Ever since I came within 280 feet of the summit, I haven't been able to stop thinking about Mt. Everest. It literally haunts me and populates my dreams and each of my every waking moments. I wish I could go back next March already, but alas I can't. BUT.....in 2013, I can.
In fact, here is my plan (I've told a few people about this already, but never publicly): In March 2013 I'll be heading to Tibet to try Mt. Everest from the north side. Some say it's harder, some say it's easier. The fact remains that it's still Everest, and is hard either way. I just want to try something different. It would probably be easier for me to try again from the south side (the side I know well), but I don't like to do things easy :) And anyways, this is all for Alzheimer's Disease awareness....and the more attention I can get for doing something extremely difficult, the more awareness the disease will get.
Anyways, so here is where it gets interesting. Not only will I attempt to summit coming from the north, but I will continue down to the South Summit (roughly where I stopped this year) and then come back over to the north side all in one go, essentially summiting twice in a matter of hours.
This will be insanely difficult, but I believe I can do it. What's more (and if I'm wrong, someone please correct me), no one has ever tried this or successfully completed anything like this before. A few people have tried to do a double traverse (which is where after summiting they go all the way down to base camp on the other side, rest a few days, then come all the way back over to the original side via the summit), but haven't succeeded. While I won't be going down all the way to base camp, I will be trying to do this all in one summit push. So I will have summited Everest twice in a span of a few hours. Pretty darn cool. Plus, I will have completed the rest of what I couldn't complete this year on Everest. Nice.
Stay tuned for more updates. This is gonna be awesome. I haven't decided on the company I will be going yet with because very few teams set up expeditions on the north side (it's kinda like the wild wild west over there) and preparations won't start happening until next year, so we will see. I'd love to go back again with Peak Freaks but I don't think Tim will run an expeditions on the north side because of how difficult it can be to organize logistics over there (maybe he will make an exception??)....otherwise I'm pretty sure I'll be working with a guy named Ronnie Muhl who runs Adventures Global, an expedition company that has successfully run trips on the north side in the past.