The Plan

I slept awful last night. Leeches. All night long I dreamed of leeches. At one point I dreamed a stranger had entered my bedroom and was releasing leeches beneath the covers at the foot of my bed. I woke with my feet retracted into a cross-legged position. I have been researching leeches for a blog entry. "How many times have you asked yourself," it begins, "how do I get all these leeches off of me?" That is as far as I have gotten. After spending the evening researching the leeches of the New Guinea jungle I knew the answer to this question and many other fascinating facts about these unique and rightly maligned creatures, but I could not bring myself to write them down. I am going to give us both a bit of time on this one. But prepare yourself. It's coming. 

After five major summits in as many years, I took the last year and a half off from climbing. It had been a lot of fun, a lot of work and a lot of money. But I felt burned out. Somewhere along the way I had lost my Mojo. My son, Chase, asked that I take the next year off as it would be his senior year of High School and he wanted me around. I was happy to comply. He had been voted student body President, would return as a varsity member of the state champion Cross Country Team, and looked forward to Prom, college selection, and being a kid one last time. I did not want to miss any of it. I trained less and instead spent more time performing Improv at the Upfront Theatre. A new character, Schlomo Rabinowitz "Yiddish Psychic", emerged during this period. 

I decided I needed to deconstruct my climbing and let the pieces lay in a pile for awhile, see what I might be inspired to build back. As the months rolled by I thought very little about it. Yet I knew I was not done climbing. The first thing I missed was the blogging, a means of both preserving my experiences and sharing them with others. For me, it is the sharing of moments that makes them meaningful. I wanted more of that. I suggested to Lin that she be a part of my next climb, still not sure where that was. "Not necessarily doing the climb," I clarified, "but being there when I come off the mountain, experiencing the place with me afterwards." She accepted. This would mean doing a climb during our summer months when school was out and Lin was on break from her job with the district as a sign language Interpreter. At this point I had two remaining names on my Seven Summits list; Everest and Carstensz Pyramid. Everest was out, being a March-May climb. I looked at the rain tables for Carstensz and determined July-August to be an ideal time for an attempt. So the plan was hatched. I would leave for Indonesia, do the climb, then meet Lin a short flight away in Bali afterwards. It would be romantic and restful. Then Lin came up with a variation; We would both leave Seattle the same day. Lin would fly east to Munich, by way of Iceland. I would fly west to New Guinea, by way of Taiwan. Lin could spend time traveling Europe with her daughter Rachelle (who lives and works in Munich), while I was on the climb. She would then fly to Bali to be with me. A week later we would return home together, retracing my path through Taiwan. In the end Lin would circumnavigate the globe. We began making arrangements immediately. 

Everything had to center around the climb. I would need a high quality Guide Service with extensive experience trekking to and climbing this very remote mountain. There were only four outfits that met my criteria. One of them, Adventure Consultants, had guided me well on three prior climbs. But I had also gotten to know some of the other companies as their teams moved up the hill in tandem with us. I wanted to give them a try. In the end I decided to sign with International Mountain Guides, IMG, based in Ashford, Washington near Mt Rainier. I had gotten to know IMG's head Guide, Phil Ershler (First American to summit Everest by way of the North Face) and observed their teams to be well-managed and efficient on the mountains. 

Originally I had entertained the idea of a fly and climb strategy, where a chartered helicopter whisks climbers over the jungle, over the mud and mosquitoes and rain and problematic negotiations gaining permission to cross various tribal lands. Over the rivers, the blisters, the questionable food and venomous creatures. Over the hills and marshes, and aches and pains. It deposits climbers at base camp, elevation 12,000 feet. The 4,000 feet remaining to the summit is climbed in one day, then that same helicopter extracts the victorious climbers to comfort. It sounded pretty good to me. But... 

A good friend of mine did this a year earlier. Or I should say he barely did this. His team arrived in Timika, where they remained stranded for a number of days owing to yet another strike at the Freeport MacMoran Mine and civil unrest that resulted in the canceling of landing permits in the area and the sudden absence of aircraft. The entire expedition would have been scratched if not for a local contact that met a man wearing an aviator's hat while standing in line at the Dunkin Donuts. As luck would have it he was a helicopter pilot. His "bird" was almost done being repaired and he either had a permit to fly that region or didn't care that he didn't. A daisy chain of fuel provisions was stocked at various village clearings leading to Carstensz and, one by one, the climbers and gear where transported to base camp.  They summitted Carstensz and managed to rescue a sick trek-in climber during their extraction operations. Like most major climbs this expedition spent a fair bit of time teetering between success and complete failure. 

Any land-based approach would certainly incure its own share of uncertainty, but at least there would be some sense of self-determination. If we could last the jungle trek we would almost certainly get our shot at the summit. This to me seemed a safer bet than trusting the fates of machine and bureaucracy.  So I commited to a trek-in expedition and began training.