A grueling journey

Fifty-three years ago, Russ Staples made history as one of the first Americans to hike to Mount Everest’s base camp.

The Rochester resident says he’s still guided today by the lessons he learned trekking to that barren, 17,800-foot-high patch of Nepal in sneakers and a borrowed backpack. Those lessons, according to Staples, are particularly poignant as booming Everest tourism increasingly threatens the very things and people that impacted him the most.

“Walking back the next day was when I started reflecting — ‘Is that all there is? That barren spot, that we got to there and we’re going home? Is that what this trip was all about?’” said Staples. “I realized then that it wasn’t the goal that was important, but the journey. It was getting there and all of the adventure we had while getting there.”

Staples and Ken French were a pair of 22-year-old University of New Hampshire grads serving in the Peace Corps in India in 1967 when, on a whim, they set out on their ill-equipped, ill-planned and ill-funded trek. They enlisted two Sherpa guides to help them through what ended up being a grueling 27-day, 400-mile round-trip trek from Kathmandu to base camp.

Given that trip was such an unlikely one, Staples said it’s only fitting that publishing a book about the journey has unfolded in unexpected ways since he started it as a way to share his Everest travel journal with his family.

The first-time author has already drawn praise in mountaineering circles for his memoir, “My Everest Odyssey,” and next week he’ll set out on his next adventure: a book tour across seven New Hampshire libraries and counting, starting with Dover Public Library at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 29.

“Everest is a topic that evokes something in people,” Staples, now 74, said while reflecting on the impact Everest had on him. “I was just awestruck. I had never been to the Rockies… I still think driving up through Crawford Notch is incredible. You’re just mesmerized by everything (on Everest). It wasn’t difficult to let your mind drift back in time to a point where you thought you might be the first westerner to walk among these mountains and mist-shrouded monasteries tucked up here near Tibet. There was nobody there, except for the four of us.”

Today, that Everest is largely gone.

When Staples, French and guides Mima and Ang Dawa trekked to base camp in 1967, only 24 people had reached the summit of the mountain’s 29,029-foot peak across six expeditions. News coverage of Sir Edmund Hillary’s conquest and the 1963 American expedition had captivated and inspired Staples and French well before trekking to Hillary’s basecamp became en vogue in the 1970s.

Now, there are 15 to 30 summit expeditions each year and roughly 40,000 people annually trek to base camp. Many fly in near base camp, rather than make the long hike up to base camp like Hillary and Staples did.

In spring 2019, the party-like tourism splashed across headlines worldwide because of images of 1,100 climbers waiting in a line at the summit, experts warning about the significant human waste left behind by inexperienced travelers, and melting ice revealing many of the bodies left behind on the mountain.

Small villages, some of which didn’t have buildings, warmly welcomed Staples and his companions in 1967. Many of those villages no longer exist, or have been irreparably changed by resorts, chain restaurants, retail shopping and other industries happy to oblige deep-pocketed travelers, Staples said.

“Nepal at some point is going to have to limit the number of people. You can’t turn the clock back,” Staples said. “They should put a moratorium on expeditions to the summit and trekkers, to just stop, think about the impact, and come up with ways to clean up the waste that’s there now and how to deal with what’s coming. They have to lessen the impact. It’s the same thing that’s happening with our national parks now.”

Staples takes pride in the fact his book shares parts of Nepal lost to time and economic growth. His memoir does so using the meticulous details he jotted down in a travel journal every day of his trek, and through the six rolls of photos he shot using a Kodak Instamatic along the way.

In addition to questions about the landscapes and the most challenging aspects of the trip, Staples said he’s often asked if he’d ever want to go back to Everest. He said he’s also often asked if he ever regrets not continuing up to the summit.

Staples said he’d have a hard time seeing Everest today because of the tourism-fueled changes, and that he has no regrets about not trying to reach the summit because it was never his goal.

Still, he said he can’t help but wonder what adventure lies in less-visited corners of the region.

“You can still find an experience there, but I would say there are other places besides base camp where you can find the type of experience that I had,” Staples said, referring to moderately challenging hiking trails that lead into Nepal from surrounding areas. “I think if I were to go back for a similar experience in Nepal, I would go somewhere else other than base camp.”