Hawai'i adventurers reflect on their treks

By Michael Tsai
Advertiser Staff Writer

Frank Kingery's one and only trip to Mount Everest happened half a lifetime ago, when he was an ambitious 28-year-old geologist anxious to prove an important and controversial theory.

"We were looking for fossils and faults that would prove the theory," said Kingery, now 61. "We didn't go there to 'climb Everest.' "

But as thousands of amateur and professional alpinists have learned in the 50 years since New Zealand beekeeper Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa climber Tenzing Norgay's historic conquest of the summit, the mountain has a powerful way of commanding attention.

"The experience was almost mystical," Kingery said. "Everest is just so immense. Its scale is overwhelming."

Kingery is one of a lucky few Honolulu residents to have seen the highest, most forbidding mountain in the world in person.

Kingery and his fellow scientists took the southern approach through Katmandu, Nepal, trekking about 100 miles over a week and a half from Namche Bazaar through Khumjung and up along the banks of Dudh Kosi River.

To prepare for the expedition, they spent time training in the French and Swiss Alps. But nothing, Kingery said, could prepare them for the terrible, humbling presence of the mountain.

"I remember looking up at the sky and there was this immense cloud," he said. "Then I looked up again, and I realized that it was the mountain."

The expedition spent a week and a half at the mountain's base camp, about 17,900 feet above sea level. The scientists took day trips past the infamous Khumbu Icefall and up to the 20,000-foot level.

Only on Everest would such feats seem middling.

"Five years ago, I went to Mount Cook (the highest mountain in New Zealand), where Hillary had trained for his initial conquest," Kingery said. "It's a serious place, but it looked like a half-scale of Everest."

Kingery said he quickly developed a deep respect for the mountain and the traditions of the Sherpa people. All the trekkers carefully observed the prayer stones Sherpa climbers ritually placed at the middle of trails.

"You always go to the left of them," he said. "There might be a nice, wide path on the right side, and the left side might be narrow and crumbly with a 2,000-foot drop, but you still go left out of respect for the mountain."

For more than 30 years, Kingery has faced the difficult task of trying to describe the indescribable to those who have never seen Everest for themselves. The best he can do is try to offer perspective.

"At 20,000 feet, you're already a mile higher than Mount Whitney (California) or Chamonix (France), but then you look across the glacier and you realize that the summit is still two miles above you," he says.

Also difficult to convey, say Everest visitors, is the extreme physical toll the 29,002-foot peak exacts from its guests.

Honolulu resident Tom Loomis, 54, visited Everest in 1995 via the less-used northern approach through Tibet. He and a friend spent six days climbing to Camp 3 at 21,000 feet, enduring fatigue, altitude sickness and — as they climbed higher and higher — hallucinations.

"At one point I was in my tent, and I thought there were three people in there, even though I knew there were only two," he said. "One time, I thought I heard Tibetan drumming outside. Another time, I felt like I was walking through water, but I was walking on rocks."

Loomis, a clinical psychologist, had the uncommon perspective of being able to evaluate his own malfunctioning mental capacities.

"They were all fairly common types of hallucination," he said. "The extra person in the tent is very common."

With its dryer, rockier terrain, the northern route up Everest was a better match for Loomis' amateur climbing abilities, but it still wasn't easy.

"There's not really a trail to speak of," he said. "It's very, very remote, and you travel very long distances. We just followed a geographic map."

Despite a two-week stay in Tibet (which helped him acclimatize) and a careful regimen of Diamox, a drug used to fight the effects of altitude sickness, Loomis still suffered.

"It was difficult to sleep at night," he said. "When my breathing slowed, I couldn't get enough oxygen in my body, and I'd wake up gasping. This happened maybe a thousand times a night — kind of like sleep apnea. I was exhausted."

Loomis and his friend spent "one very long" day ascending to and descending from Camp 3.

"We spent only about an hour there, just sitting and looking around," he said. "It was just a very special thing. The distances are so big and you feel so small. You're just surrounded by spectacular mountains in all directions. It was a spectacular aesthetic experience — very stark and dramatic."

Still, Loomis had no desire to go any farther.

"From where we were, it was hard to conceive of going any higher," he said. "There was still a lot more mountain, but I felt so lousy it was hard to imagine."

Since Hillary and Norgay's groundbreaking ascent in 1953, roughly 2,000 other climbers have reached Everest's summit. Many thousands more have taken advantage of the booming adventure-tour opportunities that have arisen over the past 20 years. Tour companies like Wilderness Adventures and National Geographic's iExplore regularly offer pricey guided visits to the base camp.

Honolulu resident Emma Himeno, 90, took her three-week Everest trip in 1985. Like Loomis, Himeno opted for the more remote northern route to the mountain.

"I read (James Hilton's "Lost Horizon") when I was young, and I always had a vision of Tibet as being Shangri-La, a way-out, never-never land. So, when I had a chance to go, I went."

Himeno's first day on Everest was something of a rude awakening. She and her dozen fellow trekkers crammed their supplies on the back of a truck and endured a long, cold trip to the mountain.

"When we got there, it was snowing and there was nothing, no accommodations," she said. "We put up our tents and crawled into our bags. We were chilled to the bone and exhausted.

"The next day, I felt the sun coming into the tent and it was warm," she said. "I thought, 'Oh wow, I guess I'll go out.' But it was still really cold outside. It's always cold at 17 ,000 feet."