Climbing feat offers life lesson

He froze in Antarctica and puked with the mountain sickness in Tibet and stared down the barrel of a machine gun in Indonesia and battled the high winds of Kenya on his way to scaling the famed Seven Summits — the tallest peaks on seven continents — so inevitably Chris Nichols is asked the old question.

Why? Why do something that is so difficult and painful?

His answer is better than Hillary's. "It puts everything in perspective," says Nichols, a Reno attorney from Utah.

It's funny how all that suffering brings contentment. He's seen the world through his climbing adventures and witnessed poverty at its worst and nature at its most formidable. "You realize how insignificant you are and that your problems back home are meaningless," he says. Life in America is so soft that you need to throw obstacles in your path — even mountains — for a physical and mental challenge that will bring your life into focus and demand all your faculties.

The 50-year-old Nichols — raised in Ogden, educated at Weber State and the University of Utah — has stood on the roof of the world to gain his perspective. He climbed Denali in Alaska, Aconcagua in Argentina, Vinson in Antarctica, Everest in Tibet, Elbrus in Russia, Carstensz in Indonesia and Kilimanjaro in Kenya. Stacked on top of one another, they would reach into space some 140,000 feet (or about 27 miles). Airlines typically cruise at 35,000 feet. And this is ignoring the many other peaks he has climbed.

Dick Bass, owner of Snowbird Ski Resort, was the first to conceive the idea of the Seven Summits and in 1985 became the first to pull off the feat. Since then, others have done so, but, due to logistics, effort and cost, it remains an exclusive club of a little more than 300.

Nichols never meant to do it. He was a purist, climbing for the love of the sport, not to tally up peaks like baseball statistics. He climbed Denali in 2000 never thinking it was the beginning of something. He went to Argentina to climb Aconcagua but planned to follow a more technical route that wouldn't take him to the top. Bad weather forced him to abandon the technical climb and instead he topped the mountain.

He flew to Antarctica mostly for the rare opportunity of seeing that part of the world. He climbed several peaks there before deciding that as long as he was in the neighborhood he might as well climb Vinson, another member of the Seven Summits list, because it was so difficult and expensive to reach.