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LEDGER-NEWS
CHEROKEELIFE
26 THE CHEROKEE LEDGER-NEWS JULY 15, 2009
Chris Guest, of Canton, reached Mount Everest, the highest peak in the world, this past spring. The avid adventurer has been climbing since he was a teenager.
BY ERIKA NELDNER
erikaneldner@ledgernews.com
Reaching the world’s highest point has been a dream of
Chris Guest’s since he was a child. This past spring, he fulfilled
his childhood dream by reaching the world’s tallest
peak.
Guest reached the summit of Mount Everest May 22. He
topped the peak just as the sun was rising.
“I was climbing the last few hundred feet of Everest in
the dark, and I was afraid I was going to summit in the
dark,” Guest said. “Sure enough, as I got to the top dawn
broke. I stepped out on the summit with the sun hitting
me.”
He said the inspiration for his climbing, which he started
doing when he was 13 years old, was classical book of a
mountaineer’s journey.
Guest, now 49, of Canton, pulled a book off the bookshelf
when he was 8 years old not knowing that it would inspire
him to reach Mount Everest’s highest peak of 29,029 feet.
He read the book “The Epic of Mount Everest: The Historic
Account of Mallory's Expeditions,” written in 1926 by Sir
Francis Younghusband.
The book recounts George Leigh Mallory’s three separate
expeditions to Mt. Everest in 1921, 1922 and 1924. Mallory
vanished on that final expedition. His body was found
in 1999.
“I was captivated on it and did a book report on it,” said
Guest, who is a mechanical engineer who works in industrial
gases. “I was hooked. I wanted to climb Everest. When
I was 12-13, I started hiking … ice and rock climbing.”
His 35 years of experience were his conditioning for his
great expedition up Everest, although the most recent trip
wasn’t his first. He tried climbing the south side of Everest
in 2000, but got injured before reaching the summit.
“I failed because I blew my knee out,” Guest said. “I had
to turn around and go down.”
For his most recent journey, Guest said he chose the
north side of the mountain, which proved to be more difficult.
“I was motivated. I went on the other side this time,”
Guest said. “I didn’t realize how much more dangerous the
north side is.”
The typical six- to eight-week journey took Guest exactly
six weeks to complete. He left April 10, the start of his vacation
from work. The people he summitted with started
their journey in late March.
“I had to do it faster,” he said. “I had to do it smarter.”
Reaching the highest peak
His vacation was scheduled to end May 21, but he didn’t
quite make it.
“I was a little over my holiday time, but my company forgave
me,” he said.
Guest began the journey with a friend of his from Canada,
with whom he climbed Mount McKinley in Alaska last
year.
But he didn’t get to summit with his friend, because his
friend wasn’t getting acclimated to the altitude as fast as
Guest was.
Everest is a deadly beast, and expeditioners must be prepared
and careful when tackling it. Guest said he saw many
people who didn’t get to complete their journey.
“I came across a dead guy on the ropes at 28,700 feet,”
Guest said. “There are a lot of dead people littered on the
slopes. They’ve been there for one year, two years, five
years, 30 years. Above 26,000 feet, they’re everywhere, I
mean everywhere.”
While climbing in the dark, Guest said he saw one man
who they thought was a Chinese man who had died on the
mountain recently. He came across the man who had his
hand exposed, which is a sign of hypothermia.
“When my headlight hit his hand, it bounced back like
light hitting glass,” he said. “I said ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry for
your family.’”
Most people who lose their lives above 26,000 feet are left
there, because it’s not feasible for someone else to carry
them down. Each climber has to be able to help himself to
make it.
“You’re in a very dangerous place. Everest is one dangerous
mountain. It’s where no inexperienced climber should
be,” Guest said. “You can’t be carried by anybody.”
He continued his journey, and, at 9 p.m. May 21, he left the
high camp to head for the summit.
“I was climbing up to the top, and I thought we had left
early,” he said. “Everyone was leaving early because the
weather was collapsing; there was a big nasty storm coming
on the 22nd in the late afternoon.”
On the way up, Guest found himself in trouble. His oxygen
mask froze, and he couldn’t breathe.
“The valve froze up with ice. I couldn’t breathe. I was suffocating,”
he said. “I wasn’t getting a lung full of air oxygen
mixture. I was just getting pure oxygen. I wasn’t
scared. I was concerned.”
At first his Sherpa fixed him up with a new oxygen cylinder,
but that wasn’t the problem. So the Sherpa used his hot
breath to unfreeze the valve.
“Just at the top, my oxygen system failed. The Sherpas
SPECIAL
gathered around me. They gave me a new cylinder. I said
‘that’s not it, I’ve got an iced-up check valve on my mask,’”
he said. “So the Sherpa breathed through the hole in the
mask, and I kinda joked about it because it was the worst
breath I had smelled in my life. This guy probably hadn’t
brushed his teeth in like 50 years.”
As the ice chips hit his face, he kind of cringed about
what he really thought the chips were.
“Up there it’s a third of the atmosphere, and you’re not
thinking right,” he said. “When he blew in the mask, all
these ice chips hit me, but I thought he was eating a granola
bar. I thought he was spitting food in my mask.”
Just as he summitted, his mask froze again. But the pure
sunlight at the Earth’s highest peak was all the help he
needed.
“The radiation is so intense at the high altitude, my mask
defrosted,” he said.
His stay at the top wasn’t a long one, because he saw impending
danger in some clouds.
“I looked over in the distance and saw some very high
clouds in the distance. When you see bad high clouds at that
altitude, it means high winds coming in,” he said, adding
he spent 10-15 minutes taking pictures and headed back
down.
Just before one of the camps, the storm caught up to
them.
“Just above a camp, I got hit by the storm coming in,” he
said, adding winds threw him and his Sherpa about 10 feet
in the air. “We were just lifted off our feet and thrown into
the rocks. The winds pinned us down. I said ‘we have to get
back to our tents.’”
That’s where their fuel, oxygen and water were.
However, when they got there, they found that someone
had stolen their oxygen tanks. But, luckily, his Sherpa, after
a two-hour journey, found three oxygen tanks that he
took, with permission.
“He found a quarter of a butane canister so he could start
on the stove,” Guest said. “He got a bag of ice and melted it,
and we got two cups of water to drink. We had no food, but
we didn’t need food. We hadn’t eaten in 24 hours. We just
needed fluids.”
The rest of the descent to the bottom was a quick one.
“I had to rush back to get to an airstrip to fly back to the
U.S.,” Guest said.
A Mount Everest expedition isn’t a cheap one. Guest’s
journey cost him about $23,000.
There were three Westerners, four Sherpas, one cook and
two cook boys on his expedition.