Heading to the top

Russia's Mt. Elbrus marks Mike Matty's second triumph on quest to become elite summiteer By Debbie Gardner PRIME Editor Many of us are passionate about something. But not many are willing to follow that passion half-way around the world. Or up a glacier. But it seems the prospect of a 10-plus hour plane flight, primitive camping conditions and an icy climb did little to dampen PRIME's financial columnist Michael Matty's, enthusiasm for his latest vacation adventure. If anything, the challenge of testing his mountaineering skills on Russia's tallest peak, Mt. Elbrus, only whetted his appetite for more. By the time many of you read this article, Matty will be heading to the bottom of the world to climb Vincent Massif in Antarctica. And in the not too distant future, he's hoping to tackle Everest. "It does kind-of flow out of his body," Matty's wife, Jeanne, told PRIME during a phone interview about her husband's recently rediscovered interest in hiking and mountain climbing. She said though Matty had taken some orienteering courses in his younger years [he did mention to PRIME an aborted attempt to climb the Matterhorn in Switzerland in his 20s], it was a book he read while vacationing in Puerto Rico a few years back that seemed to rekindle his interest in the sport. "It was called 'A Walk in the Woods,'" Jeanne said, explaining that it chronicled the adventures of two middle-age men who tackled the Appalachian trail. "He said, 'I've always wanted to walk the Appalachian Trail'," she recalled. "And he started with Mt. Greylock [in North Adams]." "He climbed Mt. Washington so many times that first year," she added. "Once Mike has a passion for something, he has a passion for something, and he's very passionate about this." Sharing his passion It was mid-October, a little over a month after Matty's return from his Russian adventure when PRIME met with him in the downtown Springfield offices of St. Germain Investments, where he is vice president of Investments for the firm. And though it was his first day back in the office after a long weekend, Matty said he was happy to squeeze in a few minutes to talk about climbing, and share photos of his most recent trek. We quickly adjourned to his desk (and computer), where he introduced me to fellow hiking buddies and office-mates Tim Suffish, also a vice president and Paul Valickus, president of St. Germain Investments. I was concerned that our conversation might be disturbing to the others (though I really wanted to see the photos!), but Matty said I was in the company of fellow mountaineers, explaining that he and Suffish hike together regularly, and that he and Valickus had originally planned to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro Matty's first international trek together. And he told me about St. Germain's annual office hike up Mt. Washington, something he called a "great bonding experience." But it was Elbrus I'd come to learn about. We turned our attention to the photos, and Matty's story. To Russia, with his love Matty said the trip started with a stay in St. Petersburg with his wife, Jeanne, where the couple did typical tourist things such as visiting the Hermitage and Catherine the Great's fabled winter palace. He said St. Petersburg was also the gathering place for the dozen climbers undertaking the Mt. Elbrus trek, giving Jeanne "an opportunity to meet some of the people I would be spending the week with." Among those he was anxious to have Jeanne meet was Phil Ershler, owner of Washington-based International Mountain Guides, the company he had climbed Kilimanjaro with in the spring of this year. He wanted Jeanne to meet the man who, should he choose to tackle the challenge, would most likely take him up Everest. "Phil and his wife, Susan, are the first husband-and wife team to have climbed all seven [fabled mountaineering] summits," Matty said, emphasizing the couple's credentials and trustworthiness. Elbrus, he then told me "Is one of the seven." The first leg From St. Petersburg Matty and the others boarded a Russian domestic flight to Mineralnie Vody, the starting point of their trip. Given what he had heard about the condition of Russia's domestic air fleet the world's worst air disaster occurred in-country in [2006] Matty admitted this was one of the more worrisome parts of the trip. "We had water dripping [on us] he said. "I was sitting in front of the emergency exit [and] the sign kept flopping down and hitting me in the head. I finally put my hand up and held it in place." From the airport the group drove to Cheget, a village located at an altitude of 7,000 feet on the border of the independent state of Georgia. "Part of the whole thing is you have to get acclimatized to the altitude," he said. "We stayed in Cheget, a once-popular ski resort town, and started doing hikes up to Caucus." The twin-domed dormant volcano that is Mt. Elbrus, he said, has a top elevation of 18,500 feet, with the last 6,000 feet to the summit covered by an icy glacier. "You sleep at a lower altitude and stress your body during the daytime. At the higher altitude you . get a bit of a headache, but you can recover [at night],' he said. During the first hike, to an altitude of 10,000 feet, Matty said he could see "big guns and [Georgian] soldiers doing training exercises." The second hike, he said, gave the climbers an opportunity to reacquaint themselves with some equipment. "We hiked up to the glacier, not just to acclimate [ourselves to the height] but also to work with crampons [snow/ice grips that attach to the bottoms of hiking boots]," he explained. That second hike also introduced the climbers to the vagaries of Russian equipment. "We took a [gondola-style] ski lift part-way up to to get to the edge of the glacier," he said. "But Russian ski lifts are not as well-maintained as ours. We were a little worried." After the ski lift, the climbers took a chair lift to 12,000 feet, the foot of the Mt. Elbrus glacier. That was also when the group saw the converted-diesel-tank hut constructed by Russian guide Igor Tsarouk that would become their home the night before the ascent. "They were pretty primitive, [with] outhouses and no running water. You got your water from runoff from the snowpack," Matty said, adding that they had come up with "45-pound packs loaded with several days of food." They climbed the glacier the next day to the Pashnutov Rocks, located at 13,500 feet, the last of their acclimatizing hikes. The temperature was in the 20s, "not that cold." Matty said "unless it was windy, but you could get some pretty decent winds." The group descended to the huts where they would sleep shoulder-to-shoulder on a stone floor. "You go back, have dinner and try to get a good night's sleep because you're going to get up at 1 a.m. to go to the summit," Matty said. He explained that, much like his trek up Kilimanjaro, the Mt. Elbrus climb began in the middle of the night to ensure the glacier would be stable. Once the sun rose fully and began to warm the surface, the softening ice, not to mention any snow bridges across crevasses, were infinitely more dangerous to cross. The climb But the night of the ascent, the weather got dicey. "The wind came up and we got hailed on," Matty said. "We all thought 'we aren't going tonight'." "I expected in the morning, Phil would say he didn't bother to get anyone up, and that we'd have to wait for a break in the weather," said Matty. But by midnight, the storm blew through. "We opened the door to the hut and it was just a pristine, starry night. The Perseid meteor shower was going on .it was just a phenomenal night to go," Matty said. After fueling up with a little oatmeal, the climbers set out at 1:30 a.m., in the pitch dark, heading back toward the Pashnutov Rocks. "You have head lamps on, crampons on . the weather is in the low teens. You take a break every 90 minutes, and as soon as you sit down, you pull out your down parka," Matty said. As they hiked, their guides, Ershler and Tsarouk, the latter whom Matty said had been "pretty hot stuff a champion climber back in the days of the Soviet Union," kept the climbers together in small groups and marked the trail with reflective wands "in case of a whiteout." By dawn the group had reached the east peak, the lower of the two summits. "You go part-way around, drop into the saddle [a valley] and then head up the west peak, the taller of the two, " Matty said At the last break before topping the summit, Matty said he finally pulled out his sunglasses and sunscreen." "At higher altitude the UV rays can do a number on your eyes, and you get sunburned pretty fast, " he said. By that point, Matty said Ershler and Tsarouk had their groups roped together for safety. "Some of the people were pretty tired and they started to worry. If you put down a crampon wrong, you could fall," Matty said. They topped the summit, at 9 a.m., "maybe 8:30," Matty said. The most dangerous part But that was only half of the trip. After a break to drink in the vista and take photos, the group donned their crampons, grabbed their ice axes and started back down into the saddle. And that, he said, was the most dangerous part of the climb. "The reality is, most people who get hurt [on these climbs] are hurt on the way down," he said. "On the way up you have a hard time, it's intense muscle work and hard to breathe," he said. "But on the way down, your legs are tired and you're trying to brake yourself, hold yourself back." They hiked back to the hut, spent the night, and then finished the decent. "This time the chair lift was not open and we had to hike to the [ski lift]," Matty said. "That's the way things work in Russia." Matty said the group spent the afternoon celebrating their achievement at an open-air eatery in the relatively balmy temperatures of the village. The next day, they headed back up to the glacier. "We had an extra day [built into the trip for weather delays].we spent it ice climbing," he said. Why climb? The photos were breathtaking, the story thrilling, and a bit scary. I asked Matty if he'd left anything at the summit, as his photos had shown previous climbers had done. That day, he said 'no.' But a few days later, he emailed me to say that answer wasn't quite true. "You were the first person to ask, and my gut reaction was 'no,' but it wasn't true, I just wanted to think about it a little" he said in the e-mail. "I carry some very small photos of relatives that have passed away in the past 10 years or so (mom, aunts, grandparents). I leave a small collection of photos at the summits. So yes, I do leave something at the top." "The whole experience of reaching the summit and struggling to get there, day after day, hour after hour is a fairly emotional experience," he continued. "People cry there, wrung out from emotions, physically exhausted, with a lack of sleep from climbing all night." "The idea of putting the photos there gives me some additional motivation at crucial moments when it would otherwise be easy to quit," he said. And he reminded me that I hadn't asked the most crucial question anyone can ask a climber, why climb? "First, I find it's a great complement to my job at St Germain, which can be somewhat stressful," he said. "[Mountaineering] requires the training discipline that forces you to forget about work for an hour or so a day and focus on pure physical activity and endurance. Kevin, the personal trainer I work with, makes sure I have no time to think, only to push! And when you are actually on an expedition, you are too busy managing the details, along with the physical requirements, that you need to stay safe. So it's a great release." "Second," he said, "In my lifetime, I'll never get to go to Mars, and probably not even into space. But I can be part of an even more elite team...the seven summiteers. And it's not because there's any 'death wish'.it's one of the hardest things a human being can do in life. It requires that you push beyond what you thought was your endurance limit. It puts you closer to life, not closer to death. "There's a real sense of accomplishment that you can do anything you put your mind to if you can get yourself to push hard enough and long enough to do it . and then make yourself push a little more when it's needed!" Fewer than 200 people in the world, to date, have topped all seven summits, Matty told me. He's on his way to his personal summit number three this month. PRIME wishes him luck in his quest.