The Tokyo Declaration...Part 1

It didn’t start out as an anniversary celebration.  The Lady Ottoline Pub doesn’t have a connection to mountaineering, as far as I know.  To W. B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Wolf and D.H. Lawrence, yes.  The Lady herself, an angel to the arts and Central London’s “hostess with the mostest” in the 30’s and 40’s , was said to be the inspiration for Lady Chatterley.  That’s a long way from the early British climbers Mallory and Irvine, who were spending their time at the Royal Geographic Society back then.

Anyway, the Lady Ottoline Pub in London’s Bloomsbury neighborhood, the home of its namesake, is where Jane and I met recently with my good friend Jim Wickwire, retired lawyer and noted first American to climb K2.  It was Sunday and, in England, Sunday roast is mandatory so we enjoyed the mix of beef and pork with our Guinness.

Jim had been on a tour throughout the UK with other celebrated mountaineers who had connections to K2, the second highest mountain and, many say, the most difficult of the world’s 8000 meter peaks.  The tour was a benefit for our British friend Doug Scott’s charity  Community Action Nepal and now Jim was ready to get a good night’s sleep and head back to Seattle.

And finally to the anniversary.  As we reminisced over dinner and counted the passage of time, we realized it has been just over 20 years since a group of us ventured to Tokyo and Mt. Fuji for the fifth edition of the Mountain Summit. A New York Times reporter friend of mine suggested that the mountains were very good at getting bad press for the accidents and tragedies that occur on them. So why not get lovers of the mountains together with journalists and talk about meeting the challenges safely and  rewardingly.

We put out the call and the leaders of the climbing community at the time all responded.  From Reinhold Messner and Chris Bonington to Sir Edmund Hillary, John Roskelley and famed sled-dog racer Susan Butcher, who took a dog team to the summit of Denali, everyone was anxious to put some perspective on adventuring in the mountains. Even rock stars like Lynn Hll and France's Catherine Destivelle joined the enclave. Initially we took over the Lodge at Paradise on Mt. Rainier, then as years progressed, Dick Bass, the first person to climb the Seven Summits, hosted us at his Snowbird Resort in Utah.  When Robert Redford heard we were right next door to Sundance, he invited us there. Our timing was impeccable and the media responded as well.

USA Today, Time magazine, the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, NPR and ABC Sports, among many others, sent reporters to listen and discuss the mountains of the world. Jack Skow, writing for Time magazine, reported “The first Mountain Summit conference ever convened among world-class climbers has been calm. Forty foot chimneys rise above the huge stone fireplaces at each end of the great hall here at Paradise Lodge, and thus far, oddly, no one has climbed them…Everybody is just talking, quite peaceably…What drives (the adventurers) to exasperation is talk of more regulations to snarl freedom of movement in (the mountains of the world).”

When Yuichiro Miura, better known as “The Man Who Skied Down Everest” showed up in Sundance, he and I had an instant connection. He has ski schools in Japan and takes Japanese kids around the world to play golf and ski. An amazing athlete, even now at 82, he’s planning another trip to climb Mt. Everest. He felt it was very important to carry the message of the Mountain Summit to Japan and as we talked the Tokyo Mountain Summit was born.

The Summit reached every corner of the country through live coverage on Tokyo Broadcasting TV and the mountaineers and adventurers were celebrities everywhere we went.  We were front page news.  We walked around the city to drink up the culture of that amazing country. People lined up for photos and autographs when we climbed Mt. Fuji to pay our respects at the prayer temple.  We rode the bullet train, sailed in a tall ship and ate an amazing sushi dinner as we made the climbers visible from one end of the country to the other.