The best cup of tea...

The tea is black and very strong. Gombu always brought it in a tinfoil ball. Each time we met over the past 30 years or so, he would bring me a “ball of tea”. He liked the big Hershey chocolate bars that I gave him and we both enjoyed exchanging these small gifts.

Sherpa Nawang Gombu, the first person to climb Mt. Everest twice, died over the weekend and, yet another of the people who have had great influence on my life is gone. We met through our long-time friend, famed mountaineer Lou Whittaker. Lou and Gombu had a newly established relationship with JanSport backpacks and I was the corporate liaison from Cummins Engine Company that owned the budding backpack company when we first met on Mt. Rainier.

Gombu’s English was not that good then and, frankly, not much better when we were together last on the Mountain a year or so ago. But communicating was never a problem. His big broad smile told you very quickly that things were fine and, if he scowled, you knew something was wrong. Even better, he would make it right very quickly and there would be that smile again.

Rainier Mountaineering guide service relished Gombu’s summer visits. He came as often as he could and would stay as long as time and weather would allow. He was the guide’s guide…an energizer bunny of sorts…who never ran out of stamina or oxygen. I still smile at the film of Gombu’s ascent of Mt. Everest with Lou’s brother, Jim. The first thing he does when they get on top is light up a cigarette…not PC, for sure, but definitely a testament to his fortitude.

Fortunately, I got to travel with him and Lou in the Himalayas. Those mountains were his home, like the Cascades and Olympics are for us. He loved it there and was in his element. He was a major player in opening the trekking and climbing routes that are now flourishing in the Himalayas. Sir Edmund Hillary gave great praise to Gombu and his family for their efforts at mountain conservation when we were working on the 50th Anniversary of Hillary’s climb of Everest.

During the 1980’s and 90’s, I put together an annual event called the Mountain Summit. It was hosted on Mt. Rainier, at Snowbird and Sundance and Tokyo too. All the top mountaineers of the day from Reinhold Messner to Tim McCartney Snape and Ed Viesturs came together to talk about access issues in the mountains of the world. With the possible exception of Rick Ridgeway, Gombu was the most diminutive guy there. But his presence was big and when he talked, everyone listened. In one of the sessions, we got into a discussion about taking care of the mountains for future generations. Gombu spoke up, after a little prodding, and said, “If you love the mountains, they will love you.” That pretty much said it all.  The rest of the discussion was just rhetoric.

Nawang Gombu was a great man and a great friend. His legend and his memory will live on. His obituary says he was 79 but he had the heart of a teenager. News reports are calling him a "Tiger of the Snow", which may be true but I think it would embarrass him a bit. What is for certain is that he was a leader among his people, the Sherpa, and a highly respected ambassador of the mountains he loved. I miss him already as I sip his tea, which I will now use quite sparingly, and think of our quiet times together high in the snow. I know he’s still climbing.

Encore

Today is the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated.  Last year, I posted my recollections of that day for the first time in this blog.  My memories have not changed.  They may even be a little more vivid.  I'm re-posting that piece.  It hasn't changed in the past year but I may have...and so may you. Read it, if you like.  Martin Luther King made me look at our world differently.  Out of those troubled times, he made me stronger. He made our country stronger.

http://extremedanmc.blogspot.com/2010/04/april-5the-day-after.html

Speaking of the Final Four

Tonight’s Final Four match-up between Butler University and University of Connecticut should be a great game. I was raised on Indiana Basketball and, as far as I’m concerned, Butler was the real winner last year and now deserves to take the title home. Unfortunately, deserving to win and actually winning in basketball, especially this level of basketball, do not always go together. In any event, I’ll be there cheering on the Butler Bulldogs until the final buzzer.

But today, I’m thinking about a different Final Four on a day that came close to changing our country in a very dramatic way. It was a Monday just like this one in Seattle, cool and cloudy. My colleague picked me up in his van at about 11am as we headed for the airport and a client trip to Austin, Texas. He had the radio tuned to a news station and, as we drove to the airport, we heard the first report that President Reagan had been shot coming out a hotel in Washington, DC.

We cringed as we thought that March 30, 1981 would be yet another of those days indelibly branded into our psyche’s forever. Until that moment, all I had been thinking about was getting to Austin in time to watch the Indiana Hoosiers take on North Carolina in Philadelphia for their second national championship under coach Bobby Knight.

A significant aside to the game and the shooting was that the President’s attack was covered by Ted Turner’s 9-month-old television experiment called Cable News Network, now CNN. Never before did we have such instant, in-depth coverage of a breaking news event, much of it directly from the scene. You literally couldn’t turn it off. I watched the whole basketball game from my hotel room, switching back and forth between it and CNN’s coverage of the shooting aftermath. What an amazing advance in broadcast news…one that has changed television forever.

Fortunately, we arrived in Austin in ample time to get checked in and find some carry out before the tip-off. And more importantly, both events of that day ended happily, for me at least. President Reagan made a healthy recovery and the Hoosiers beat North Carolina 63 to 50. It did not become a day that “will live in infamy” in our lives. But it’s one that I remember quite vividly, along with the huge Tex-Mex burrito that I ate in my room while watching the game.

Tonight the Butler Bulldogs will carry the flag of all those small schools that are populated with very talented and intelligent student athletes who deserve to be recognized on a national basis. GO BULLDOGS!!!