Mount Everest Diaries

From The Top of the World to the Top of the World

In March of 2009 I will be going to Nepal to fulfill a long dream to experience a 15-day trek through the stunning Himalaya foothills to the Mount Everest base camp. This is part 1 of my journal, and the full journal will be maintained at http://www.arctic-photo.com/everest

The moment for me – as it was for many people – was when I read Jon Krakeur’s Into Thin Air, the now famous account of the 1996 Everest tragedy in which eight members of the two teams that Krakeur climbed with (and a total of 15 people) died trying to climb the most well-known mountain in the world.

Now for most safety-loving, suburb-living, “normal” people this moment would translate into the moment in which I declare all climbers as crazy death-loving fools, and go about their lives without a second thought to Everest, or to climbing. For me, though, it had the opposite effect. I was enthralled.

I became enthralled with everything Everest and everything climbing-related. I devoured tales of harrowing experiences on razor thin Himalayan ridges and watched Joe Simpson’s Touching The Void (a recreation of his and Simon Yates epic, incredible, somewhat disastrous attempt on Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes) not once, not twice, but probably four or five times. My personal library now has dozens of climbing-related books (along with other non climbing-related adventure stories), each read with a sense of excitement and awe, each read cover-to-cover.

Although it seemed like the majority of the adventure stories that I read had some element of death and danger to them (would they be adventures otherwise?), it’s not the death and danger that ultimately drew me to them. Instead, I was enthralled with the notion that there are people in this world brave enough to shed the monotony of every day life, look all the people in the eye that said they couldn’t, and went to experience these places in the world that most people only read about, whether that be a scenic peak in the Canadian Rockies, the vast barren icy landscape of the North Pole, or the mountain which the local people call Chomolungma, “Goddess Mother of the World” (Mount Everest). This is what I wanted to do as well, someday, but content to live vicariously through the words of others until it was my time.

Fast forward to February of 2007, which is the month that I write this. My wife, Erin, who has long known about my ambitions to “someday” go to Mount Everest, or go for an extended hike through the Canadian Rockies, or to train to climb Mount Logan – although my “someday” was always in the future, free from commitment – turned to me as she was making a cup of tea and said, “Dave, you should go to Nepal. You should go to Mount Everest”.

Mount Everest. Nepal. The sounds of the words bounced through my brain quickly enveloped in images of the Himalaya, lush green foothills, Bhuddist temples, and Sherpa’s trekking up steep cliffs with oxygen tanks (Sherpas are the ethnic group found on the Nepalese side of Mount Everest, and are noted for their amazing strength and ability to live and work high in this mountainous region with oxygen levels far below those found at sea level).

What? I wasn’t quite sure I heard her correctly. Of course I should go to Nepal – to Everest – but I have said that for years, not really believing it myself.

“I’m serious. You should go. You need to go. Let’s look at what it would take…”

With that sentence it became somewhat a possibility, and has since become real. After some internet research in which I have determined the optimal time to go for what I want to see (Spring), a respected and reasonably priced guiding company (GAP Adventures), and hundreds of web pages describing and displaying the over-powering beauty of this region of the world, I am booked to go to Nepal and to Everest Base Camp (I’m not insane enough to think that I’m anywhere close to being able to climb the thing, not to mention put my family through that risk) in March of 2009.

 I am going. I am going to Mount Everest.