Brave words before Everest adventure

 

It's time for another bucket list adventure and who cares about elections? There are more important things in life like completing your bucket list, and by the time you read this, I should be doing just that in exotic Nepal, home to eight of the highest mountains in the world, including the highest of them all – Mount Everest.

No, I'm not climbing the 29,035 ft. peak (you don't insult Everest by measuring it in meters) but I hope to trek into the base of the mountain the Tibetans call “Chomolugma,” Goddess Mother of the World and was first put on the map in 1865 by Andrew Waugh of the Royal Geographical Society and named for Sir George Everest, the former chief of the famed society.

Being raised in the mountains of the Kootenays, I have thought, read and dreamed about Everest all my life and can even remember the breathtaking announcement on the radio May 29, 1953 when New Zealand beekeeper Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay summited the highest prominence on earth. What an exciting day! For many of us, it even outshone the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth which happened less than a month later. My God, I'm getting old!

Years later, and I mean years, the first words that Hillary uttered when he returned to base camp were reported – “we knocked the bastard off.” Spoken like a man and considering all the lives (more than 300) lost on Everest before and since Hillary and Norgay's dramatic first ascent, a little cussing is more than understandable.

Then, of course, there's the other name most often associated with Everest, the man that in response to a New York reporter uttered the most famous phrase in the history of mountaineering – “because it's there.”

Most people today think Hillary spoke the immortal words. Well, he didn't. It was George Leigh Mallory in 1923 in response to a New York Times reporter and many others who kept asking the why question. Mallory apparently was incredulous (and a little irritated) that such a question would even be asked, considering the glory of achieving the first ascent of Everest. Less than a year later Mallory, and his climbing partner Andrew “Sandy” Irvine, were dead after succumbing to Everest's cruel slopes less than 2,000 feet from the top though to this day some believe the pair may have made it. Most regard it as highly unlikely but if you want to stir up a passionate mountaineering debate just say you think Mallory and Irvine made it. It's one of the most controversial issues in mountain climbing lore.

As for yours truly, all I'm hoping to do is to get to Everest base camp at 17,500 ft, almost twice as high as Mt. Fisher, and if I'm lucky and can handle the altitude, I may make it to the top of Kala Patthar, which means “black rock” in Nepali and which provides a breathtaking, unobstructed view of Everest and the great peaks surrounding it, Lhoste, Nuptse, Ama Dablam and others. You actually can't see Everest from base camp because it's too close. So if I make it to the top of Kala Patthar, about 800 feet above base camp, and get to see the Great Panoramic View of Everest and the others, I'm not ashamed to say I'll probably cry.

I've waited for this all my life.

The rest of the trip should be fascinating as well. I'll be spending about a week in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, and one of the most interesting and exotic capital cities in the world in its own right. Two of the world's great religions meet in Kathmandu – Buddhism and Hinduism – and the city is chock-a-block full of temples, shrines and monasteries as well as some of the most intriguing and colorful tourist attractions to be seen anywhere in the Third World. But I've also been warned that Kathmandu also contains some of the worst poverty and pollution that you'll experience abroad and only recently emerged from a civil war.

I plan on visiting an orphanage while I'm there and immersing myself in a culture that is as different as the moon from what we know here. This should be a hell of an experience and one that I look forward to reporting on while I'm there (if the Internet works properly) and when I get home.

And when I get back from Kathmandu and Everest's shadow, I'm sure home will never seem quite the same.

– 30 –