Tag: Mountain Climbing

If I’d Been a Career 8000-meter Peak Mountain Climber, I’d probably be Dead by Now

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn mountains

I started reading accounts of mountain ascents and attempted ascents when I was in junior high because my father, who climbed mountains in college as I did later, had most of the classic accounts. My target peak was K2, the second-highest mountain in the world, and considered more difficult than Everest. The fatality rate on that peak is about 25%.

In fact, like the successful American climber Ed Viesturs, I wanted to summit all fourteen of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks without supplemental oxygen. There have been many bad years on these mountains in the Himalayas and Karakoram ranges, so why go there?

I have no answer, really, because I never made it to any summits higher than Colorado’s 14,0000-foot peaks, some of which my father climbed years before.

I did have an opportunity to trek in to the Base Camp at Everest, but the money fell thought at the last minute.

You have to push yourself on these climbs and know when to trust your instincts when everything about the mountain is against you, especially above the so-called “Death Zone” at 26,000 feet, above which the atmosphere isn’t conducive to long-term survival.

Perhaps pushing oneself is the rationale behind climbing. It was for me because truth be told, one doesn’t have a lot of time for the view. It amazes me, though, how the dreams of a high school student can be just as vital now as they were then. Do you have dreams like that? Things you wanted to do and mourn not doing?

Malcolm

One of the perks of being a writer

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn writing5 Comments

Most of us enjoy the world of our imagination even though many of our fantasies will forever be stamped CLASSIFIED.

As a writer, though, my job is spending large amounts of time with my imagination without having to admit to garden-variety daydreaming.

For example, I gave David Ward, my protagonist in Garden of Heaven some of my best and worst qualities. While people who really know me may debate which are which, those qualities include dreams I never fulfilled.

When I was younger, I wanted to work for the railroad, specifically the Great Northern, now a part of the Burlington Northern Sante Fe. The railroad was never hiring when I was looking. David Ward also wanted to work for the Great Northern. While it was not to be, he did get a chance to run a passenger locomotive for a few miles on the high line tracks east of Glacier National Park.

(Oddly enough, my wife and I were volunteers at a railway museum in the 1990s, and she turned out to be much better at running locomotives than I was, from a 44-ton yard goat to a mainline freight engine. Sigh.)

People who see my bad knees and ankles now can’t imagine that I used to climb mountains in Colorado and Montana, and (worse yet) that I actively wanted to climb Everest or K2. Unfortunately, such things were outside my budget.

But David Ward wasn’t cramped by his budget. So, I sent him off to climb K2, and (worse yet) to summit via the dangerous “magic line” route before it was called the “magic line.”

Pretending to run a diesel locomotive on the head end of a passenger train and to climb the most difficult mountain of the world are parts of my fantasy world. One of the perks of being a writer is using one’s active imagination and following through with such dreams in, perhaps, another reality or universe.