She was born in Austria — “The Sound of Music” country — so it’s no wonder Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner wanted to climb every mountain.
She’s conquered all 14 of Earth’s “eight-thousanders,” those mountains 8,000 meters and taller. In 2011 she made it to the top of K2, the formidable peak on the China-Pakistan border, which kills roughly one out of every four climbers who attempt to make it to the top.
It took her seven tries, but Kaltenbrunner reached the summit without either porters or supplemental oxygen — or her husband and climbing partner, who decided to turn back about three-quarters of the way up.
“It was a difficult moment,” she says of husband Ralf Dujmovits’ decision to descend as she and three others forged on. “But years ago, we agreed to accept each other’s gut feeling.” She says his turning back proved to be a blessing: From his perch at base camp, he guided her by radio, his binoculars trained on her and the terrain ahead.
She began climbing in earnest at 13, a passion she prepared for with endurance training — skiing, running, core training, mountain biking — and sleeping with the windows open to adjust to the cold. In between expeditions she became a nurse, which taught her to “pay attention in different ways — to listen to my body, how fast or slow I should move, what I should eat . . . and how much time my body would need for regeneration.”
But while nursing helped her cope with injury and death, nothing prepared her for the horror of seeing a fellow climber die.
In 2010, during one failed try at scaling K2, she stopped, petrified, as her friend Fredrik Ericsson plunged to his death. “I heard a loud scream, and then he was gone,” she writes in “Mountains in My Heart,” her 2014 memoir. Heartbroken, she turned back — only to return to K2 a year later, this time making it to the top.
Now living in the Black Forest in Germany, and divorced (“We’re still good friends, but on the mountains, we had very intense moments”), Kaltenbrunner is still climbing; though the peaks are smaller, she says they’re still beautiful.
“If you have the mountains in your heart, you’ll never hang up your crampons,” she says, laughing. “I still have other places I’d like to go.”
Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner will speak Feb. 23 at 7:30 p.m. at NYU’s Skirball Center, 566 LaGuardia Place.