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Webster, pioneering climber, dies at 66

BY SETH BOSTER seth.boster@gazette.com When he heard Ed Webster had died, Stewart Green thought about a photo his friend had taken. It was from Webster’s record-setting ascent up Mount Everest’s Kangshung Face, a never-before-done mission that capped the climber’s legend in 1988.

Between his pain, between passing out and thoughts of dying without sherpas to save him and his three partners who also declined supplemental oxygen, Webster grabbed his camera to capture a sunrise.

“He said it was so beautiful, just perfect,” Green recalled at his Colorado Springs home. “He said he didn’t even think about it when he took off his overmitts. His fingertips pretty much froze instantly, but he didn’t realize it.”

While hosting Webster soon after the climb, Green observed the heavy toll: fingertips shaven to the bone, three toes lost to frostbite. Webster worried, too, about what those days in Everest’s “death zone” might mean for his brain and other bodily functions. But the photo, it seemed, made it all worthwhile. And Webster was set on recovering; there was more of the world’s beauty to behold. “He pushed himself to get back into shape again and go climbing,” Green said.

He was the climbing until end.

Webster, who attended Colorado College in the 1970s and set the standard on many now-famous crags across the West and the globe, died suddenly late last month at his home in Maine. He was 66. He is survived by his wife, Lisa,

and daughter, Joyelle.

“It’s so weird to talk about Ed in the past,” said Jimmie Dunn, a fellow climber from the sport’s pioneer era in Colorado Springs. He always saw Webster as invincible.

Webster grew into one of the mightiest of that shaggy, ragtag bunch he joined from the Boston suburbs. As a boy there, he became mesmerized by photos of Everest. He cut his teeth on rock out east before setting his sights on Colorado College and grander obstacles on the other side of the country.

One afternoon in 1975, Dunn led Green to the new guy’s dorm room.

“Ed was nowhere to be found, but the window was open,” Green said. “We looked out the window, and he was climbing up the side of the building.”

It was a proper introduction to Webster’s free spirit and intense commitment. Another local climbing partner from those days, Bryan Becker, keeps photos perhaps best depicting Webster. They show him on the rock, “very focused, concentrating on what he’s doing,” Becker said.

Or maybe stories like this from Dunn depict Webster best: The twenty-something was alone in the backcountry, “grimy and wet and worn out” after a long night. “He found two tourists the next morning” for a ride, Dunn said. “They said, ‘ Did you hear the wild animal screeching all night?’ And Ed said, ‘No, that was me singing!’”

If not out his dorm window, Webster was out establishing bold routes with no rope or anchors around Pikes Peak, Garden of the Gods, North Cheyenne Cañon and beyond at Eldorado Canyon and Rocky Mountain National Park. That was in between bigger adventures.

He didn’t have a car, Becker said. But “whenever he got the chance, he was on the road hitchhiking or putting together rides to get to places like the Black Canyon (of the Gunnison) or the desert,” Becker said.

In the yet-to-be-tamed desert around Moab, Utah, he was with Webster to claim the first ascent of the route known as Supercrack. The climb is widely celebrated for redefining the possibilities on sandstone.

That was but one boundary-breaking feat in the fabled region for Webster, whom Green credits for several first ascents on Castleton Tower. A trusted historian of the sport, Green wrote a remembrance of Webster calling him, simply, “one of the great rock climbers, mountaineers and adventurers of the late 20th century.” The rise came with tragedy. In his 2001 book, “Snow in the Kingdom,” Webster wrote of his 1980s “storm years” on Everest after the death of his girlfriend. They were climbing together at Black Canyon of the Gunnison when she fell. She died in his arms.

“On our last trip to Moab in 2019, he talked about that actually,” Green said. “He still felt extreme guilt about that.”

Settled down by then with his beloved wife and daughter, he might have felt guilt about other costs of his passion.

“When we hung out three or four years ago, I remember him saying, ‘Yeah, I didn’t really prepare for the future, so I got these (crappy) jobs now,’” Dunn said. “We didn’t save money, we climbed. I remember he said, ‘I didn’t think I was gonna live.’ He was serious when he said that.”

He picked up jobs while writing and giving presentations and lectures on climbing. Always, he thought about climbing, friends say.

“He was a climbing machine. That’s what he wanted to do,” Green said. “He didn’t care about a lot of the trappings we have, a career and making money and buying a big house and a car. … I think he wanted to live in the moment and go climbing, because that makes you feel good. It makes you feel like you’re part of the world in a very intense kind of way that just going through the motions doesn’t satisfy.”

Going through the motions would never have granted him that sunrise on Everest. Webster showed that photo to an audience of schoolkids once, Dunn remembered. That sunrise and his mangled fingers and toes.

“Some little kid raised his hand and said, ‘I got frostbite on my toes. Will I be OK?’” Dunn recalled. “He went and found the kid in the crowd there, got down on both knees, got face to face with this kid. He put his hand on his shoulder. And he said, ‘Yes, you will be OK. You will be OK.’”

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2022-12-04T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-12-04T08:00:00.0000000Z

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The Gazette, Colorado Springs