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'Three Cups of Tea' author finds new mountains to climb
Greg Mortenson Reflects on Lessons of Travel, Looks Ahead to 2009
The former Army medic, 51, who will receive Pakistan's highest civil award next March, has even been tapped by the U.S. military. He has lectured at the Air Force, Naval and West Point academies, and he has shared his philosophy of curtailing Islamic extremism through education with such Pentagon brass as Gen. David Petraeus; Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Adm. EricLarson, SOCOM commander (Special Operations).
The soft-spoken, 6-foot-4 Mortenson hasn't strapped on a crampon since his fateful 1993 trip. (Along with writing hundreds of letters and collecting pennies from his mother's Wisconsin grade-school students, Mortenson's initial fundraising included selling his beloved climbing equipment and an aging Buick he had nicknamed "La Bamba"). But the onetime adventure tour leader says he still has an incurable wanderlust, and the travel lessons learned on his transformational journey are still with him.
When he launched the K2 expedition in honor of his younger sister Christa, a frequent travel companion until her death of an epileptic seizure on her 23rd birthday, "I was singular in my focus to reach the summit. It was linear and logical, and very Western," Mortenson says in Washington while juggling a family vacation with Pentagon and Capitol Hill briefings about his foundation's work.
"When I failed (less than 2,000 feet shy of the summit), it was humbling," he says. "But that failure opened my eyes to this incredibly beautiful area and the people who live there. If I'd reached my goal, none of it would have happened."
Too many adventure travelers, Mortenson says, "try to program too much. We become insular and encapsulated. … We have our Gore-Tex and our satellite phones and our antibiotics, and we're always following an agenda.
"I'm not saying you need to travel the way I do," says Mortenson, whose exploits have included surviving an eight-day armed kidnapping by the Taliban in Pakistan's northwest frontier tribal areas and escaping a firefight with feuding Afghan warlords by hiding under putrid animal hides in a truck heading for a leather-tanning factory.
