Dreaming of cheeseburgers at the top of the world

By Jacob Wheeler
Sun editor
Peter Richards was dying.
He wasn’t spouting blood or hearing his last rites read to him, nor was he watching all 19 years of his young life flash before his eyes. But the Glen Arbor-raised adventurer had lost 15 pounds in just a few days and he couldn’t continue climbing toward the top of the world. Eighteen thousand two hundred feet up at Camp One would have to suffice. The Summit of Mount Everest would have to stay in his imagination.
“I was having dreams about food. All I wanted was an Art’s cheeseburger and a root beer float,” Peter remembers about his trip to the Himalayas last fall. “I’d been eating dried and powdered stuff: granola bars, goo, carbohydrated energy and protein that you chew. But I just couldn’t gain any weight because my metabolism was so fast. I had lost so much weight. My body was going through what would be equivalent to sprinting for days at that altitude. And I couldn’t go on.”

Peter Richards, now 20 years old, who recently finished his sophomore year at Northern Michigan University and is currently spending the summer in Telluride, Colorado, was part of a group of four that attempted last September to reach Everest Camp Three, at a mind-numbing 22,500 feet, where the air is so thin and the climate so harsh that yaks, not humans, are the most dominant species on the food chain. Ascending past Camp Three to the Summit (29,035 feet) costs tens of thousands of dollars and you have to use axes and crampons and rope yourself to someone else in the group because the path is all snow and ice and rock.
The Midwestern delegation was led by Bill Thompson, 40, who owns a sporting goods store in Marquette called Downwind Sports and actually reached Everest Camp Two four years before this trip, a police officer from Green Bay named Joe, 35, and another student from Northern Michigan named JD, 21.
Thompson gave a slideshow presentation at Peter’s Outdoor Recreation class in the fall of 2004, the beginning of his freshman year at the school notorious for adventurers and environmentalists. Climbing Mount Everest happened to be number 15 on Peter’s “list of things to do in my life,” which he had compiled the previous spring. On a whim Peter approached Thompson after the slideshow and told him he wanted to go, as much for the adventure but also because Peter is a photographer who aims to shoot for National Geographic some day. “He laughed at me first,” Peter remembers, “but I was at his store at 8 the next morning to get information for the trip.”
The problem was the cost.
Flying all the way across the Pacific Ocean and into Chinese-occupied Tibet and hiring guides to take them (partway) up the world’s tallest mountain would cost $8 thousand per person — no small feat for a poor college student. So once Peter asked (told, actually) his parents for permission and secured it as long as he could raise the money himself and prove he was healthy enough, the ambitious kid worked four jobs all summer long (including at Empire’s Surf & Kayak Shop) and secured donations from local businesses Boone Docks restaurant and Cherry Republic.
Peter reached an agreement with Boone Docks’ owner Bob Ewing that he would bring home a picture of himself waving a Boone Docks banner at Everest Base Camp, and he trained all summer long, running up and down the Dune Climb to prepare his lungs and heart, and willpower, for Everest. Peter kept a small picture of the great beast of nature in his room in Glen Arbor with the words, “Reach for your dreams” under it, and by the fall he was ready for the great human challenge.
On September 25 of last year the Midwest team left Marquette and traveled through Detroit, Tokyo and Beijing before arriving in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, two days later (not including another day lost to the International Dateline). They stayed in Lhasa for three days to acclimate themselves to the elevation of 12,000 feet and took in the local sites, including visits to the Potala Palace, which was home to His Holiness the Dalai Lama before he was forced into exile in 1959, (the Chinese only keep the place open today because it brings in so much tourism money) and the Ganden monastery outside Lhasa, which was destroyed by Chinese artillery. There the delegation witnessed a debate between Tibetan monks.
From Lhasa they drove for five hours on dirt roads in their minibus, crossing over the Lhasa and Tiger Rivers, to Shigatse, Tibet’s second largest city, in the foothills of the Himalayas. There they visited an 85-foot statue of the future Buddha and stayed for a day in a 10 x 10-foot hole in the wall without electricity before driving up into the mountains to Shegar, or New Tingri. On one mountain pass where they stopped for lunch at 17,120 feet, the clouds parted, giving Peter his first look at mounts Everest and Lhatse.
The men descended to Rongbuk, at 16,350 feet, where they camped outside for the first time, on the gravel plain just below Everest. They were the only westerners there because this was the off-season, and at night they heard wild dogs yipping and fighting each other.
The steep climb from Rongbuk up to Everest Base Camp (16,900) took Peter, Bill, Joe and JD four hours of hiking over shale rocks (“much tougher than the Dune Climb,” our local hero attests), and they camped there for three nights in a little Tibetan tent village to acclimatize themselves and drink as much water as they possibly could. “I had three Nalgene bottles with me and every day I would fill up and down each of them twice. That’s what kept me alive,” Peter remembers.
There at the Base Camp of Mount Everest, in a place that seemed light years from northern Michigan, Peter met a Tibetan guide who carried a backpack with the words “Traverse City” written on it, and that amazing coincidence instilled confidence in him.
But once the group of four began ascending toward Camp One, at 18,200 feet, Peter was reminded how far he was from home. “We just kept hiking, up and up for eight hours, with my pack that probably weighed 40 pounds.” Their only guide at that point was a yak herder and his three beasts of burden that carried most of the group’s haul bags. “There are two walking speeds on that trail: slow yak pace and fast yak pace,” Peter jokes. “The yaks take up the entire path, so you can’t pass them.”
By the time they reached Camp One on the north side of Everest eight hours later, as Peter tells it, “I’d never been so happy to see a barren rock field in my whole life.” Relief was in store for them in the form of a mountain stream of glacial runoff another mile up the path — “the coldest water on earth.” In fact, this water was so pure that Peter filled a jug of it and brought it home with him.
The group of four camped for three days and nights at Camp One, during which time Peter experienced the most bone-chilling nights he could ever imagine. Despite wearing four pairs of socks, all his fleeces, jeans, a down jacket, hat and gloves, all while cocooned inside his sleeping bag, he still froze. The thermometer inside his tent plunged to 20 degrees Fahrenheit.
Meanwhile, Peter was losing weight like a snowman in a sauna. And when it came time to leave for Camp Two, he couldn’t go on. He told his companions to continue on without him. But of course, Bill Thompson’s gang wasn’t going to leave anyone behind.
Despite feeling disappointed and guilty for letting the group down, Peter and his fellow Northern Michigan student JD also looked forward to returning to a more hospitable climate, and their descent to Rongbuk took them only four hours. “No worries,” JD told Peter along the way. “Of course we all wanted to go higher, but this has already been so much fun. And it was smarter to come back down than to go any higher.”
Peter Richards didn’t reach Everest Camps Two or Three, but his trip to the tallest mountain in the world was far from a waste. He still treated himself to countless once-in-a-lifetime experiences. In Rongbuk Peter sent postcards from the highest post office in the world — a 6 x 6-foot corrugated metal tin shed with only a bed for the postmaster, a grumpy and anal retentive man, says Peter, who charged $10 per postcard.
The 19-year-old slowly regained his weight in Rongbuk and Shigatse by shoveling down yak, noodles and steak as fast as his slender frame would permit, and Peter was glad to sleep in a bed again, though it felt as hard as a rock. Back in Lhasa the group toured famous Buddhist monasteries and the Barkhor market square, where everyone walks in a clockwise pattern through the kiosks and shops, and the stupa in the center. Their guide Lakpa introduced them to more monks with whom they dined and drank tea at the high monastery in Lhasa.
And thanks to the extra time the group had in Lhasa, Peter stumbled on what he now considers his calling. The group visited the Dickey Orphanage, Lhasa’s only privately-run orphanage, which is home to 80 kids, one of whom was only 24 days old and had been abandoned in a toilet and saved by Lakpa. Many of these kids had physical handicaps, birth defects or are blind, according to Peter. Not to mention the Tibetan poverty and pressure from the Chinese government for a family to have (or keep) no more than one child. The director of the orphanage was a businesswoman from Lhasa who had met the Dali Lama in India and was encouraged by His Holiness to start an orphanage.
Upon hearing her story, Peter realized that what he wants to do with his own life is document the suffering of orphans all over the developing world through his photojournalism.
In falling short of one great quest, he inadvertently embarked on another.
Not bad for a sophomore in college.