For Climbers, Rewards Outweigh Risks

Dec. 17, 2006 — -- At the Mountain Tracks Ski and Snowboard Shop in the shadow of Mount Hood, the fate of three climbers lost thousands of feet above weighs heavy on everyone's mind -- but despite the dangerous search-and-rescue mission nearby, climbers continue to gear up as normal.

Store owner Glenn Nilsen, a veteran climber himself, said the rewards outweigh the risks of the sport -- something many climbers feel non-climbers don't fully understand.

"The challenge is what drives folks to climb mountains," Nilsen said. "It's just a, 'Do it.' Taking an extremely tough route in the winter is just a really big challenge."

Veteran climbers Jerry Cooke, Brian Hall and Kelly James have been missing for over a week after getting caught in a nasty winter storm atop the mountain.

Nilsen said just about every other person stopping in his store is coming to hear the latest on the missing trio.

"Everybody's concerned," Nilsen said. "We're all hoping … that they're somehow going to come out of their snow caves and it's going to end happy."

But climber Charlie Shimanski agreed that the benefits of a tough climb outweigh the risks.

"I love the view from the tops of mountains," he said. "If you can ever get to the top of a big peak, the view is amazing."

As vice president of the Mountain Rescue Association, Shimanski has been involved in hundreds of mountain rescues in the last 20 years. He knows climbers aren't all crazy.

"Public misperception is that climbers have a death wish and want to push the envelope until they're almost dead," he said.

He feared the sport is being misrepresented in light of the Mount Hood emergency and the case of another missing duo of American climbers in China. In that case, Christine Boskoff and Charlie Fowler were supposed to return on Dec. 4, but haven't been heard from since mid-November.

Shimanski said that while the two incidents happened to coincide, accidents in his sport are rather rare.

"This certainly is an anomaly," he said. "For every million days of climbing, you're going to have a couple of days where someone has an accident. … This is not a typical week."