Steve Stevens still doesn’t have an answer to a question he was first asked in August, right after he’d finished climbing Mount Elbrus.
The 18,510-foot peak in Russia is the tallest mountain in Europe. For Stevens, 53, it was the seventh of the Seven Summits — the end of his quest to climb the tallest peak on each of the seven continents.
He started the list in 2019, with Aconcagua in Argentina. Later that year, he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. In 2021, he caught frostbite on Mount Everest.
On New Year’s Day in 2022, he was on his way up Antarctica’s Vinson Massif. Six months later, he drove from his home in Whitefish, Mont., to Talkeetna, Alaska, to catch a flight to a base camp on Denali.
The final two climbs came this year: Carstenz Pyramid, the highest point in Oceania, and Elbrus.
His guide and fellow climbers on Elbrus knew it was his seventh summit. They congratulated him and snapped photos of him at the top, holding up seven fingers.
Later, when they got off the mountain, they asked the question.
“Everybody was like, ‘what’s next?’” Stevens said. “I’m like, I don’t know yet.”
So far, the answer has been spending lots of time at the family farm in Rockford, Wash., about an hour south of Spokane. Both of his parents died in 2024, and he’s been tasked with taking care of the property, the place where he grew up.
His mother always said he’d talked about climbing Mount Everest as a kid. A friend he knew as a child recently told him the same. Stevens has no memory of that.
“If those stories are all true, this has obviously been in the back of my mind for a long time,” he said.
Stevens graduated from Freeman High School in 1990 and went to college at Central Washington University. He lived in Spokane for a short while after graduating, before becoming a golf professional and moving to northwest Montana to work at a course there.
He did some rock climbing in college, he said, and has always been a hiker, but serious mountaineering didn’t become part of his life until his 40s.
He remembers going to see a photographer friend’s slideshow from a trip to Nepal and being mesmerized by the landscape. It convinced him he had to see the Himalayas for himself.
In the fall of 2016, he went. He did some trekking and climbed a mountain that was about 20,000 feet tall. He visited Everest base camp, awed by the scale of the mountains.
Something clicked. Back at home, he kept thinking about climbing mountains. Then he got serious and booked a trip to Argentina to climb Aconcagua in 2019.
The 22,841-foot peak served as a kind of proving ground for Stevens. He found out he was a strong climber. The altitude didn’t bother him much. He felt good scaling the tallest peak in South America, and he liked the process of getting there.
“I fell in love with it,” he said.
That was in January. The following December he was in Tanzania climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. That was less technical than Aconcagua — no crampons, no ice axes. Stevens described it as a “long hike at altitude.”
By the time he returned, golfers at the club where he worked started to notice Stevens liked tall, difficult mountains. At one point, a member offered to help Stevens fund a trip to Mount Everest — an expensive undertaking that involves hiring guides and spending weeks out of the country.
The offer eventually led to a GoFundMe that pulled in enough donations to fund the trip, and Stevens found himself climbing the tallest mountain in the world in May 2021.
He remembers getting to the summit and telling someone they were halfway done — they still had to get down. That turned out to be the hard part. Shortly after leaving the summit, he realized he couldn’t see. His corneas had frozen. He said it was like looking through a frosted windshield.
Later, when he took off his boot, he found another problem — frostbite on his foot.
The next morning, he could see again, his eyes thawed by sleep. His foot was still a problem. A helicopter rescued him from Camp 2 and got him to basecamp, and eventually to a hospital.
At the hospital, he stepped on a scale and discovered the other toll Everest had taken — he’d lost 31 pounds.
Still, he knew he wasn’t done climbing. There was no turning back.
“After I had the opportunity to climb Everest, I’m like, ‘well now you’ve got to go for the seven,’” Stevens said.
Feeling had returned to his foot by the time he went to Antarctica to climb Vinson Massif, about seven months later. That trip started on Dec. 23. Two days later was the first time he hadn’t woken up in his parents’ house on Christmas morning. He also experienced 24-hour daylight for the first time. The run up the 16,050-foot peak took four days.
About six months later, he made the 2,500-mile drive to Alaska, detouring slightly to spend time with friends in Edmonton. He drove the entire length of the Alaska-Canada Highway. He saw a lot of wildlife.
Climbing Denali normally takes close to three weeks. Stevens’ group did the climb in two weeks round-trip, hauling 40-pound backpacks and 80-pound sleds between camps.
“I don’t know if I want to work that hard again,” Stevens said.
That was June of 2022. His next summit wouldn’t come for almost three years, though not by choice. Carstenz Pyramid, a 16,024 foot peak in western New Guinea, represents the tallest point in Oceania, had been closed to international climbers since 2019 because of a conflict between the Indonesian government and Papuan separatists.
The area was reopened to climbers for the first time in 2024, and Stevens worked with a Colorado-based climbing company to get a trip there in March.
He flew into base camp, avoiding the long jungle hike otherwise required for climbing the peak. That put him at about 14,000 feet of elevation, not far below the 16,024 foot summit.
The climb was one of Stevens’ favorites, thanks in large part to the Tyrolean traverse — a set of cables climbers use to cross a ravine. Stevens has pictures of himself walking across it, his feet balancing on one cable while his harness is clipped to two others about chest height.
“I loved it,” Stevens said. “I had been looking forward to that for so long.”
He booked his trip to Elbrus with the same company. The peak is in southern Russia, not far from a ski village near the border with Georgia.
Among Stevens’ climbing partners on that trip was Lonnie Bedwell, a blind climber who’s working toward an Explorer’s Grand Slam — climbing the Seven Summits and skiing to both poles. He’s on Stevens’ left in the summit photo.
Behind them, there are no clouds.
Of all the variables that go into these sorts of climbing trips, weather is the one you hear about most. Stevens had his weather problems. On Vinson Massif, a storm kept his group stuck at base camp for a week, unsure when they’d get a weather window to fly down to Union Glacier and catch the plane to South America to get home.
And yet on each of the summits, Stevens hit the weather just right.
“I’ve been lucky,” he said. “All seven of my summit photos are blue skies.”