Scaling a mountain for cancer research

Published 11:48 am Thursday, October 2, 2008

NORTH BEND – North Bend resident Debbi Bailey gained some perspective while climbing Mount Adams last month.

Staring down at her feet in the early morning hours of her ascent up the state’s second-highest peak, Bailey thought about how scared she was. Her headlamp illuminated just enough darkness for her to see where she was stepping and she came to a point where the safe, crunching noise of her steps in snow was replaced by the less-than comforting dull sound of walking on solid glacier. She looked down, saw a blue sheet of ice and started to panic.

“I remember thinking at that moment that this is nothing in comparison to what some women have gone through,” she said. “I’m scared, but they have to be terrified, and they have no choice and I am up there by choice to help that.”

Bailey gathered her courage to summit the mountain, along with six other climbers who made the same promise to themselves and to everyone fighting cancer. Bailey and her fellow mountaineers completed the climb as part of a fund-raiser for the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, which has organized similar climbs annually since 1998.

One of Bailey’s climbing comrades was Sarah Moore, another North Bend resident. Moore had never climbed a mountain before but wanted to support medical research. She moved to the Valley two years ago and saw the climb as a way to meet more people and raise money for a worthy cause.

At the Sunrise base camp on the Yakima Indian Reservation on Mount Adams, the group completed a “Snow School” where they learned how to use their axes and gear, and then went to bed. When the group was awakened at 2 a.m. by their guides to start climbing, they were told they’d be able to see the Northern Lights. Bailey thought it was a ploy to get the climbers out of their sacks, but sure enough the group emerged from their tents to see white streaks across the sky.

“I had never seen it before,” she said. “It looked like white clouds across the sky.”

As the group climbed the Mazama Glacier, they also got to see a brilliantly-illuminated Venus and watch the sun rise. When the group summited Mount Adams’ 12,276-foot peak at 10 a.m., they enjoyed the views of nearby Mount Rainier, Mount St. Helens and even Mount Hood in Oregon. Once they took their photos, though, they realized they were only halfway home and started the descent back down to base camp. It was an unusually hot weekend that caused the snow to melt more quickly than anticipated during the day, so the guides took the group down by way of an alternate route than the one originally planned. The group trekked over pumice (old lava beds from the dormant volcano they were climbing) and arrived back at camp at 3 p.m. They packed up and got back to their cars at 8 p.m.

“It was very exhausting,” Moore said. “It was quite a day.”

Everything about the trip was a challenge. Each person had to raise $3,000 for the trip and no one on the climb was an expert. Bailey had climbed Mount Baker for the cancer research center before and had become so terrified she’d told herself she was never going to do it again. To train for the climb, Moore spent weeks going up and down Mount Si.

There also was an emotional toll as well. Everyone on the climb was climbing for, or in memory of, someone with cancer whose names were written on pink ribbons that were attached to the climber’s gear. Bailey started doing the cancer climbs in memory of her mother-in-law, who died three years ago of breast cancer. Two of the people Moore raised money in honor of died before she could finish the climb.

Bailey and Moore said it was that kind of stress and hard work, however, that brought the climbers, all strangers, together so quickly. They said their guides from Portland Parks and Recreation were excellent, and everyone lent each other a helping hand or encouragement when needed.

“You are meeting everyone in extreme conditions and seeing how everybody forms as a team to get it done,” Bailey said.

While she again contemplated never climbing a mountain while on Mount Adams, Bailey’s hindsight made her rethink such a self-imposed dictum. Now Bailey is even considering a climb of 19,340-foot Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, which would nated from the much flatter lands of England, said she has not climbed her last mountain.

“I’m hooked on this mountain climbing,” Moore said.

Bailey said the individual reasons everyone climbed Mount Adams were different, but they were all part of a common cause that inspired her to keep trekking up the mountain, even when she thought she was too scared to go on.

“Here we are on this common ground. We all have the same goal to summit and the same goal to raise money for the cause,” Bailey said. “And everybody has a story as to why they are doing it, and everybody has been touched in a way that puts them in a position out of their comfort zone to do it.”

Ben Cape can be reached at (425) 888-2311 or by e-mail at ben.cape@valleyrecord.com.