Everest

��񱦵� Alum Part of First All-Black Team to Summit Mount Everest

Anonymous — Mon, 07 Nov 2022 07:00:00 +0000

��񱦵� Alum Part of First All-Black Team to Summit Mount Everest Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 11/07/2022 - 00:00

Cheyenne Smith

Former CU decathlete Eddie Taylor (BioChem, Math’12) admits he never expected to stand on the summit of Mount Everest — especially as part of the first all-Black team to attempt the expedition.

Organized by veteran alpinist Phil Henderson of Cortez, Colorado, Taylor summited the tallest mountain on Earth in May 2022 alongside seven other athletes and 12 Sherpa guides on a team called the Full Circle Expedition. Under the mentorship of Henderson, the team’s accomplishment nearly doubled the number of Black climbers to summit Everest. Previously, less than 10 Black climbers had reached the summit out of thousands of others.

As someone who didn’t have climbing mentors he could relate to, Henderson — the first Black American instructor at NOLS [National Outdoor Leadership School] — said of the feat: “It came full circle.”

Invitation to Everest

Taylor grew up in the Midwest, where he enjoyed running track while getting his mountain fix on family trips to northern New Mexico and various national parks. When it came time to choose a university, the appeal of the well-known track and field team, innovative community and beautiful Colorado weather was a no-brainer: ��񱦵� was the perfect fit. Taylor double-majored in math and biochemistry, all while competing in the decathlon.

“The Buffs are a legendary sports team,” Taylor said. “I was a walk-on, and the opportunity was amazing.”

Taylor’s experience reinforced what it meant to train hard and find success in chosen objectives. After graduating from CU, a friend invited Taylor to go rock climbing, and a light switched: “I went all in,” he said. Taylor became a strong, competent climber and mountaineer, and where he once had track goals, he was now setting goals in the mountains.

In early 2021, Taylor met Henderson at a dog park in Ouray, Colorado, when both were in town to ice climb. The two sparked a conversation and saw each other around the town’s infamous ice climbing park. Henderson took notice of Taylor’s impressive climbing ability and mountain sense. When Henderson began finalizing his Full Circle team in 2021, he invited Taylor to join.

Spearheaded by Henderson, Taylor and the rest of the team — Moanoah Ainuu, Fred Campbell, Abby Dione, KG Kagambi, Thomas Moore, Dom Mullins and Rosemary Saal — raised over $800,000 for the expedition as they began their training.

To train, Taylor stayed true to his weekly routine: climbing outside three to four days a week, coaching track at Centaurus High School in Lafayette, Colorado, and getting out to Rocky Mountain National Park to climb or ski on the weekends.

The Summit

The team traveled to Nepal in March 2022, embarking on a 70-day expedition up the southwest ridge of Everest. After hiking 25 miles to Everest’s base camp (17,400 feet), Taylor and the Full Circle team spent a few days acclimating and preparing for the ascent. Henderson, who did not attempt the summit, remained at base camp.

From base camp, the team spent many rotations successively climbing higher to acclimatize to high altitude, eventually making it to Camp 3 at more than 22,000 feet. On May 12, the team staggered hiking times and pushed for the summit at their own pace.

Where he once had track goals, he was now setting goals in the mountains.

During a good weather window, Taylor stumbled out of his tent around 9 p.m., wearing an oxygen mask, down suit and pack. He saw a line of headlamps heading up the mountain and “put one foot in front of the other and started plodding toward the trail,” he said.

“Soon enough, I caught up to the traffic,” he said. “I was cold, so I did what I knew how to do best; I unclipped and started passing folks.”

At midnight, Taylor and Pasang Ngima Sherpa were among the first at a resting place known as the Balcony. At 2:40 a.m. Taylor and Pasang stepped onto the highest point on Earth. The summit of Everest was dark, short and sweet. Taylor snapped a blurry photo and quickly turned back to begin a safe descent and eat a hot meal.

“The summit didn’t mean that much to me, but what the expedition means is very important,” said Taylor.

The seven other Full Circle team members also summited on May 12, officially reshaping the future of mountaineering. The team’s accomplishment was featured in USA Today, Outside magazine, National Geographic, CNN and more.

“Our goal here is to help folks aspire to have a profound and respectful relationship with the outdoors and feel not entitled to it, but welcome to it. If you see it can be done, you can do it right,” said Full Circle team member, Abby Dione, in a CNN interview.

Bringing It Full Circle

As it did for Henderson, the experience has come full circle for Taylor.

Just as Taylor prepared for Everest is how he returns from Everest — continuing his daily routine. Taylor continues teaching at Centaurus and coaching track after school. He travels to the mountains in his free time and plans to climb in Yosemite National Park next season.

“I just love giving back, taking my knowledge and giving it to the kids in the up-and-coming community,” Taylor said.

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Photo by Amrit Ale

Former CU decathlete Eddie Taylor admits he never expected to stand on the summit of Mount Everest — especially as part of the first all-Black team to attempt the expedition.

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Social Buffs: Madison Tarbox

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Sep 2017 06:00:00 +0000

Social Buffs: Madison Tarbox Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/01/2017 - 00:00

CU junior Madison Tarbox (Mktg'18) spent the month of July in a rural village outside Kathmandu, Nepal, teaching English, planting and harvesting in the jungle and trekking to the Everest Base Camp.

CU junior Madison Tarbox (Mktg'18) spent the month of July in a rural village outside Kathmandu, Nepal, teaching English, planting and harvesting in the jungle and trekking to the Everest Base Camp.

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Rarefied Air

Anonymous — Sun, 01 Dec 2013 07:00:00 +0000

Rarefied Air Anonymous (not verified) Sun, 12/01/2013 - 00:00

Emery Cowan

Fifty years ago, Tom Hornbein made history by being part of the team that put the first American on top of Everest.

Fifty years ago at the age of 32, Tom Hornbein (A&S’52), along with climbing partner Willi Unsoeld, became the first people to summit Everest by the dangerous and still rarely successfully summited West Ridge route. The two were among the team that put the first American on Everest on May 1, 1963.

“Once you’ve climbed Everest it’s like an albatross hanging around your neck,” Hornbein says, quoting words originally spoken by Unsoeld. “You’re never getting away from it, but it’s a good albatross.”

Hornbein grew up in St. Louis and first experienced the mountains when his parents sent him to summer camp near Estes Park, Colo. He was hooked and returned summer after summer. The Rockies drew him back again for college, and he entered the University of Colorado with his sights set on becoming a geologist. By the time he graduated, his passion had turned to medicine. He was accepted at Washington University and studied anesthesia with a focus on the effects of altitude on body function — a clear outgrowth of his passion for climbing.

His medical résumé is impressive in its own right. He became an anesthesiology professor at University of Washington in Seattle and one of the foremost leaders in high altitude medicine, even inventing a new type of oxygen mask that was used on his Everest expedition.

“He’s very tenacious,” says Bill Sumner, a longtime friend and climbing partner who was a graduate student at Washington University when Hornbein taught there. “I wouldn’t call him a bulldog, but to carry so many of those things to completion requires some real push and strong character.”

And yet the climber’s relationship with the world’s tallest peak hasn’t been simple. Hornbein says he appreciates the people and opportunities that have come into his life because of his accomplishment. But he has never returned to Everest, and the book he wrote about the expedition, Everest: The West Ridge, aims to strip out the heroic undertones included in other accounts.

Skipping over Everest, he says he’s most proud of the accomplishments of his six children and others close to him, and Longs Peak is the mountain that holds a special place in his heart. His most intimidating climb was on the peak’s east face, which he can see from his home in Estes Park, Colo.

Still, Everest has been an important piece in his life puzzle, Hornbein says.

“It has created a magic I’ve been able to share with a lot of other people,” he says.

Photos by Claudia Lopez (top) and Jim Herrington

Fifty years ago, Tom Hornbein made history by being part of the team that put the first American on top of Everest.

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When Everest Speaks

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 07:00:00 +0000

When Everest Speaks Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 12/01/2011 - 00:00

Lisa Marshall

Mountaineer Neal Beidleman survived the 1996 Mount Everest tragedy that left eight climbers dead. Upon his return this year he found some peace.

As he plodded across Mount Everest’s knife-edge Summit Ridge on May 20, 2011, Neal Beidleman (MechEngr’81) realized something was not right.

His summit push had begun perfectly the night before, with a starry, moonlit sky overhead as he and his partner, Chris Davenport (Hist’93) hiked upward at an impressive clip. But as dawn broke and the icy crown of the world’s highest mountain grew nearer, the effort become much more difficult and eventually Beidleman’s pace slowed to a crawl. An eerie tunnel vision consumed him and his oxygen-starved mind turned to the events of a darker day, 15 years earlier.

“I started having all these wild thoughts,” recalls Beidleman, who later discovered his oxygen mask had malfunctioned, leaving him climbing without oxygen for hours. “On the way up, I felt like I was somehow reliving what Scott [Fischer], myself and some of the others had gone through … like fate made this happen to me, so I could better understand what happened in ’96.”

Beidleman had been a guide during one of the most tragic days in the mountain’s history. His tearful arrival at the summit last spring marked one of the most “emotionally intense” moments in a two-month trip that was full of catharsis, revelation and coming to terms. It was the first time the 52-year-old Aspen-based engineer had returned to Everest since his close friend Scott Fischer perished along with seven other climbers.

For Beidleman, whose life was forever changed by the events of that day, returning was all about moving forward.

“I wanted to go back and leave Everest on better terms,” he says. “Chris and I had a great trip. But there were several times when I was taken off guard by how intense it was. There were some very powerful moments up there.”

Fifteen years after the disastrous expedition, made famous in Jon Krakauer’s bestselling book Into Thin Air, the events of May 10, 1996, remain a haunting memory in the minds of many involved. In all, eight died after a fierce fast-moving storm engulfed the mountain. Among them was Beidleman’s expedition boss Fischer, one of the first mountaineers to offer guided treks up many of the world’s highest peaks. Veteran Everest guide Rob Hall and a diminutive 47-year-old Japanese client named Yasuko Namba also died. Namba proudly became the oldest woman to summit Everest before dying on its flanks despite Beidleman’s efforts to save her. Three members of an Indian expedition also perished.

Afterward, the tragedy became fodder for countless media accounts, with at least five survivors publishing dueling perspectives on who was to blame. The nagging question that Krakauer asks in his controversial account is, “Why did veteran Himalayan guides keep moving upward, ushering a gaggle of relatively inexperienced amateurs — each of whom paid as much as $65,000 to be taken safely up Everest — into an apparent death trap?”

The question has yet to be answered fully, as the two men in charge died on the mountain that day. By all accounts, the weather deteriorated quickly. And many have speculated that a friendly, unspoken rivalry between Hall and Fischer may have led the two guides to resist turning their clients around earlier.

But for Beidleman, widely credited for acting heroically that day, returning to Everest was not about stirring up old controversies. Rather, it was about making peace with an iconic mountain he’d dreamed of climbing since he was a child but could only look upon with grim memories.

“To leave Everest on such a horrible note like that and have it be the last word that the mountain speaks to you is not the way I wanted it to be,” he says.

It was just after 1:25 p.m. on May 10, 1996, when Beidleman crested the 29,035-foot Everest summit the first time. But his climb to Everest began in grade school when his outdoors-loving parents turned him on to the sport in his hometown of Aspen. He became a world-class climber, getting engaged to his wife Amy Beidleman in 1994 while on an expedition to Makalu, the world’s fifth highest mountain, located 14 miles from Everest. When Fischer asked him to join his upstart guiding business and serve as third-in-command leading eight clients up Everest, Beidleman jumped at the chance.

The summit push was fraught with mishaps and delays. But when the then 36-year-old finally arrived at the summit with two clients and Fischer’s second guide Anatoli Boukreev, the clear cobalt sky and sweeping panorama didn’t disappoint.

“It was beautiful. For about five minutes, I took it all in,” he recalls. “But then I got very nervous.”

It was late in the day. He was burning through oxygen even though he turned the flow down. A solid blanket of clouds was building on the jungle plains below. And Fischer and the team’s remaining clients had yet to arrive.

Without a radio to communicate with his boss and reluctant to head down and begin turning paying clients around (that was pre-determined to be Fischer’s job), Beidleman waited a grueling two hours on top until every last client stumbled up.

“My role was to do what Scott had asked me to do and I did those jobs well,” he says. “Had I known Scott was in trouble I might have acted differently, but I assumed he was still making decisions and guiding people to the top.”

Around 3:30 p.m., Beidleman headed down, accompanying five clients into the brewing storm. They passed Fischer, looking tired but still pushing upward near the summit and assumed they’d ultimately see him shortly in the descent. What Beidleman didn’t know was Scott may have been suffering from severe high-altitude sickness that many believe later debilitated him, leaving him unable to continue below 27,500 feet after the others began their descent.

The wind was so ferocious it just kept knocking us down. We put our backs to the wind, and I kept yelling at people and hitting them on the back just to make sure they stayed awake.

As they climbed down, the lightning and thunder worsened. By nightfall, Beidleman’s group had swelled to 11, including two sherpas and several members of Hall’s team.

Blinded by a furious ground blizzard with winds blowing at 75 miles per hour and unable to find their camp, they huddled in the dark on the South Col, not far from the 7,000-foot drop-off of the Kangshung Face. Beidleman feared if they kept wandering they might step off into the abyss, so he made the call to huddle on the ice and rocks and wait for an opening in the weather.

“The wind was so ferocious it just kept knocking us down,” Beidleman recalls. “We put our backs to the wind, and I kept yelling at people and hitting them on the back just to make sure they stayed awake. You just wanted to close your eyes and drift off.”

When the sky cleared after midnight, only four, including Beidleman, had the strength to set out for the tents, which ended up being roughly 400 yards away. Three others would be rescued later that night. Namba, a member of Hall’s team whom Beidleman had virtually dragged off the mountain to the huddle, succumbed to the frigid temperatures, lying down on the Col and never waking.

Hall’s client Beck Weathers, left for dead by other rescuers the next day, miraculously made his way to the tents in late afternoon but lost his right arm, the fingers on his left hand and part of his nose to frostbite. Hall, his third guide Andy Harris and his client Doug Hansen, a postal worker who saved for years for the trip, reached the summit but never made it down. Neither did Fischer.

“Nobody had ever imagined that something so extraordinarily bad like this could happen,” Beidleman says.

After leaving Everest in 1996, Beidleman began to contemplate going back. But it wasn’t until recently that the pieces began to fall together.

Davenport, a fun-loving, professional big-mountain skier and guide famous for skiing all of Colorado’s 14ers in one year, had a client who wanted to climb Everest. He called long-time friend Beidleman and asked if he’d be interested in co-guiding. Beidleman now had a wife and two kids and a thriving engineering business.

But the prospect of climbing with a small team and being in control of the decision-making appealed to him. For Davenport, 40, it was not only an opportunity for another first but also for a rare learning experience.

“It was really powerful to have a firsthand perspective as to what went wrong in ’96 and to learn from the mistakes that were made,” Davenport says. “I learned far more having been there with Neal than had I gone on my own.”

Things went so smoothly on the early acclimatization ascents that they took a detour one day, making a glorious ski descent of a large portion of the Lhotse face, a 45-degree slab of black ice barely covered in powder snow at 24,000 feet.

But the mood intensified as the duo and their client moved higher. On May 18, they made a summit push but turned back without hesitation when the weather turned bad.That bit of “serendipity,” as Beidleman puts it, allowed Davenport and him the full next day to wander around the South Col and visit the rock pile where he and the others had huddled in the blizzard 15 years prior.

“It’s very easy to look back and say to yourself, ‘You should have done this or that,’ but I took one look at the topography, remembered the fierce storm, the dark night, the lack of oxygen and could really see how easy it was to get there instead of where we were supposed to be,” he says.

The next morning, as they pushed toward the summit in their second bid for the top, Beidleman passed the snow-covered area where Fischer’s body still lays and was heading toward the South Summit where Hall, Harris and Hansen perished. Beidleman felt his body weaken, and his oxygen-starved brain began to play tricks on him.

Davenport took the lead, arriving at the crystal clear summit a few minutes ahead.Not long afterwards, Beidleman leaned into his friend’s arms, emotionally cooked by what he described to Davenport as “an epiphany.”

“A lot of people have burdened Scott and Rob and others up there after the fact with all these things they should have done. But the reality is, once you are out of oxygen, your world becomes very small and what you are capable of becomes very limited,” he says. “I was reminded of that.”

After another climber discovered the malfunctioning of Beidleman’s mask and repaired it, Beidleman regained his faculties within minutes and walked away with the epiphany that what occurred in ’96 couldn’t have been easily solved with a few quick fixes. He realized, having climbed inadvertently without oxygen, that not all things are possible on a mountain that has been ascended about 3,000 times but where more than 220 have lost their lives.

“Little things can go wrong, and it is still the highest place on Earth,” he says.

At home in Aspen now, he looks back on the trip as a gift, which helped him close one chapter and start another.

“I will always be sad about what happened in ’96,” he says. “People died up there and that’s a bad thing. You cannot ever change that outcome.

But you can come to terms with accepting what your limitations were. Just allowing yourself to appreciate that you maybe did everything you could under the circumstances is really powerful.”

Photos by Neil Beidleman

Mountaineer Neal Beidleman survived the 1996 Mount Everest tragedy that left eight climbers dead. Upon his return this year he found some peace.

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Everest

��񱦵� Alum Part of First All-Black Team to Summit Mount Everest

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��񱦵� Alum Part of First All-Black Team to Summit Mount Everest