Amherst exchange student among the last on K2

By Mary Carey
Staff Writer

Published on August 22, 2008

If he wasn't outdoors willfully braving the elements, Norwegian adventurer Rolf Bae was kicking back, wearing a bandana and playing the guitar for his friends in Amherst.

At least that's the way David Kroodsma remembers Bae, who spent a year in Amherst as an American Field Service exchange student in 1992-93, living with the Kroodsma family when David was in eighth grade.

Bae, 33, died earlier this month in an avalanche trying to reach the summit of Pakistan's K2 - the second highest mountain on the planet but a more difficult climb than Mount Everest - in one of the worst disasters in mountaineering history.

In all, 11 climbers from Korea, Pakistan, Nepal, France, Norway, Serbia and Ireland were lost, the most recent deaths on the mountain. Thirteen climbers died on K2 in a two-week period in 1986.

The summit is reachable for only a few days in August, and it is necessary to climb under a glacier en route. Bae, who was leading one of several expeditions attempting the climb, was swept away when an ice mass broke. His wife, Cecilie Skog, a fellow mountaineer and author of a book about their adventures, "The Three Poles," reportedly saw him being carried away in the avalanche.

Bae returned to Amherst in 1997 to participate in an eight-week Arctic expedition in a canoe, led by James Abel, a doctor and adventurer, who had met Bae during his first visit to Amherst. Bae had joined the Norwegian Navy Seals in the intervening years and become "a very funny, outgoing, young man who (was) tough as nails, wild as the March Hare and proved to be one of the most quick-learning, gifted athletes I have ever encountered," Abel said in an email.

The Kroodsmas had kept in touch with Bae after he returned to Norway, visiting him in 2006, when David's parents, Melissa and Donald, and their granddaughter, Fort River Elementary sixth-grader Amanda Riley, joined him on a hike there.

Melissa remembered Bae, when he was still in high school, telling people he wanted to make a living as an outdoor living instructor.

"And he did. He did reach his goal that he had in the back of his mind," she said.

The family followed his exploits over the years, which included skiing across Antarctica and Greenland and to the South Pole twice and walking to the North Pole.

David Kroodsma has since become an adventurer himself, biking from California to Argentina, and Bae was an inspiration, he said.

He remembered the fun-loving Norwegian being part of the Survival Living class at Amherst Regional High School, which challenges students to go into the woods with nothing but a matchbox full of equipment, Kroodsma said. "Rolf went out and buried the matchbox. He didn't even bring it with him."

Melissa Kroodsma saved the piece of paper on which Bae wrote what he had liked about the class.

"That I could start fire with a bow and drill ... that I am staring to learn and understand this feeling stuff," he wrote. His classmates added that he "made people safe," had a "warm smile and heart that touches all the lives around" him and had "99.9 percent of the school in love" with him.

In the college application essay that helped win David Kroodsma admission to Stanford, he wrote, "Rolf entered my home with an unparalleled love for life and the outdoors. ... At the time, I was an introverted eighth-grader trapped in the bowels of junior high, plagued by a non-existent social life and immersed in my studies. Rolf showed me the importance of closing one's books, getting outside, and living life."

Mary Carey can be reached at mary.carey@att.net.