Erhard Loretan, who was killed on April 28, his 52nd birthday, while climbing in Switzerland, was one of the few people to reach the summits of the world’s 14 highest mountains.
He was only the third mountaineer in history to scale the 14 Himalayan peaks above 8,000 metres (26,240ft), which include Mount Everest, Annapurna and K2. The feat took him 14 years, and he completed his quest in 1995.
With his fellow Swiss climber Jean Troillet, Loretan — then 27 — conquered Everest, the world’s highest mountain, in 1986, making a revolutionary single-push ascent in a record 40 hours, climbing at night and without using extra bottled oxygen.
Equipped with neither tent nor sleeping bags, Loretan and Troillet snatched a clear-weather window towards the end of the monsoon for a lightning dash up and down the mountain. The pair took one of the most direct routes, climbing the north face, via the Japanese couloir at its foot and the Hornbein couloir at the top; as if to mock the mountain, they then slid down to their base camp on their bottoms. Their achievement stunned the climbing world, making headlines around the globe.
“We didn’t intend to climb Everest in two days, we just set off and we were fortunate to do it in two days,” Loretan recalled. “I think that we were young, in love with climbing. When you’re in love you’ll do anything, it wasn’t sacrifice, it was all normal. We didn’t think we were doing incredible things, it just all seemed normal.”
Since Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa guide Tenzing Norgay first made it to the summit of Everest in 1953, nearly 2,700 climbers have followed suit; relatively inexperienced mountaineers can pay up to $70,000 to be guided to the top, using fixed lines for part of the way.
Comparing Loretan’s achievement with that of guided climbers, Hillary’s son, Peter, used a skyscraper analogy: “Loretan climbed the outside skin of the building,” he pointed out, “following grooves in the concrete and glass; the guided climbers took the elevator.”
Along with his Everest ascent, Loretan’s most impressive accomplishments included the traverse of the Annapurna range in 1984; the ascent of the difficult south-west face of Cho Oyu, in 27 hours, in 1990; and, a few days later, the ascent and descent of the south face of Shishapangma’s central peak in 22 hours. In the winter of 1989, with André Georges, Loretan climbed 13 north faces between the Eiger and Doldenhorn in the Bernese Oberland in only 13 days.
In 1994 Loretan made a solo climb of the highest peak in Antarctica — hitherto unnamed, it was christened Mount Loretan in his honour by climbing enthusiasts. Loretan repeated the feat the following year.
On his home ground, Loretan once claimed 38 peaks in the Swiss Alps in 19 days. His passion was for climbing difficult routes in extreme altitudes in Alpine style, very fast and with only a minimum of equipment and food and without oxygen or high-altitude porters.
Erhard Loretan was born on April 28 1959 at Bulle in the Swiss canton of Fribourg, and started climbing at the age of 11. Two years later he scaled his first north face, and in subsequent years he was seen, often alone, on extremely difficult routes in the Bernese Oberland, the Valais, the Mont Blanc massif and the Dolomites.
By 1979, when he was 20, he was earning his living as a cabinet-maker; but the mountains continued to draw him, and he made his first expedition to the Andes in 1980, qualifying as a mountain guide the following year.
In 1982 he achieved his first 8,000-metre conquest when he reached the summit of Nanga Parbat, at 26,660ft the world’s ninth highest mountain. Over the next 13 years Loretan conquered the other 13 of the highest peaks; in the process, his famous night-time push to the summit of Everest in 1986 cemented his reputation as one of the world’s finest mountaineers . He climbed the last of them, Kanchenjunga, in 1995, becoming, at the age of 36, one of the few to have conquered all 14.
He was only the third person, behind the Italian Reinhold Messner and the Polish mountaineer Jerry Kukuczka, to achieve this. Last year the Spanish climber Edurne Pasaban became the first woman to pull off the same feat.
In 2003, however, Loretan received a four-month suspended prison sentence after pleading guilty to the negligent manslaughter of his seven-month-old son. He told police that he had shaken the little boy for “a couple of seconds” to stop him crying; and that when he put the child to bed, the crying stopped. He had later summoned an ambulance.
The notoriety of the Loretan case led to new research which showed that many parents are unaware that infants can die from being shaken for only a few seconds, because of weak neck muscles.
As a climber, Loretan possessed remarkable mental strength and the skill realistically to assess critical situations. Often, in tricky or adverse circumstances, he would turn back just in time, even when within sight of the summit. He valued his personal freedom, largely ignored the media, and remained relaxed about the expectations of his sponsors.
Last year Loretan, who cut a somewhat solitary figure, reflected on his triumphs as a mountaineer, saying that his passion had afforded him “an extraordinary life”. “I’d like to thank the mountains, for almost 40 years they have allowed me to climb,” he added.
According to police in the Swiss canton of Valais, Loretan died when he was leading a client up the summit ridge of the Grünhorn, in the Bernese Alps. The pair had made part of the climb on skis, then roped up for the final ascent.
For reasons that are not yet clear, they fell at 3,800 metres (12,500ft) up the 4,043-metre (13,264ft) mountain. Loretan died at the scene. His 38-year-old Swiss companion was flown to a hospital in a serious condition.
Erhard Loretan was awarded the King Albert Medal of Merit in 1996 for his distinguished contribution to mountaineering.
The Telegraph 
