A whole world down below
Alone with their thoughts, two women find solace high in the mountains
No mountain is the same, climbers will tell you, but they all speak the same language. There’s the sound of the wind, from a gentle murmur to a charging freight train. And there are sounds no climber wants to hear: the heavy thud of falling rocks or the rainpelting nylon tents at base camp.
 |
And then … silence … a whole mountain underneath well-planted feet, a vast sea of white and blue that vanishes into the horizon, a whole world down below, living and breathing, and up above, kissing the morning sun, mountain and climber briefly speak as one.
Barbara Gregory and Lynn Lippert grew up with massive peaks of eternal snow in their backyards—Mount Rainier in Gregory’s and Mount Hood in Lippert’s. If you grow up by the ocean, you swim. If you grow up near mountains, you climb. It’s as easy as that, the women say, and a bit more complicated as well.
Gregory turned 50 in July. Reaching such a milestone might depress some people. Not Gregory. For her, every minute counts. She has been a hiker and climber all her life, but these days she climbs with a clear purpose: reaching the top of Mount Elbrus, an 18,510-foot peak in Russia’s Caucasus mountain range.
Earlier this summer, Gregory filled her backpack with 60 pounds of water in large containers and hiked straight to the top of Mount Si near Seattle in three hours and 15 minutes. The trail is a bear of a climb, gaining about 3,100 feet in just four short miles. Later in the week, with 25 pounds on her back, she climbed 300 steps over and over until her trainer told her to stop about an hour later. Finally, in late June, she tested her fitness on Mount Baker, a 10,778-foot ice-cream cone notorious for its fickle weather. She came within 300 feet of the top before her team ran out of time and was forced to turn back.
In her blog, she wrote: "I believe that life often hands me things I need to work on most, so I got a dose of ‘living with the second guessing’ with this climb. What if we had waited and gone overnight as the conventional wisdom suggests? What if both climbing guides had been available for the summit? What if my Gore-Tex layers had been more reliable and we had been able to put them on in the sleety weather? What if, what if, what if? I’ll have to find a way to live with the ‘what ifs’ and just let the outcome be OK as it is."Lippert is a 67-year-old with the sinewy frame of a climber who has been trekking to the tops of mountains for 40 years. She learned quickly that careful preparation, good judgment, good decisions and yes, luck, determine a person’s success on the mountain. And she never speaks of conquering a peak, because the mountain will often have the final say.
"Why do I climb? Because I enjoy the beauty of it," she said, as if reaching lofty peaks was merely ordinary. But don’t mistake her nonchalant answer for a similar attitude. Climbing is a serious avocation for her, never taken lightly.
 Barbara Gregory and daughter Madeline |
Her sight is set on the Mexican Pico de Orizaba, an approximately 18,500-foot dormant volcano whose top she wants to reach sometime in October. In preparation, she has already tackled Mount Hood and Mount St. Helens, reaching a level of conditioning through the summer that would be the envy of any athlete.
Many people who don’t understand climbing or climbers assume they must be thrill-seekers with a death wish. Often, many climbers can’t find the words to explain their passion, leaving others to do it for them.
"The pleasure of risk is in the control needed to ride it with assurance so that what appears dangerous to the outsider is, to the participant, simply a matter of intelligence, skill, intuition, coordination—in a word, experience," wrote Al Alvarez, a climber, writer and poet. "Climbing, in particular, is a paradoxically intellectual pastime, but with this difference: You have to think with your body. Every move has to be worked out in terms of playing chess with your body. If I make a mistake the consequences are immediate, obvious, embarrassing and possibly painful. For a brief period I am directly responsible for my actions. In that beautiful, silent, world of mountains, it seems to me worth a little risk."
"During that year of cancer treatment, I dared that French fry and burger to kill me first. Today, it’s been almost 10 years of being cancer-free," Gregory said. "Cancer changes the scale of what you think is hard."
 Linn Lippert |
"If cancer teaches you anything, it’s that it’s your life," she said. "To be able to contribute, that has value for me—that has meaning." And so, Mount Elbrus waits. "I feel I have done the necessary work. The rest is up to the mountain."
The same is true for Lippert. "I had two primary cancers, in 1997 and 2000, and now I’m facing a recurrence of cancer in my bones," she said.
"What an odd coincidence that the cancer I thought I had beaten twice has returned," she said. "And the mountain [Orizaba] whose summit eluded me on last year’s climb is in my sights this year. Perhaps it’s a message. Until we find a cure for cancer, until we support the research that will find a cure, there will always be summits that elude us."
Lippert has a good prognosis. She believes she’ll beat the cancer in her bones. And she believes she’ll be standing on top of Orizaba come fall. Cancer is just part of her personal story.
"There are days it bums me out," Lippert said. And then she finds herself above the clouds on a mountain far from home, and the cancer fades into memory—like fresh snow carried away by a gust of wind.
Barbara Gregory and Lynn Lippert are among many outdoor enthusiasts who are part of the Hutchinson Center’s Climb to Fight Breast Cancer®. Many others are ascending some of the world’s most breathtaking peaks in honor or memory of loved ones who have battled breast cancer. They are all raising funds for breast cancer research at the Hutchinson Center. For more information, visit www.fhcrc.org/climb, e-mail cfbc@fhcrc.org or call (206) 667-1398.
