Peak performance
Area native fulfilled a childhood dream by climbing Mount EverestBy John Hartsock, jhartsock@altoonamirror.com
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Some kids dream of becoming president of the United States.
Others have visions of becoming movie stars, playing in a World Series or participating in a Super Bowl.
Growing up in Altoona in the 1970s and early 1980s, Dale Wagner had his own special dream - to climb to the famed summit of Mount Everest that borders the countries of Nepal and Tibet (China).
Wagner, 43, who is employed as an associate professor of exercise science at Utah State University in Logan, Utah, achieved his childhood goal May 19, completing an adventure that spanned nearly two months.
"For me, it was a childhood dream, and how many people can say they've reached a childhood dream?'' Wagner said. "It was a big relief to get to the top.''
Wagner was among a team of six climbers from around the world - along with two guide climbers from Nepal known as Sherpas - who reached the top of Everest at 29,029 feet above sea level on what climbers refer to as summit day.
"I was really exhausted,'' Wagner said of reaching the Everest summit, which is the highest point on Earth. "I had almost tunnel vision in terms of focus.''
The crew, which ascended the mountain from the Nepal side, operated from several camps at various altitudes on Mount Everest after trekking and walking to get to their base camp - their focal point of day-to-day activities - in early April.
Wagner and his crew members - who included fellow Americans Vik Sahney and Jason Maelh, Australian Richard Pattison, Finland's Sam Mansikka and David Fairweather from the United Kingdom - had never climbed a mountain together before Everest. A Seattle company organized the expedition for the group and obtained the necessary permit for the team to embark on the challenge.
"Camp 4 on Mount Everest is a little over 26,000 feet above sea level,'' Wagner said. "To get from Camp 4 to the summit and back down to Camp 4 took us almost 20 hours. We had some delays here and there.''
Everybody but Maelh reached the summit of Mount Everest. He was forced to turn back at the 27,000-foot mark of the mountain with a bad cough caused by potential pulmonary edema.
"You don't just go straight up the mountain,'' Wagner said. "When you're at 29,000 feet, it's like you're in a jet. If you just showed up at 29,000 feet, you'd either be dead or pass out and die shortly thereafter.''
The sense of exhilaration that accompanies the completion of such an adventure is second to none, according to Sahney, who lives in Michigan.
"Completing something that I had slowly worked up to over the past seven years was incredibly rewarding and fulfilling,'' he said.
"I felt that I had earned the right to stand up there on top of the world, if only briefly.''
To be sure, embarking on an adventure like scaling Mount Everest is rife with risks that could result in death or serious impairment. Six people have died while attempting to scale Everest this year alone.
Along with pulmonary edema (bleeding in the heart), the other primary health problems that can be incurred from climbing such heights are cerebral edema (bleeding in the brain), as well as swelling in the lungs.
"If you don't take care of things like that quickly, they can become deadly conditions,'' Wagner said. "It's ideal to have a doctor on your crew. We didn't, but we had an emergency room nurse at our base camp to help our crew, and we had all kinds of appropriate medication in a team medical kit.''
There are also plenty of physical dangers imposed by the ice-covered mountain itself.
"An avalanche killed a climber [from another group] when we were there, and you also face hazards from falling,'' Wagner added. "It's like climbing a big glacier. We used ladders, and I fell on a ladder, and basically nothing happened to me because I was able to pace my fall. But if you fall the wrong way, you could fall several hundred feet into a crevasse [a deep, canyon-like opening or fissure in the earth and ice] and possibly die.
"You could also make it to the top and die on the descent,'' Wagner pointed out. "There are a lot of ways to die on Mount Everest.''
Sahney said that confronting one's own mortality creates a sobering environment on the mountain.
"The climb was an incredible experience,'' he said. "On the climb itself, you must come to grips with your own mortality in the face of great danger and the low probability of success. It is [both] a humbling and rewarding experience.''
In his best-selling book, "Into Thin Air,'' Jon Krakauer described the ordeal of his May 1996 expedition on Everest in which a storm on the mountain claimed several members of his climbing crew.
"I'd always known, in the abstract, that climbing mountains was a dangerous pursuit,'' Krakauer wrote. "But until I climbed [Everest that] spring, I'd never seen death at such close range. And there was so much of it. Eleven men and women lost their lives on Everest in May 1996, a tie with 1982 for the worst single-season death toll in the peak's history.''
Krakauer successfully reached the summit of Mount Everest that year, but that accomplishment did nothing to assuage his sense of survivor's guilt.
"Of the six people on my team who reached the summit, four are now dead,'' he wrote. "[Those were] people with whom I'd laughed and vomited, and held long, intimate conversations. The stain this has left on my psyche is not the sort of thing that washes off after a month of two of grief and guilt-ridden self-reproach.''
Despite its deadly drawbacks, or perhaps even because of them, Everest offers a unique sense of appeal and challenge for seasoned climbers like Wagner and his crew.
"Everybody on our team had climbed some substantial peaks,'' Wagner said. "I climbed the Aconcagua Mountain in Argentina, which is just below 23,000 feet above sea level, and I did Mount Kilimanjaro - which is actually a volcano in Africa that's like 19,300 feet - back in 1999. I've done a lot of peaks in countries like South America, Bolivia, Equador, Peru, Argentina, and quite a few have been over 20,000 feet.''
Proper equipment is essential for such climbs. Included in that equipment is cold-weather gear such as a down suit, special boots and gloves, ski goggles and a cloak-like garment known as a baclava to cover the head and neck.
Wagner and the other climbers on his crew used oxygen bottles, oxygen regulators and an oxygen mask for the purpose of covering their noses and mouths at higher elevations. But all the oxygen equipment available to mankind only serves to take a little of the edge off what is a very taxing, arduous and frigid climb.
"Everest is a polar environment,'' Wagner said. "A lot of people consider Everest to be the third pole, like the North and South pole. The human body isn't supposed to be at that altitude for very long.''
Which means that even reaching the summit doesn't afford a climber much time to stop and smell the proverbial roses.
"You try to get up and down as quickly as you can,'' Wagner said.
Climbing Mount Everest is probably a one-shot deal for Wagner, who pointed out that the attempt involved considerable time and financial expense, as well as the physical risk.
"It's definitely not for everybody,'' he said. "Some people see it being done on the Discovery Channel, and they think that they can just go out and climb Mount Everest. But if you don't have previous experience climbing mountains, [climbing Everest] is like getting into a boxing ring with Mike Tyson. It's not going to come out good for you.''
