VERTIGO – Part 6 – The Mountaineers (cont)

I became fascinated with Everest, itself.  Rob brought home an old National Geographic he found in the church basement about Sir Edmund Hillary’s and Tenzing Norgay’s first expedition to summit Everest.  (May 29, 1953 in case you’re interested).   I spent hours studying maps of Mount Everest and carefully traced all of the routes to the summit. I even printed maps from the internet and studied them, too. I knew all fifteen routes to the top.

I dreamed about trekking to Everest base camp from Namche Bazaar in Nepal.  I printed out pictures and in my imagination crossed the gigantic crevasses of the Khumbu icefall. I meditated on the glorious Western Cwm, as I glided through this wondrous valley of glittering snow and ice. I climbed the Hillary Step and the Lhotse Face.  I pretended that I was walking across The Balcony (where poor Beck Weathers spent a whole day waiting for Hall) and the sun was shining and the snow was glittering.  And I felt healthy and strong. I knew the spiritual delight of standing on the top of the world. 

I stared at the forlorn camps on the South Col where they weathered a horrible, horrible storm and it was deafeningly loud and the tents collapsed on their faces.  (How scary!). I felt the cold and listened to the wind of the high camps on the south summit.  I read the part over and over when they couldn’t find the camp and were trapped in “the huddle”, waiting out the dark, stormy night, thinking they would probably die. I read about the brave rescues.  How I admired them.  So many of them survived!  Extraordinary!

I learned the lingo, understanding what it meant to “fix the ropes”, to “move under your own power”, to “short rope”, and of course, to “summit” (a verb). I knew what “jumars” and crampons looked like and how to properly set an ice axe in the snow.  I was spooked about the “death zone”, (over 25,000 feet), crevasses, the roar of avalanches, and “seracs” (apartment size blocks of ice) in the icefalls.

I respected that small group of elite climbers, braving the mountains over “8,000 meters”.  I knew what it meant to “bivouac”, (basically spend the night hanging off a cliff.)  I knew about altitude sickness, frostbite, “hypoxia” and “cerebral” and “pulmonary edema”.  I knew about “acclimatizing” and “carrying loads” from camp to camp.  I knew the optimal “turnaround times” and ideal conditions for the “summit push”.

I liked that sense of stripping away everything in my world except for that feeling of the physical push and the mindlessness of the focus of stepping right in front of you, step after step. That was so peaceful. .

– Beck Weathers, pathologist from Dallas, summited six of the seven continents' highest peaks.

I meditated on the metaphor of being stripped away and plodding forward.  I became peaceful, too.  I just need to put one foot in front of the other.  I can do that.  God in me can do that.