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Carlos Buhler
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| Photo: Crista-Lee Mitchell |
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Leaership Position: Mountaineer
NOLS Graduate: 1970 Wind
River Wilderness Course
Carlos Buhler’s climbing resume is a long, long
list of some of the world’s most challenging mountains:
Everest, Ama Dablam, Cho Oyu. He is the man Climbing Magazine
called “the most accomplished North American climber
in the Himalaya,” but the first mountain he lists
on his resume is none other than Pyramid Peak in Wyoming,
Buhler’s first mountain ascent. He climbed to the
summit at age 15 while a student on a Wind River Wilderness
course with NOLS in 1970.
Buhler still remembers the NOLS course that would ultimately
change his life. “That
was a wonderful experience for me to reach the top of something,” he
says. “I remember that rocky scree-field going up to the top; it was
beautiful and really made an impression on me.” Buhler also remembers
the first time he tried to lead a climb on that course and placed a piece of
protection upside down in the rock. That, he says, was the beginning of a long
career learning and climbing.
From Alaska to Tadzhikistan, Buhler has gone on to climb
not only the hardest mountains, but also the hardest
routes on the hardest mountains, oftentimes
on light-weight, high-altitude expeditions with just a few climbers. A New
York Times article once called him a “super-alpinist,” and in his
30-year mountaineering career he has no doubt earned the title. His first ascent
of the Tibet Kangshung East Face of Everest is still unrepeated and remains
one of the most technically demanding routes on the mountain. In 1988, he joined
an ultra-light team to make the first American ascent of Kangchenjunga, the
third-highest peak in the world, via the North Wall. On Changabang in 1998,
along with a team of Russians, he established one of the most difficult routes
ever done at that altitude. Imagine all of this in a high-stakes field of expeditioning
where, according to Buhler, only 10-15 percent of difficult ascents in Asia
succeed and about one out of every 30 climbers dies each year trying.
At his home in Bozeman, Montana, Buhler prefers to talk
about the philosophical side of climbing rather than
the fame he’s reached in the mountaineering
world. Climbing, he says modestly, is just a way for him to do all the things
he’s always been searching for. Today he combines a climbing career with
a consulting business, Buhler Alpine Professionals, which sends him out speaking
to groups about how the lessons of climbing can be brought home to everyday
life.
Philosophical by nature, it’s obvious that Buhler hasn’t stopped
learning since that first experience on a mountain with NOLS. “When I
take risks in climbing,” he once wrote, “I can carry some things
back into my life as a non-climber; a new set of problem-solving techniques;
an enhanced appreciation for another culture; an insight into the strengths
of a friend; or a shift, however slight, in the way I look at my own resources
and ability to improve the world. The higher the risk, the more I want to come
away having learned something.”
Expedition Leadership | Leadership
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