After 37 years of dreaming, training and preparing, I’m going to attempt to reach the summit of Mount Everest.

When I read my first Everest book back in the 1970’s, I was awed by the adventurous spirit and passionate lives of high-altitude climbers. By the 1980’s I was a mountaineer, and by the 1990’s I was climbing high peaks in the Andes and Himalayas. During three decades of work, family and life, snow swept images of Everest drifted in and out of my dreams.

Building resilience

With 32 years of climbing now beneath my harness, I have committed to try climbing Mount Everest in March 2015. For me, climbing Everest is certainly not about “conquering the mountain”. I chuckle when I hear that phrase, as we fragile humans cannot possibly conquer mountains. We are but fleeting visitors on their magnificent slopes. If we are careful and respectful guests, we might be granted with a few magic moments on their sacred summits before we must leave.

Perhaps, climbing Everest is not very much about standing on the summit either. Spending 65 days on the mountain, a year training hard, and 32 years gradually getting ready, just to have a few oxygen-starved minutes on top is a really bad Return On Investment (ROI) on your time!

So, what is this Everest climb all about then?

EVEREST RESILIENCE

Climbing Mount Everest requires that you become as strong and as resilient as you possibly can. Then you climb your best, spending all your strength in the process. Maybe you summit, maybe you don’t. Either way, the harsh challenge will demand all that you have, all that you are. And this fire of experience tempers you into something stronger, someone more resilient. So summit or not, you will have more resilience for every challenge, setback and opportunity that you encounter for the rest of your life.

My attempt to scale the world’s highest mountain is about resilience. The resilience needed to prepare for Everest. The resilience tests that I’ll encounter on Everest. The resilience I can bring back from Everest.

Testing resilience

And I will share all of that with you through blogs, photos, and videos. I will share the adventures, setbacks and successes. I’ll reveal what the mountain exposes about my weaknesses and what Everest reveals about human strengths.

So please follow along on this blog and on my new public Resilience Facebook page here.
Share it with friends who might be facing their own test of resilience.

 

The journey to Mount Everest and back will not be easy. And that is precisely the point.