for college, Calhoun chose the University of Vermont for its proximity to cold weather and icy skiing. But Calhoun got even more: Senior year, hiking the Presidential Traverse in New Hampshire, in winter, with a fellow classmate, she was benighted without food or bivy gear on the deserted Mt. Washington summit, where winds and temperatures often top Everest’s.

Calhoun had found her calling.

Even among peers Calhoun stands out in her endurance of extreme cold, hunger, altitude, small and smelly spaces, minimal possessions, and a general acceptance of deprivation. Calhoun also admits, “I didn’t expect to live past 30,” though not always because of climbing. “I was resigned to dying in a car accident on the Skardu highway to Askole,“ she says, citing one of the most dangerous roads in the world—sharp turns, no guardrails, sometimes just wide enough to fit one typically speeding vehicle, on cliffs overlooking the raging Skardu River hundreds of feet below. Calhoun says, “All you can do is pray.”

For seven years, if not guiding in South America or Asia, Calhoun drove across the west in search of hard ice and mixed lines, living off the grid in her car—no electricity, permanent address, or knowledge of current events. Her contact to the outside world was her mother in South Carolina, who collected her mail and whom Calhoun weekly called collect. Calhoun’s total sacrifice to her craft included foregoing hygiene, to extents exceptional even among fellow alpinists who go weeks without changing underwear. With few opportunities to wash, her socks became particularly notorious for their odor, as was her car. Calhoun’s mother admitted, “You could smell it coming!” It was not an existence expected of a beautiful 20-something woman: Still, the question, as for so many climbers remains: Why?

Calhoun has previously admitted that climbing for her was a way to rebel against family expectations. But it cuts even deeper than that.

The Calhoun name is famous throughout the traditional South and prominent in U.S. history. In the decades before the Civil War, Calhoun’s great great great uncle, John Calhoun, was one of the most influential men in the U.S.—Vice President under two presidents and, after the South seceded, Vice President of the Confederacy. John Calhoun was slavery’s most eloquent advocate and a slave owner himself, insisting that slavery benefited the slaves as much as the Southern economy, and that accounts of torture and brutality were distorted, exaggerated, or plain untrue. It was a message that Southerners longed to hear, justifying slavery in bestsellers like Gone With the Wind long into the 20th century.

Growing up near the same town as her ancestor, as late as the 1970s, Calhoun heard her father defend slavery using the same language. Calhoun says, “I was a kid. It never occurred to me to question him. I never thought through what he was really saying.”

Climbing helped Calhoun reconcile her complex legacy, taking her away as far as possible, literally and figuratively, from her family destiny. In Vermont, no one connected the dots with the Calhoun name, nor out west, nor later when Calhoun started guiding after teaching herself Spanish and Nepali from a book. And she never doubted her chosen path, even as climbing partners died, she routinely dodged death herself, or endured family traumas, including the suicide of her younger brother while Calhoun was home visiting for Christmas.

Death is the occupational hazard of alpinists in their unforgiving profession. For Calhoun, religion helps her cope. “I’m a devout born-again Christian,” Calhoun says. “After my brother’s suicide, I considered becoming a nun. Most of my climbing partners are agnostic or atheists, and I respect that it’s up to each person to find answers. We never spoke about death when climbing.”

Pausing, Calhoun adds, “What could possibly be the reason behind so much death? So much suffering? Not just in climbing but in our world. But I know that God has a plan. If we had the answer to why good things happen to bad people, and bad things to good people, then we’d be as wise as God. And that’s impossible.”

Thinking of six close friends who recently died and another recently diagnosed with Stage 3 cancer, Calhoun says, “When you realize you don’t know when you’re going to die, you’re free to live how you feel you should. It’s because of my complete assurance in God that I’m comfortable knowing that I could die tomorrow. The beauty is to live each day like it’s your last.”

After her monastic seven years’ existence in her car, Calhoun decided she was missing other life experiences. She married a longtime climbing partner and spent two years on the East Coast while her husband finished medical school at Yale, later moving into an upscale Seattle suburb while she attended the University of Washington business school, cooked family lasagna dinners, and prepared for the life of a doctor’s wife.

It didn’t last. Calhoun was soon driven to make first ascents of three Grade VI rock routes in Kyrgyzstan, a new Grade VI route on Middle Triple Peak in Alaska, and a rare ascent of the Diamond Couloir (also VI) on Mt Kenya. Nor did the marriage, although for common, non-climbing reasons.

Despite her achievements—earning notable accolades like The American Alpine Club’s Underhill Award (recently renamed the Pinnacle Award)—Calhoun couldn’t escape mountaineering’s endemic sexism. At basecamp, other climbing teams invariably assumed she was her team’s basecamp manager, not its leader. (Calhoun organizes and leads all her expeditions, amazingly, on whom no one has died.) Once she became a mother in 1995, Calhoun faced extra pressure. When alpinist Alison Hargreaves died descending K2 in 1992, Hargreaves was quickly labeled selfish for “leaving” her young children—unlike three years later, when Alex Lowe died on Shishapangma also with young children. Calhoun concedes, “It was hard as a mom to leave on trips. But I believe it’s important to be engaged in life rather than living vicariously through your children. Our kids pick up on that.”

What happens after the summit was increasingly on Calhoun’s mind after over forty years of guiding in the U.S. as well as internationally, later as a founding partner of Exum Utah Mountain Guides and Chicks, an outdoor women’s guiding service. Unlike many, Calhoun’s world expanded with age, starting with reaching out to others who lost loved ones from suicide, climbing, cancer, or other ways, knowing, “It always hurts. But time really does help.”

Calhoun also feels compelled to give back through her unique perspective as an alpinist. In 1987, attempting the second ascent of the Kurtyka-McIntyre on the East Face of Dhaulagiri, instead of ice, Calhoun found at the climb’s base a long stream of running water pouring down over the rock slab. Calhoun says, “The ice tongue was gone, melted. I can’t imagine it will ever come back and that the route will ever have a second ascent.” Yet it wasn’t until 2005, on Mt. Kenya’s Diamond Couloir, that Calhoun sensed a disturbing climate pattern. This realization led her to embracing climate-change activism, including starring with Barack Obama’s climate advisor in a Patagonia-sponsored documentary, The Scale of Hope, on its impact in Alaska.

Calhoun credits Scarpa for deepening her commitment to the climbing community via its Mentorship Program; an initiative which promotes climbing among underserved and underrepresented communities. Paired with an Indigenous climber with Navajo roots, it was then that Calhoun discovered the Navajo culture with values so like her own and those she had found in Nepal: simplicity, family, human relationships, acceptance of suffering, conviction in essential goodness, and harmony with nature.

Yet also with increasing time spent on the Navajo reservation, Calhoun saw how the Navajos have been disproportionately impacted by climate change: One-third of the 170,000 Navajos today still live without clean running water. It’s a complex and contentious issue with no solution in sight, tracing back to a treaty 150 years ago between the Navajos and the U.S. government. Upheld as recently as June 2023 by the U.S. Supreme Court, astoundingly, the treaty still determines Navajo reservation water rights. While the Supreme Court Justices acknowledged that Navajo water needs have changed since the Civil War era and that the Navajos today face dire water shortages, the Court ruled that it didn’t have the authority to modify the treaty, which could only come from Congress.

Meanwhile, Calhoun also saw 15% of the Navajos living without electricity—no way to recharge devices without plugging into running vehicles or resorting to loud and dirty generators, in turn limiting crucial online access to education, college admissions and scholarships, medical care, and various government programs. The 2022 U.S. Census reflects this painful reality: Versus the overall U.S. population, Navajos are twice as likely to live in poverty (24.8% vs 11.5%) and without health insurance (17.0% vs. 9.3%), while half as likely to graduate from college (16.7% vs. 38.7%).

Perhaps channeling guilt from her family legacy of slavery and oppression into commitment to the Navajos, Calhoun is now fundraising to buy clean energy kits for Navajo households while filming the project as a way to publicize the Navajo plight. The film, to be published mid 2024, is directed by the Indigenous filmmaker Angelo Baca, features an all-Navajo cast and crew, and is receiving financial support from Patagonia. Whitney Clapper, who leads Patagonia’s Community Impact and Partnerships, says, “The way Kitty tells this story is a real model of what we hope to see more of. What typically happens [in film production] is non-Native filmmakers, from outside the Indigenous community, come in knowing very little about the community, extract a story, then leave. But that’s exactly what Kitty is determined not to do.”

Calhoun isn’t sure what’s next, but she knows she needs to continue to work to earn the trust of the Navajos, even learning the complex Navajo language with its unique consonants and vowels wholly different to English and other European languages. “It’s arrogant for a white woman to think, ‘I’m going to save the Navajo world,’” Calhoun says. “There’s such a long history of distrust—betrayal after betrayal. I need to show I’m not like everyone else.”

Still guiding privately and at festivals, Calhoun continues to find joy in the outdoors as she maintains her legendary physical conditioning both to celebrate her faith and keep herself ready for what lies ahead. Despite two hip operations brought on by years of distance running, besides climbing, Calhoun works out three times a day with weights, yoga, stretching, calisthenics, and running using a computer program (reducing her biological age by over two decades to make it vaguely challenging).

For all her extraordinary summits, Calhoun remains grounded. “Just because you do something extraordinary doesn’t mean that you are. You come home after an expedition but people don’t understand what you’ve been through. Maybe they say, ‘Wow, that’s nice.’ But you still have to get by, reintegrate yourself in daily life, while you’re thinking, ‘What’s next?’”

For Calhoun, there are still summits ahead, even as she knows they’re only halfway of her journey.

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