On top of the world

Somewhere between the Balcony and the South Summit, Carol Masheter, 61, crawled up over an icy ledge on her hands and knees in the dead of night May 23.

She was an hour behind the rest of her group and still hours from the summit of Mount Everest.

"I thought I just couldn't do this," Masheter said.

Masheter tried to protect her eyes so they wouldn't freeze shut as the snow and wind blasted her face. One of the sherpas asked her if she was OK. She was silent. Then the sherpa followed a tradition that Nepalese use with friends and family.

"He touched his forehead to mine," Masheter said. Her eyes teared up as she recalled the experience. "We just stayed there for about 10 seconds. It felt like an hour."

After gathering strength from the sherpa, Masheter said she felt she could continue with the climb.

"So on we went," Masheter said.

The moonlight shone down as she followed the line of head lamps leading to the top of the world.

The scene was quite different from those depicted in the Eddie Bauer catalogs, which Masheter looked at as a teenager in Southern California.

"They had models in parkas and sharp pointy things on their boots, standing on the tops of mountains," Masheter said. "I thought, wow, that is cool."

Reaching the top of such a mountain seemed out of reach for "a mere mortal" like Masheter.

"That's where the seed was sown," she said.

In 1997, Masheter did not get tenure at the University of Utah. She had loved teaching, she said, but she decided it was a good time to build a different set of skills. Her resume began filling up with a list of mountains she climbed.

"I didn't want the mountaineering door to close for me," Masheter said, who was 50 at the time.

After her friend hiked Cho Oyu, the sixth highest mountain in the world, Masheter remembered thinking, "real people can do this."

They can, of course, after much preparation.

"I am disciplined in my training, but I am nothing special," said Masheter who rides her bike to and from her work everyday. Taking the elevator is "against her religion."

Before Everest, Masheter trained to the level of a college athelete. Eventually, Masheter climbed Cho Oyu, (26,906 feet) in Nepal during fall 2005.

"After Cho Oyu," Masheter said, "I figured I was done. It kicked my butt."

But she wasn't done. She was only humbled, saying her perspective of big mountains had changed.

Masheter went to Brazil to climb Aconcagua (22,840 feet), the highest peak in the Americas in January 2007. Then she climbed Kilimanjaro (19,340 feet) in Africa for the second time in her life in December 2007 to test the training program she was using to prepare for Everest.