CHAPTER ONE

Dream Management

“You are led through your lifetime by the inner learning creature, the playful spirited being that is your real self. Don’t turn away from possible futures before you’re certain you don’t have anything to learn from them.”

—Richard Bach

Mt. Everest Base Camp, May 2007, 17,300 feet. Painful indecision. Sleepless days and nights. Violent hacking cough. Lungs and throat raw meat. Fear of what was to come. Fear of the route above Camp Three. Fear of the catwalk between the South Summit and the Hillary Step. No energy to face down the fear.

Have I done my best? I should have trained more intelligently. Is my mind in the way? Am I talking my way out of a summit bid, or are my fears warranted? There’s discord on the team. I am sick. I shouldn’t go on, but this is Everest. Maybe I should just come back next year. What about my sponsors? What will they think about failure? Will they support another attempt? Were Tuck and Jangbu politely telling me to stop the attempt? Maybe I am just not cut out for Everest.

I was alone in my tent. Most of my teammates, including Al, my climbing partner, were on their own summit attempt. I was lonely. I missed my son Kurt. If I were with him, he would have called me a tool for thinking that way, and he would have been right.

After all, there is no failure on “The Big E” (other than death, that is). To try to heal my finicky lung tissue, I decided to go lower, to thicker air. I walked “down valley” with a hacking, tissue-ripping cough to Pheriche (14,000 feet), where I met up with teammates Nat, Ryan and the two barrister Brits at the Himalayan Hotel under the smiling, always gracious, proprietorship of Ang Nuru Sherpa.

When the temperature dropped below freezing at 5 PM, Nuru’s young Sherpa helpers lit the yak dung firebox and the climbers and trekkers filed in, speaking Russian, Czech, French, Romanian, English and Nepali. By then, we were all ravenous for a dinner of mo-mos (thin pasta covering cheese or meat) and vegetable picadas (a deep-fried, bite-sized entrée that came with a ketchup-like dipping sauce). What a place to relax, with funky reading material donated by decades of international trekkers (who got fifty percent off the room rate of two hundred rupees—or about five bucks American—for donating a book) and the finest milky sweet tea. The Himalaya was just what I needed. I could rest, eat and read all day, then write out a dispatch to send on hand-held computer and satellite phone each night to the thousand or so people in the States following my blog.

After a few days, when my buddies left for Base Camp and the summit, I was still not healed. In fact, I kept others up at night in the thin-walled rooms with my relentless, rib-rattling “Khumbu cough,” caused by many weeks of forcefully sucking in thin, dry, frigid air nearly devoid of oxygen.

Each night I resorted to swallowing codeine pills, which I had broken up into quarters, to manage the violent hacking. I loathed taking the drug, as it depresses respiration; hardly a happy thought when, even at Base Camp, there is one-half the oxygen available at sea level. At this altitude, the simple act of tying your shoelaces is exertion enough to cause one to pant like a hyperactive foo-foo dog. But I couldn’t sleep a wink without the codeine, and I was conscious of people around me getting ticked off from lost sleep.

I called Tuck and Jangbu, the International Mountain Guides (IMG) management team at Everest Base Camp, and informed them of my intention to go even lower down valley, all the way to Deboche at 12,500 feet. Lower altitude meant more oxygen, which meant more pulmonary healing, which meant a shot at the summit, my ultimate goal.

I learned from Amy, a climbing guide with Alpine Ascents, of the Ama Dablam View Inn, a relatively clean teahouse with good (safe) food and a blue metal roof. Such recommendations were vital in the Khumbu Valley of Nepal, because Western hygienic food prep can be difficult to find in the teahouses. One speck of spoiled yak cheese can result in the kinds of gastrointestinal disasters that have hamstrung many a summit attempt in the Third World.

Each step of my solitary hike became progressively more exhausting. I felt no energy or elation with the increased oxygen concentrations. I felt trashed, physically and psychologically, as I made my way for hours down valley into an increasingly green, lush world of flowering rhododendrons. The views were heaven on earth, but I hardly noticed them because of the battle raging in my head over the fear of what was to come. Hiking alone gave me time—too much time—to think about what I had undertaken.

I had read about Everest since I was a kid. I had thought about, planned, and devoted much of the previous four years preparing for this expedition. I was on a mission. A selfish mission, some might say. After all, I had spent a terrific amount of money, time and energy on myself. Add to that the undeniable possibility of death, and to some this mission probably seemed absurd.

As I walked down the narrow nine-hundred-year-old path, I realized my sense of mission had become dulled, clouded by my hacking cough and my exhaustion, but most of all by my overriding sense of fear. For several days since becoming ill at Base Camp, and as I trudged down the dusty path, I felt Everest looming over me like a giant avalanche about to bury me in its depths. I could not, for the life of me, visualize myself standing on the summit of Everest. There I was, trying to go to a lower elevation to rest and get healthy so I could go to the highest of elevations, but when I thought of going up, I just couldn’t “see” myself succeeding. I had lost my mountain mojo.

I came to a small village and almost immediately saw the roof and sign. Can this be it? It certainly didn’t seem very prosperous, but I trusted Amy, who assured me she had stayed there on each of her many Everest expeditions.

As soon as I hesitated a moment in the stone veranda in front of the two-story ramshackle teahouse, a young Sherpa woman with baby-in-backpack handed me a cup of steaming milk tea as I off-loaded my yellow Wild Things pack stuffed with my forty-below-zero down sleeping bag, toiletries, snacks and clothes. OK, I thought, this had better be it.

She showed me to a room on the first floor that had no furniture except a wooden sleeping platform with an ornate woolen rug on top for insulation and padding. The walls, made of quarter-inch paneling, displayed gaudy plastic Asian pictures, the Nepali equivalent of Elvis on velvet.

Windows in the upstairs glassed-in dining area revealed quaint, pastoral views of a mist-covered valley, a spitting image of Tolkien’s Shire. Farmers with hand tools tilled the brown, dusty fields, which filled every tiny patch of earth available. Letting my gaze rise higher, I saw great glacier-laden ramparts clinging to the twenty-thousand-foot hills beyond the village. I couldn’t make out the namesake mountain, Ama Dablam, clouded as it was with fog and coming rain.

I ordered up some food and it hit me that I was the only guest. I got an immediate pit in my stomach and wondered once again if I was making a huge mistake. The innkeepers were devoutly Buddhist based on all the visible paraphernalia: incense burners, rattles and ceremonial copper bowls of all shapes and sizes. The ubiquitous old climbing expedition posters and advertising stickers also abounded. The Sherpani told me that her husband, like all the men of age, was off on some mountain expedition, leaving the aged father and mother to run the house and help with the young baby. The old couple politely asked questions about where I was from and what I was climbing, even though we could each understand only ten percent of the conversation. They clucked apologetically when I told them that I was ill and hoped to improve enough to attempt Everest. Again, I wondered if I was in the right place and if I could trust the food. I ordered only heavily fried and cooked goodies.

My task from the expedition’s first day was to overeat as much as possible, because muscle tissue wastes at high altitude even when doing absolutely nothing. At Base Camp, you can lose weight just by sitting around, because your heart labors as if you were running nine-minute miles. I took a long, luxurious nap, got up, and ate more. I rationed lozenges and hard candy for my raw throat. Before leaving Pheriche, I had stopped at the HRA (Himalayan Rescue Association) for an exam of my fragile throat condition. The volunteer British doc couldn’t do much. Yet here at lower altitude, my cough seemed a bit better. I was still on the codeine, but needed less of it to get some rest. My plan just might work out.

I couldn’t get a radio connection to Base Camp and constantly fretted about the weather window. There are very few days a year, usually in late May, when the weather conditions are benign enough to attempt a summit of Everest. Climbers must be prepared in every way to take advantage of that opportunity. I decided to leave in the morning, having spent two nights with the Sherpa family at lower altitude.

At dinner, the baby crawled about the dining area, getting into trouble playing with the Buddhist objects, and I was struck by the similarities between kids all over the world. I read and wrote in my journal as the baby played at my feet. I would have enjoyed being there a heck of a lot more if I didn’t have so much fear and uncertainty on my mind. I slept fitfully that last night. My objective was to head back up, way up, to the top of the world seventeen thousand feet higher. I needed my body and mind to play nice together for the ordeal to come. They weren’t.

Jim, a fellow climber from our expedition, was a character who quit his high-tech marketing job to climb Cho Oyu, the world’s sixth highest peak, and Everest in the same year. He had accomplished the former the previous October. On Everest, he also got whacked with the Khumbu cough. He had hiked down valley before me, and one day we crossed paths on the dusty yak path just below Pheriche. He was heading up and I down. While we chatted in an increasingly biting wind and snow squall, he told me that to save energy he had hired a porter to carry his pack. Hmmmm, that’s an idea, I thought.

I asked the innkeeper if he could hook me up with a porter all the way back to Base Camp so I could save vital energy. We agreed on fifteen-hundred rupees (about twenty-five bucks) for a porter to Base, including a night in Lobuche. My bill for two nights and five meals was seventeen-hundred rupees, and the old innkeeper seemed surprised that I didn’t complain. He happily presented me with a suundi, a thin red cord blessed by a lama, or high priest, that is worn around the neck for good luck. For improved karma, you are supposed to leave the cord on until it rots off. It was my second suundi of the trip, the first being a gift from climbing partner Phinjo Sherpa (pronounced Pin-jo) when we first met at Namche Bazaar weeks earlier.

Sherpas are the ethnic group in the Khumbu Valley and Everest area; they originally migrated from Tibet three to four hundred years ago. They are highly regarded expedition team members and elite mountaineers. We mikaroos (non-Sherpas) would have little chance for success on Everest without their expertise. Sherpas are virtually all devoutly Buddhist, and also believe in numerous gods and demons who reside in the mountains, caves and forests. Tibetan Sherpas call Everest “Chomolungma” and Nepalese Sherpas refer to her as “Sagarmatha”; both mean “Goddess Mother of the World.”

The many Sherpas I had gotten to know over the years were without exception a fun, friendly bunch who sported brimming, wide smiles. The smiles come from the heart, and also showcased the whitest, most perfect teeth imaginable, attained mostly without a smidge of professional dental care.

The villages in Nepal, at least the ones on the way to Base Camp, had no signs that said “Entering Deboche.” I realized that I was mistaken and was in Pangboche (13,000 feet), rather than Deboche (12,500 feet) the whole time. Maybe there were multiple Ama Dablam View Inns with blue roofs. Whatever…it’s all good, I thought. I later learned that Pangboche was the oldest Sherpa village in Nepal.

I felt a bit smarmy and embarrassed when I met my porter, a Sherpani woman of similar age to the young mom at the inn. I was a healthy-looking American man, much bigger than she was, yet I was paying her to carry my pack? She was no doubt happy to make the money. I just hoped not to see many climbers along the way. She was wrapped in the traditional Nepalese dress of thick wool, dyed dark brown and ochre, together with the striped apron on front and back (signifying she was married), and wore Nike running shoes. She shouldered my pack along with her small personal bag as I said my goodbyes to the innkeeper family. As we started to hike, the terrain was only moderately steep, but my respiration rate was red-lined.

The weather had been rainy and mild for the previous two days, but now we trudged uphill in fog and wind with the occasional snow squall. I soon started to wretch and hack with the exertion and elevation gain. At times, I had to stop until a bout of head-spinning vertigo passed, and I was dangerously close to vomiting. After all my plans to get healthy, and enduring the embarrassment of having a small woman carry my pack to conserve energy, I realized my lungs were, at best, minimally improved. Hours later we reached Pheriche, and I stopped in again at the seasonal, makeshift health clinic, knowing full well that there was nothing the doc could do.

When I coughed and coughed again, my young porter looked at me with concern but we conversed little since she essentially spoke no English. On the plains above Pheriche, there was good radio reception, so I called Tuck (Mark Tucker, the head honcho of our International Mountain Guides Everest team). He asked me how I was, and I blurted out, “in no shape yet to climb Everest.” He suggested if that was true, there was no sense in coming up 3,300 feet to Base Camp. I agreed and decided on the spot to stay at Ang Nuru’s for another day or two. I paid the young woman, who was thrilled as I gave her the agreed-upon amount for our abbreviated journey together. I’d rather carry my own pack, coughing or not. It was less a macho testosterone-laden decision than a desire to do it all myself.

Back to the oasis of the Himalayan Hotel, where I was a veteran of sloth. That night after dinner, I retired to my room with a bit of a stomach ache. I overheard the trekkers next door, a young British couple, having a conversation through the thin walls and I heard the woman vomiting very daintily and quietly. What an amateur, I thought as I nodded off to sleep. I awakened at two or three in the morning with severe stomach pain and the tell-tale salivary response of impending hurl. I barely made it out of bed and down the hall to the communal hole in the floor before I lost my stomach contents while roaring like a bull yak in heat.

Payback is a bitch, I thought, for my earlier haughty thoughts of superiority. I cleaned up what I could see in the dull light of my headlamp but had no illusions that I got it all before I stumbled back to bed. The next day I felt so sick I didn’t get out of bed for breakfast, lunch or dinner. Ang Nuru sent a young boy to check on me. It was touching that he noticed my absence, but I couldn’t move.

I felt so depressed. This could be the death knell to my summit attempt. Good, I thought. No more avalanche of Everest leaning over my head, ready to bury me. No. Can’t think that! Never think that! You are here to summit. Get better! You’ve come too far to think of anything but summiting.

The war in my head wouldn’t go away. Huddled in my sleeping bag, I heard the two voices debating louder and louder. I twisted and turned, then lay still, too weak to fight the battle any more. I heard voices, conversations and laughter, smelled cooking, and watched the afternoon shadows cross the wall. The day went on without me. I felt myself slipping away from Everest without climbing above Camp Three.

I only reached 24,000 feet? Why did I come here? What the hell was I thinking? The wasted months of training and fund-raising. Crap. The wasted money. Double crap. The possibly irreversible damage to my practice and the stress on my son. I don’t want to think about it anymore, about anything.

How ironic: I didn’t fall ill at the seemingly risky Ama Dablam View Inn, but here at the Himalayan Hotel, where everybody trusts the chow. For all I knew, even though I meticulously used Purel all the time, I could simply have picked up a speck on a door handle and voilà! Done for and done in. I couldn’t eat much at all for forty-eight hours, until I woke up hungry on the third day. Good sign, me thinks. I ate well all day and planned for a departure the next. Bright and early I enjoyed fried eggs, coffee and chapattis and headed out by 6 AM. It proved slow and fatiguing work carrying my own pack. Maybe I should have kept the Sherpani, pride or no pride. First the long trudge to Dugla, then Lobuche, then Gorak Shep, then finally to Base Camp, where Phinjo waited with a thermos of warm lemon drink. I struggled into Everest Base Camp in the slow lane.

My supposed rest and recuperation in luxurious, thick air had not exactly worked out. Maybe my lungs were a little better, but the gastrointestinal issue had left me without “pop” in the muscles. I hung out for a day and conferenced with Mark Tucker, making my case for more rest and a later summit attempt. Mark countered with a “no can do,” as he had to have the Sherpas tear down the upper camps and couldn’t support a summit attempt by just one dude and Phinjo.

I went to bed that night feeling the internal war erupt again: I was bummed on one hand as I watched my dream evaporate in the rarified air, but relieved on some level that Tuck had let me off the hook. The next morning I was happily surprised that I spent the previous night actually sleeping and not hacking and gagging at all—and without codeine. At breakfast, I ran into two team members from Singapore as they were leaving for their run up to the summit. I told them my story. “Don’t accept Tuck’s decision about the camp break down,” they told me; “you paid big money to try to summit. Tell him you’re good to go. Get going tomorrow.”

So I saw Tuck, who was only an advisor to our team. He was part of the International Mountain Guides organization that ran Base Camp and provided advisors for self-guided teams like ours. In other words, he had no direct say in what we did. I found Tuck and told him, Hey, I’m ready to go up. Funny, as I said the words I could feel the fear melt away. But he surprised me. No, he heard me coughing during the night. Which was just bull to keep me from going up—his way of saying I was not ready.

Screw it, I said to myself, I’m going anyway. If I got packed up and readied my Camps Three and Four food bags today, Phinjo and I could make the weather window and I could still get my turn at bat leaving the next morning, May 18, 2007, with a summit goal of May 23.

I talked to Pemba to link up at breakfast, and now it was up to me to make things happen. I got my kit ready by preparing my pack and the food bags. The bulk of my warm summit clothes and equipment were still at Camp Two from my last acclimatization climb. Now I needed to eat up, drink up, and rest up to get ready to go way up. After ten days of illness and waffling confidence, I once again became goal-oriented and began moving in a positive direction. Body and mind were once again playing nice together. I was running on all twelve cylinders.

Three AM comes early, but not when you have been awake for an hour just chomping at the bit to get going. My nervousness kept me from eating a huge breakfast, so I just ate what I could keep down. I put my harness and head lamp on, and headed to the Puja altar, where Phinjo was already lighting up a juniper bough, chanting Buddhist prayers and throwing rice. I added my rice and silent prayers to the ritual, and we wordlessly clomped off through camp in the direction of our dreams.

“Everything on the earth has a purpose, every disease an herb to cure it, and every person a mission. This is the Indian theory of existence.” —Mourning Dove

I’m going to introduce three dispatches here, three of the many I sent out to people following my progress on Everest. Sometimes it’s easier to write about experiences such as those on Everest at a computer, well after they’ve happened. You have time for reflection, time for feelings to change, even just a little. But when you write about an experience minutes or hours after it happens, you tend to tell the raw truth. Your blood is still racing; exhaustion and pain invade your thinking, and what comes out is as close as you can get to how you feel at that time. What follows are three actual dispatches that I wrote, some of the most difficult I had to send.

18 May 2007, 14:10 18,000 feet Safe but no summit.

Felled by a throat infection related to the weeks of violent coughing. It started three days ago and seemed to improve, but this morning in sub-freezing air at 5 AM as Phinjo and I climbed the Khumbu Icefall, we both knew it was over. The dry, freezing air combined with heavy panting constricted my trachea, throat and lungs like a vise. I sat down between crevasses, radioed Tuck at Base and…cried. Poor Phinjo cried too. I knew going in that, in addition to the physical challenge of climbing Everest, the other conflicts and challenges would be inclement weather (it’s perfect now for the boys up there) and staying healthy. Ironically, at home I am rarely ill. If I pushed a little further I would have put others at risk, who may have had to assist me, and I wasn’t about to do that (especially in light of the fact that two additional climbers died several days ago). I will say that I have learned great lessons on this Everest journey, in addition to being very proud of what I did accomplish by stepping up to the plate. I went in search of a great “perhaps.” Thanks for listening, Dr. Tim. Out.

19 May 2007, 19:36 17,300 feet Following the boys.

With my own summit bid over, I was free to follow the boys last night (our team’s first). After taking a week to get to Camp Four at 26,000 feet, they left at 9:30 PM and had beautiful weather as they climbed through the night. I slept for an hour on the floor of the communications tent between Ang Jangbu and Mark Tucker, who manned the radio and sifted information like expectant parents all night. They have to do that for the next three nights, as we have that many waves of summit climbers. Benjamin (Mexico) summited at daybreak, followed by Big Al (Canada), “Distinguished” Jim (USA) and Andre (South Africa). They could not have done it without the expert climbing skills of six Sherpas, who also summited. As for me, I stuck my pack on my back and started the forty-mile trek out, leaving early in order to get lower so my body can heal at lower altitude and luxuriant air. I am by myself, with most of my gear being portered out. It’s great to see gradually increasing green, growing things and all the mommy yaks had calves. They are everywhere. Dr. Tim. Over and out.

The truth was, as I left Base Camp after Al summited and headed down valley all by my lonesome…I was hatin’ it. I knew I had done the best I could; I’d made the good, safe decisions I needed to make in the mountains. I was simply cold inside, and angry outside. I never want to see another mountain in my life, I kept thinking. I didn’t even want to see a picture of a mountain for the rest of my life. And I meant it, for awhile. The hours ticked by as I tramped down the glacier’s rubble-strewn trail to Lobuche, where the yak path turns to dust. Three hours later, I stumbled into Pheriche and my third stay at the Himalaya Hotel, where the internal war started up again.

24 May 2007, 18:30 4,000 feet Ruminations on fear.

FEAR acronym: “False Evidence Appearing Real.” Hey, it’s in my nature to analyze the body, mind and spirit of people, places, things, and events that cross my path in this life, and fear in relation to my Everest experience has been on my mind. It will be awhile before I have historical perspective, but here is the almost present experience re: fear. With other big mountain experiences (i.e. Denali), I experienced low-level fear that I welcomed as a great safety tool. In fact, I termed that experience “focused fear.” I didn’t have that experience on Everest; in fact, for all my trips through the icefall and over crevasses on ladders and up the Lhotse Face, I experienced no fear. I find this quite interesting in a detached clinical fashion. All that changed in the days before the abbreviated summit bid. The cocktail of illnesses, being down valley from Base, and the loneliness of being away from my climbing buds all probably contributed, but the feeling was simply dread—or, to paraphrase a Hunter S. Thompson title, “Fear and Loathing in Pheriche.” I have seen it in others and even experienced it myself decades ago, when I first started climbing. Sir Edmund Hillary said, “We do not conquer the mountains; we conquer ourselves.” The long and short of it is, getting up and going at 4 AM on that summit attempt was the hardest thing I can ever remember doing. We threw our rice, passed the Puja Stupa (stone altar) on the right, and began the ten-minute walk across the moraine, while weaving through tents as our climbing gear jangled and clanked. I wretched once or twice from phlegm buildup before we arrived at the icefall proper and fixed bayonets (put our crampons on). I couldn’t tell if I was fast or slow, as there were no Westerners to judge my speed, just Sherpas (and they never seem to drink, eat or take a breath the whole time you climb). It turns out that “slow” was an understatement; “wretch” and “cough” were also gross understatements. The rest is history, but I was happy because I felt the fear and did it anyway. As my old Rhode Island friend Dana would say, I “got on the roof.” Simply, fear is False Evidence Appearing Real. Dr. Tim. P.S. I am back in Kathmandu, waiting several days for a flight out. (First time looking at my body in a mirror. I haven’t been this skinny since the ninth grade.) Over and out.

“If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in nearly every disappointment.” — Henry David Thoreau

Twenty-four hours after leaving Everest Base Camp with my tail between my legs, as I was feeling sorry for myself, napping the afternoon away, it hit me…bam! It hit me so hard I got up out of my sleeping bag and walked to the window to watch the yaks graze by the Dudh Khosi River. I can do this next year. I can come back next year and climb Mt. Everest. I can come back, in 2008, take the lessons from this year, and summit Mt. Everest. I will learn the lessons, come back in 2008, summit Mt. Everest and safely return! I will. I will. I will.

I felt the blood surging through me, the stream of blood going into and out of my heart, the individual drops engorging my capillaries and fueling my system. I started thinking about Al. You see, Al was so focused, so obsessive; he’d climb barefoot and bare-butted to the summit and probably not even feel the cold. Well, that’s an exaggeration, but not by much. I have to stop right here and tell you about Al.

Al Hancock works in the Alberta, Canada oil sands; he’s a blue-collar guy, unlike most of the climbers who had the big bucks to even think of Everest. Al was so well-liked and respected at home that he raised all of his expedition money where he worked at Sun Corp. and related subcontractors.

Al was focused; nothing was going to get in his way. Nothing. Under his hard shell, however, he cared about people, something I learned more about on another climb on another continent. There, in Mendoza, Argentina, we became friends for life. I’m glad we were close together on Everest, because I learned a lot from him.

Al wrote to me once about his focused climbing philosophy: “One needs to be a very mentally disciplined person. You need to be able to cut all ties in your mind with your family, work, money and the luxuries of life while on a climb. You have to be in the moment, and that means cutting the umbilical cord to everything. Disconnect. You need to bow down to the art of suffering, where cold becomes your friend and your tiny tent becomes your mansion and the mountain your job. I call this ‘flipping the switch.’”

The following poem was written by Big Al, who is no stranger to high self-esteem.

When the stars are out, I go to work.

When the sun is at its highest, I take a rest.

I melt snow from which I drink.

I climb to the edge of the abyss.

I share creation.

Kings can do no more.

Still half-asleep from the nap, I looked out at those yaks, and the voices started the war again. Part of me was a loud roar doing the hatin’, the other a firm, smooth voice patiently and analytically clicking off the reasons why, if I returned next year, I would have a great shot at summiting Mount Everest. Mount freakin’ Everest!

More clearly than at any time during the trip I saw myself at the summit and, more importantly, walking back into Base Camp from the top of the world, safe! And this was the reason: If Al can do it, I can do it. He has that focus, that drive that I came to see first-hand. What the hell’s the difference between us? I thought — a 200-plus-pound, former champion body builder who works in the oil fields and a 160-pound former marathon runner chiropractor? On the surface there are obvious differences, but why can’t his focus be my focus? Did Everest hang over him like an avalanche about to smother him? I doubt it. He probably saw an escalator to the summit, with him dancing on the tippity-top. Me? Over those last two weeks I saw nothing but ice, snow, cold and trouble.

Focus: that will be my word. I could finally see myself on the summit standing next to Phinjo as we looked out over the whole blue and white world! Woo-hoo, the top of the World!

I had no doubt about it: with my skills, power and motivation and the added jet fuel of experience and confidence, I would learn the lessons and come back to Nepal for the 2008 season, summit Mt. Everest and safely return. This would be my mission and mantra: “Summit and Safe Return.”

The second day after leaving Base Camp, I tottered down the trail all by my lonesome to Namche Bazaar, fatigued, hacking phlegm, but thrilled with the plans swirling through my head, the next twelve months of action steps becoming nailed down in my mind. Teammates Andre and Mike from South Africa told me of a teahouse in Namche that had unlimited hot water for showers. I aimed to find this oasis and take the wire brush to my carcass to scrape off the accumulated goop of two months. I checked into what I thought was the place but was once again wrong. A sad trickle of lukewarm water from an archaic faucet greeted me, and I realized I would have to wait for a Hotel Tibet shower in Kathmandu to loosen the mixture of dust, sweat and sunscreen that had fused to my epidermis. The plodding continued for eight hours to Lukla the next day, with a shattered body but a soul soaring in the clouds.

One thing gnawed at me. How will I tell Kurt? At one of my low moments on the mountain, I had emailed my handsome then sixteen-year-old and told him I would never climb again. Now I would have to renege, only weeks later. How would I explain this? He was thrilled when I had told him of my mountain retirement and, I wondered, because he kept things close to the vest, what he would really think of his Dad’s return to such a harsh, life-threatening environment. I ruminated on this quandary for days before arriving back in Rhode Island. I knew I would find the right way, but at that time I had more miles to hike.

Finally, I arrived in Lukla, the last stop in the Khumbu Valley before the hair-raising one-hour flight to crazy Kathmandu and the relative comforts of modern life. It wasn’t to be for a few days, however, as the foggy weather closed the airport. I ran into Benjamin, one of our team members from Mexico, who summited with Al but had hastened down valley to meet his girlfriend. I voraciously pumped him for information on his experience above my highpoint of 24,000 feet. In halting English he explained the reason for his Everest success: “I climb with one mind, not two.”

I felt none of my previous crushing fear when he shared the really scary parts of his summit story, because for the first time, I truly saw myself up there, doing what he did. I belonged at the summit. The summit of Everest and a safe return had become, in two days, firmly entrenched as my mission. I was determined to live this dream.

“So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.” —Christopher Reeve

Why did I not summit in 2007? One reason: the mission was not clear. In 2007, my mission was muddled. Despite all the preparation and expense, I was simply not meant to summit. I did not have the necessary tools. When I deteriorated physically, as we all do at high altitude, the mental battle became overwhelming, and I skulked back down the mountain. That failure helped me to understand, once and for all, what mission really meant.

“Your work is to discover your world, then with all your heart, give yourself to it.” —Buddha

I was so hot with my goal to climb Everest in 2008 that I probably had steam coming from under my Red Sox hat. I realized my focus was ill-defined, fuzzy and just plain lukewarm the previous year. Of course, my goal was to climb Everest, but I never clearly visualized myself at the top. Now I did, and there was not a shred of doubt or indecision in my mind; the vision of Phinjo and me on top of the world was laser-beam clear. I had it going on. I realized I wouldn’t have ever been this hot if not for all the ups and downs and mistakes of 2007. My failure in 2007 was a prerequisite to success in 2008. It taught me there is no such thing as failure if you learn essential lessons as a result. Failure can be a strange variety of blessing.

“As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.” —Antoine de Saint-Exupery