No Magic Helicopter
An Aging Amazon's Climb of Everest
by
Carol Masheter
Copyright 2011 Carol Masheter,
All rights reserved.
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0086-0
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
This book is dedicated to all those who face challenges, both welcome and unwelcome.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for encouragement and generosity from many people. Without their help my climb of Everest or this book would not have been possible.
I thank my sister, Linda, for her patience with my crazy adventures. Long climbs on big mountains can be hard on those we love. Linda, I appreciate your tolerance. I also thank my late parents, my first and best teachers. They set high standards and expected me to meet them, for which I am grateful.
At the Utah Department of Health, where I work, David Sundwall, M.D., Keely Cofrin Allen, Ph.D., and Wu Xu, Ph.D., believed in my dream to climb Everest as much as I did. My other colleagues graciously continued our work during my absence. I appreciate their generous support.
Professional mountaineering guides, Javier Herrera and Ben Marshall, encouraged me to try Everest. Brian Cox, Mark Johnson, Mike Hamill, Calvin Hebert, and Alasdair Turner, helped me gain the necessary high-altitude experience and the skills. Thanks, guys.
I could not have climbed Everest without the guidance and support of our guides, climbing Sherpas, and Base Camp staff. The director of Adventure Consultants, Guy Cotter; the expedition leader, Mike Roberts; and guides, Lydia Bradey, Victor Saunders, and Ang Dorje Sherpa, were willing to take a chance on me, an amateur woman mountaineer in her 60s. Base Camp Sirdar (Sherpa leader), Ang Tsering Sherpa; Head Chef, Chhongba Sherpa; and Base Camp Managers, Laurel Morrison and Suze Kelly, transformed a stark maze of rock and ice into a home away from home.
The Adventure Consultants Sherpas have my undying respect and appreciation. They have a quiet strength, patience, and humility I try to emulate and often fail to attain. Thank you, Tendi Bai (younger brother) and Nima Bai, for doing your best to keep me safe under difficult circumstances. Many others quietly and capably provided invaluable support. They include Lhakpa Dorje Sherpa, Phu Tashi Sherpa, Dawa Zangbu Sherpa, Sangay Dorje Sherpa, Ang Sona Sherpa, Temba Sherpa, Pemba Choti Sherpa, Namgyal Sherpa, Passang Bhote #1 and Passang Bhote #2, and Zangbu Sherpa as well as our Base Camp Sherpa staff, Camp 2 staff, yak men, and porters. Namaste and thank you.
Several people started me on this path, though perhaps they, like me, never imagined it would include climbing Everest. Steve Coulter, Walt Haas, Steve Walker, and Kyle Williams, taught me basic mountaineering skills in the Wasatch Mountains near Salt Lake, Utah. Bill Thompson gave me solid advice about gaining the necessary skills and high altitude mountaineering experience. Scott Carson and his colleagues at International Mountain Equipment (IME) in Salt Lake have encouraged me, a woman who started climbing late in life, for nearly two decades.
Dozens of friends from work, my yoga community, the Wasatch Mountain Club, and my meditation sangha (community) followed Internet dispatches and emails about my adventure. No doubt their prayers and good thoughts helped keep me safe.
Several friends gave me a hero’s farewell, even after my climb seemed over before it began. Their enthusiasm and optimism helped me overcome discouragement as my dream appeared to be unraveling. I will never forget that farewell dinner or their over-the-top welcome home.
Several people encouraged me to write this book. Thank you, Cyndi Bemis, Douglas M. Brown, Jamie Martell, and Mike Martin, for your encouragement and feedback. Thank you, Mark Gaskill and Bruce Tremper, for suggestions about publishing.
“Avoiding danger is no safer than outright exposure. Life is a daring adventure or nothing at all.”
Helen Keller
Why Do Climbers Climb?
June 3, 2009. Bad weather had trapped us midway up the mountain for 11 days. Then a welcome break came between storms, and we had eagerly climbed the rugged ridge of rock, snow, and ice up to the highest camp. We needed one more good day to climb the last 3,000 vertical feet to the summit. Another storm of driving snow and high winds rolled in with a vengeance. Time had run out. It was time to descend and start a chain of plane flights home. Feeling sick with disappointment, I huddled in my tent and stuffed my down sleeping bag into its compression sack.
Tears filled my eyes and splashed onto my gloves, as I packed my gear. I felt silly about crying over a mountain, but hauling enough food, fuel, and equipment up the highest peak in North America had been very hard. If I wanted to summit Denali, I would need to return next year, after another season of hard training. I was not sure I had it in me. Then I remembered crying about another mountain for very different reasons. That mountain was Everest.
This is my story about the climb of my life. It describes what led me to try Mount Everest as an amateur woman mountaineer in my 60s, how I prepared, and what the climb was like for me. My account is subject to possible distortions of memory due to demands the climb made on me physically and emotionally. Others who were on Everest in the spring of 2008 may remember events differently.
Some climbers have written eloquently about their own Everest experience, the history of climbing Everest, the beauty of the Khumbu region where Everest is located, and the remarkable Sherpa people, without whose strength and skill most Westerners would have little chance of summiting the world’s highest mountain. I strongly recommend that readers read their books as well as mine.
I was an unlikely Everest climber. A woman in her early 60s, I was not very impressive looking -- five feet six inches tall and weighing about 135 lbs. I took medication for anxiety, depression, irritable bowel, and hypothyroidism. I was afraid of heights. Why would someone like me even consider climbing Everest, the highest mountain in the world?
There are probably as many reasons to climb Everest as there are climbers. My own climb was neither a lifelong dream nor a whim. My climb evolved from a life-long drive to do something outstanding and my fascination with big mountains. Perhaps I wanted to leave some record of my time on earth. Perhaps, as one Nobel Prize laureate put it, I was looking for love.
My earliest memory of wanting to do something outstanding was a childhood daydream while in the hospital. In the summer of 1953, when I was almost 7, my mother, younger sister, Linda, and I flew from our home in Southern California to Kansas for my grandfather’s funeral. My father stayed home, as he had limited vacation time from his job as an engineer. While we were in Kansas, my sister and I became ill. A local doctor in the small farm town of Pratt, near the even tinier town of Isabel where my grandmother lived, suspected we had polio and sent us on a tense midnight drive to Wichita for a formal diagnosis. There, I was terrified of the huge syringe used to perform the spinal tap. I fought like a wild cat, while a burly nurse tried to hold me still.
When the spinal tap confirmed that we both had polio, Linda and I were immediately sent to a polio isolation ward. It was hot and humid. The hospital had no air conditioning. We wore only cotton underpants and lay sweating on top of our sheets. The treatment for polio of the time seemed like torture. The intravenous horse serum made me vomit, until I was delirious. The steaming hot blankets blistered my skin, when nurses wrapped them around my naked arms, legs, and torso. Between torture sessions, nurses told me I was not allowed to sit up or get out of bed, or I would be paralyzed for life. Lying flat on my back 24/7, I daydreamed of doing something heroic when I got out of the hospital,