Being at 18,000 feet on a skinny trail with a precipitous dropoff is unsettling even in perfect conditions. Breathing is kind
of a big deal at such an altitude, and when visibility is a few feet what
little oxygen you're getting is being used by your brain to produce messages
like "What am I doing here?" It's a question that occurred to Greene, who
allows that, "We weren't sure we should cross when we couldn't see." She and
her climbing group sat for two hours on the ridge waiting for the sky to clear
and were close to hypothermic before withdrawing.
A few days later Greene was back on the mountain, this time searching for a
group of climbers stranded in a blizzard. They had been missing for eight days
and were presumed dead, but Greene's search party found them frostbitten,
starving, but alive. "The weather was so horrible, we were barely hanging on
ourselves," she recalled.
For Greene, who this fall will enter the University of Massachusetts Medical
School in hopes of becoming a pediatrician, the wilderness is not merely an
abstract notion that inspires poets and philosophers, though it is that, too.
Wilderness is beautiful and serene and spiritual and ugly and chaotic and
unforgiving. All those things. And it's in her blood.
The same holds for Sue Miller '82, an experienced mountaineer who, like
Greene, works as an instructor for the National Outdoor Leadership School
(NOLS), which specializes in leading wilderness trips. That NOLS is a magnet
for Colby graduates--Sarah Scott '93 and Thad Gemski '90 also are
instructors--should come as no surprise.
In the last five years alone, Colbians have circled the world in a
single-engine airplane (Tom Claytor '85), kayaked from a Vermont stream to the
Gulf of Mexico (Charles Tenny '84), crossed the Atlantic in a sailboat (Charles
"Pen" Williamson '63), climbed remote peaks in the Arctic (Linsay Cochran '97)
and bicycled across Tibet (Alex Colhoun '91 and Kurt Whited '91). Several
recent Colby graduates have made lengthy cross-country trips, "blue highways"
journeys into America's recesses. Then there are the scores of Peace Corps
gigs, Watson fellowships abroad and volunteer sojourns into the Third World.
All of which begs the question, does Colby produce adventure seekers or merely
attract them? Perhaps a bit of both. But it seems clear that the College
nurtures, if not actually encourages, an explorer's desire for seeing what's
Out There.
Sue Miller led a group of women on a Himalayan climbing expedition last fall.
Their objective was the 23,000-foot peak of Baruntse. "We wanted to do it as a
group of women just to declare our independence from our boyfriends or
whomever," Miller said. "We had something to prove; that we could climb
together as a group of women independently."
After a grueling two-week hike to reach the mountain, Miller and her team
established a base camp at 17,000 feet and began reconnoitering the mountain
for possible routes to the summit. Their original route was packed with snow
that appeared unstable so the group chose an alternate route, moved back to
base camp and started up again.
Just as they were about to make their summit attempt on the third day of the
climb Miller got the flu. She and another team member, who had fallen earlier
in the climb and injured her leg, then had to endure the greatest pain of all
for a climber--to stay behind as others went for the peak. The other three
climbers reached about 21,000 feet before turning back because of exhaustion
and altitude sickness, Miller says. "I was very disappointed that we didn't
have a stronger summit attempt," she said. "To go to all of that effort to get
over there and to put yourself in a position to reach the summit and then not
make it, that's a little hard to deal with."
However, she says, they made the right decision. "We knew that at that
altitude we only had so much time before we got too exhausted to climb," she
said. "When you're at 17,000 feet and above your body is kind of slowly
deteriorating. It's a hard decision to give up a summit attempt, but it was the
safe thing to do."
Miller says she may not go back to the Himalayas soon, but she will definitely
climb again. The experience is just too enriching to give up, she says. "Being
out in the wilderness anywhere, and in the mountains in particular, just lets
your mind free up to pursue all sorts of different thoughts," she said. "You
think about home a lot, of course, and what you're going to do when you get
back. It's funny but the farther away from home you are the more you
appreciate it. It's really a cathartic sort of thought process, I find."
Alex "Sandy" Colhoun '91 and Kurt Whited '91 also have been to the top of the
world, with 20,000-foot Himalayan peaks to their credit. Even their trip
to the mountains was epic. It began on a boat in Japan, included an
overland journey across China and culminated with a 950-kilometer trip through
the mountains of Tibet. On bicycles.
Just being in Tibet would be exotic enough for most people, but for
these two the prospect of traversing on two wheels one of the world's most
remote regions was too intriguing to pass up. Arranging the logistics for their
trip was an adventure for Colhoun and Whited, who spent a year and a half
teaching English in Japan and lining up corporate sponsors to subsidize their
travel. Drawing upon "the writing skills I developed at Colby," Colhoun says,
he and Whited prepared a 35-page proposal outlining their journey and presented
it to the Goldwin Corporation, a multinational sporting goods manufacturer
whose products include mountaineering equipment. The company agreed to sponsor
the journey, including an attempt of the Imja Tse peak in Nepal. Then, after a
hoped for National Geographic sponsorship fell through, Colhoun and
Whited received additional logistical support and film equipment from Fuji
Television 5, a big-three network in Japan.
Armed with six Lonely Planet guidebooks, a tent, sleeping bags,
one cookstove and a pot, Colhoun and Whited boarded a ferry for Vladivostok and
then took a train to China. "We generally went out into the countryside where
they never see many foreigners and just walked around with people," Colhoun
said. "A typical day for me in China would begin with waking up in a tiny
little hotel with all these Chinese people and having tea."
Their route took them through Beijing and across northern China to Xiahe where
they arrived in time to witness a Buddhist festival in which a Mongolian monk
spoke on a huge plain to thousands of Tibetans. Colhoun says they took the
train "to the end of the line" and got on a bus for a 40-hour trip into Tibet.
"It was the most hateful journey of my entire life," Colhoun said. On the other
hand, he was collecting "traveler points" like mad.
"This friend of mine from England developed a system called TP's, or traveler
points," Colhoun explained. The idea, he says, is to quantify the horrible
experiences that travelers invariably describe whenever they meet. Five hours
on a train, for instance, equals one point, provided you're in third class. A
40-hour bus ride on hard scrabble roads into remote Tibet gave Colhoun and
Whited a leg up in the Travel Story From Hell sweepstakes.
And then the trip got interesting.
In Lhasa, where finding commodities like wool socks or underwear is a
challenge, Colhoun and Whited located two 18-speed mountain bikes. "It was more
than a miracle," Colhoun said. And it changed the complexion of their journey
completely. Instead of trekking and hitching across the Tibetan mountains to
Katmandu--about 600 miles--they would bicycle. Again calling on their
ingenuity, Colhoun and Whited customized the bicycles to fit their needs. "We
went to a junkyard, hacked apart old Chinese bikes and built a new seat-post
extension. We had toe clips made by a leather craftsman and converted a couple
of backpacks into panniers [storage compartments that hang off the sides of the
back wheel]."
There are five 5,000-meter passes between Lhasa and Katmandu. Most of the time
Colhoun and Whited were bicycling uphill. "It would take days, it seemed like,
to go up these passes," Colhoun said. "We called them Eveready passes--they
just kept going and going and going."
People they met along the route were friendly and curious, Colhoun says. He
recalls being visited at their camp one evening by three Tibetan men--red
tassels flowing through their hair--one of whom pulled out a large knife and
whacked off a piece of yak butter cheese to share with Colhoun and Whited. It
was an almost surreal scene, Colhoun says, the two American bicyclists in
Gortex jackets chatting in phrasebook Tibetan and drinking coffee with the
three men on horseback direct from the 19th century.
"Those sorts of real encounters with real people made the trip amazing,"
Colhoun said.
There were poignant moments, too. "We were cycling along one day and saw this
old man, a really old guy, whose face was like a blanket of lines. We can't
really communicate but I kind of waved and said, `Hold on a minute,' and I took
a Dalai Lama card out of my jacket," Colhoun said. "We were carrying these
cards with us to give to people who had been particularly kind to us or to give
to old people who we knew would appreciate it. We are in the middle of nowhere.
There is nothing to be seen anywhere around us, just mountains and desert. And
I handed him the Dalai Lama card. He looked at it and put it to his forehead,
which is the first thing they always do. Then he held the card and I saw this
tear roll down his face, across this dusty old face. It was so emotional, it
was just unbelievable."
After three weeks on the bicycles, Colhoun and Whited reached Katmandu, laid
over for a few days and then twice climbed Imja Tse, a 20,000-foot peak. After
aborting their first summit attempt for safety reasons, the pair returned to
the mountain and made a successful ascent. Standing on a narrow precipice with
an unimpeded view for hundreds of miles in all directions, Colhoun recalls
feeling humble, awed, blessed. "That hour or so we spent on the ridge and at
the summit is probably the best hour of my life," he said.
Miller says one of the most rewarding aspects of climbing is solving the
problems associated with it. "I think I have much more self-confidence because
I have to totally rely on myself and my partners on a rope," she said. "On the
climb in Nepal I had to trust my own judgment because I was more or less
leading the climb. I couldn't just pawn it off on someone else. Figuring out
how to tackle a particular technical section of the route, that's
interesting.
"It's physically and mentally draining. Breathing is a really big thing at
17,000 feet. You actually have to concentrate on breathing. It sounds kind of
funny, but you have to think about how many breaths per step you take and you
get into kind of a rhythm. But really, mentally the hard part is getting
through the days when all you're doing is carrying a load of food or gear,
slogging up a glacier."
The problem-solving challenges of an extended wilderness voyage also appeal to
Pen Williamson '63 who, when he isn't crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a small
sailboat, is vice president for development at the Hurricane Island Outward
Bound School off the coast of Maine. Williamson, who twice has completed
trans-Atlantic sailing trips aboard a 42-foot vessel, is convinced that such
experiences promote holistic human development.
"The skills you use in the wilderness are secondary to the intangibles of
personal growth and challenge and teamwork and getting along with people of
different backgrounds," he said. "When you're at sea for three weeks straight
with five people in a relatively small boat, your life, your existence, the
pattern of that experience, is very different than your regular life. When
you're in that situation nobody cares how much money you make or who your
parents are or what your job is. It's the great equalizer."
Williamson, whose résumé of adventure travel also includes
mountaineering, rock climbing, and canoeing, says Colby endowed him and others
with a hunger for going places and doing things out of the ordinary. Colhoun
agrees. "The whole attitude at Colby encourages exploration," he said. "I went
to France as a freshman, I was in Washington, D.C., as a junior, and I went to
Russia for a Jan Plan my senior year. I think those kinds of experiences awaken
a desire to explore settings away from the College and inspire people to go out
and try new things all over the world. There's no doubt in my mind that what
happened to me at Colby was already linking me up and preparing me to go do [my
trip across Asia]."Miller and Greene both say their experiences at Colby solidified their belief
in themselves by providing opportunities and challenges. COOT, the Woodsmen's
team, the Outing Club, off-campus Jan Plans and strong experiential components
in many classes all contributed to their personal development, they say.
"You get the best of both worlds at Colby," Williamson said. "You have a
top-notch academic environment in a setting that provides endless opportunities
for enjoying the outdoors. One of the reasons I've been such a strong advocate
of Colby all along is the spirit of the place and the people. There probably
wasn't any direct academic tie-in between hiking at Katahdin and my classes,
but each contributed to the other."
Colhoun, who plans a career as a photojournalist, believes Colby is producing
ambassadors to the world. "I think that somehow the Colby experience engenders
a sense of duty or service. You get the feeling that your responsibility once
you're educated is to do something with it. I think a lot of Colby people feel
that way."
That attitude may explain why adventurers like Colhoun are comfortable whether
riding a camel across the Thar Desert of India or eating dinner in the home of
an impoverished Vietnamese family, both of which he did during his 10-month
journey across Asia. "My political science background allowed me to take what I
had learned at Colby and get from the raw experience [of being in these places]
the other half of it. If you only get half of [the reality] in America, you're
lucky," he said.
And there's that nebulous but undeniable spiritual element that moves many of
these Colbians, who "grew up" as travelers during their Colby years. "When
you're in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean you can't see where you're going,
you can't see where you've been," Williamson said. "You focus on here and
now . . . on what really counts."