WARWICK -- If everything goes perfectly, 11 months from now Timothy Warren will be lying on his back in a tent 26,000 feet above sea level, gasping for breath in the freezing air and forcing himself to take food and water.
Assuming the wind dies below 50 mph, he will leave his tent and start a final, 12-hour slog to the summit of the most famous mountain in the world.
If everything goes perfectly -- and that's a big if -- Warren, 46, will achieve his goal of becoming the first Rhode Islander to reach the summit of Mount Everest, the peak in Nepal's Himalayan mountain range that is as deadly as it is alluring.
It's the toughest climb that Warren, a Warwick chiropractor and a resident of Saunderstown, has ever attempted -- the toughest thing he's tried in his life, period.
He knows there's a good chance he won't make it to the top; only 30 percent of climbers do. He also knows there's a chance he could die up there; the mountain has claimed the lives of 200 climbers. More than 120 corpses lie along the route to the top, frozen monuments to the mountain's weapons.
Warren is confident he can get to the summit and return alive. He has already climbed Mount McKinley, in Alaska; Mount Kilimanjaro, in Tanzania, and Mount Aconcagua, in Argentina. Those are three of the highest peaks in the world, part of the famous "seven summits" that only the world's greatest climbers have conquered.
"I feel very lucky that I get to do this," Warren said from his Post Road office, while demonstrating how to use a spiked climbing boot. "Looking down on the clouds, man, nobody gets to see this stuff. It's amazing."
Warren says he's no thrill seeker, and that the dual prospects of danger and death don't entice him. Some climbers get an adrenaline rush when they reach a mountain's peak. Not he. He spends 10 minutes up there, takes the requisite pictures and heads down. He's in it for the sense of accomplishment, the feeling of satisfaction that comes from conquering the mountain, the elements and his own limitations.
"I don't expect this to greatly change me. I don't think that I'm going to be a better person or have a great epiphany. But I think it will be a great experience. I know I will be inspired by it, and I hope others will be inspired by that," he said.
It wasn't always this way. Warren started climbing 10 years ago, in small rock-climbing gyms. He did not appear to be a natural. Even those small heights seemed daunting. He tried not to look down.
"My first few attempts at rock-climbing in an indoor gym were terrifying," he acknowledged.
He really got into climbing after he read John Krakauer's 1998 book, Into Thin Air, which chronicles the deadly climbing season of 1996, when 10 climbers died in a terrible storm that raked Everest for days.
Still, he was a natural athlete, a former marathoner and triathlete, and he learned to use the fear to excite and motivate himself. He sought out local mentors, and found fellow climbers in the Boston area and in New Hampshire. He climbed Mount Washington, in New Hampshire, in increasingly worse conditions each time, and then joined climbing groups to do weeklong climbs on Mount Rainier, in Washington. He soaked up what the guides told him. Soon, he was good enough to climb most mountains with only a small team.
There was still terror, though. Fear of not being good enough, of being unprepared, of making that one critical mistake.
"Every climb, you get to a point where you're saying, 'What am I doing here, this is nuts, get me out of here,"' he said.
He hit that point on the way up Mount McKinley in 2004 as he was walking up the steep, thin path to the 20,000-foot summit. It was just a couple of feet wide, with sheer drops on either side, and the winds were screaming.
"It was 5,000 feet down on one side, and 3,000 feet down on the other side, and I was flipping out. But I was doing it. I kept on doing it, and then it was over."
The effort required was all-encompassing. When he goes on a climb, Warren must either close his practice or get other chiropractors to fill in, sometimes for months. There has been an impact on his personal life as well, says the divorced father of one.
"In the romantic area, they think it's a great idea -- until the time comes when you have to go," he said. "I'd be dishonest if I said your romantic relationships didn't suffer."
Warren is training 14 hours a week now, and will work his way up to 18 as the climb nears. Biking is great training for climbing -- the long, slow hills mimic the ascent of a mountain and he has developed a series of exercises to train his muscles in climbing actions, which he performs in a barn behind his home. With a touch of irony, he calls the barn the "pleasure dome," and retreats there to punish his body and hone his technique.
He simulates using his ice ax to climb sheer rocks faces, and using crampons -- spikes that attach to boots -- to walk up the sides of mountains.
He practices pressure breathing: pursing the lips and then blowing out forcefully, to create a vacuum in the lungs that sucks in more air. He works on the rest step: a stilted way of walking that relies more on skeletal structure than on the muscles. It's slower than using mostly muscles to walk, but saves energy because the muscles aren't forced to burn oxygen. When you're carrying 80 pounds on your back in air with very little oxygen, efficiency matters.
Sir Edmund Hillary was the first to reach the top of Everest, in 1953. Since then, more than 1,200 climbers have followed him. The route has become clearer, and there's now a well-worn ascent routine to follow.
Warren will leave for Nepal on March 19, 2007, and meet his guides and assistants there. He will have Sherpas, local experts who guide climbers and carry supplies. He will have yaks to carry some of the oxygen tanks and other equipment up to some of the lower base camps.
The ascent is expected to take two months, with much of that time devoted to acclimating to the altitude and practicing small climbs in preparation for the summit push. The phase from the first base camp, at 17,550 feet, to the final resting point, at 26,000 feet, to the summit, at 29,035 feet, will last two weeks, beginning in mid-May, when the jet stream moves away from the mountain and leaves the summit relatively peaceful. Winds at the top will still howl, the temperatures will still dip far below zero and there will be precious little oxygen, but that's a bit better than the summit the other 50 weeks of the year.
All of this is expensive. The Nepalese government charges $10,000 for a permit to get onto the mountain. With airplane flights, food, equipment, guides and permits, Warren expects the trip will cost $100,000.
Warrren's playing up his prospective status as the first Rhode Islander, as well as the first chiropractor, to climb Everest to attract sponsors. (In 1996, Mark Pfetzer, then 16, of Middletown, reached the final base camp but was forced to descend because of the same vicious storm that was chronicled in Krakauer's book.)
He is leafleting local companies, offering various sponsorship opportunities. For instance, he's offering to fly a company's banner on Everest's flank for $500. He'll take your handwritten message to the highest point for $15.
You can also adopt a yak for $250, an option that, according to Warren's flyer, "includes a picture of Dr. Tim with these hairy Himalayan beasts of burden in an 8x10 frame -- a must-have memento!"
It's 11 months until his climb, and Warren is already slightly nervous. He's trying to channel the fear, use it to inspire himself, and to force himself to prepare harder, to try to reduce the element of chance as much as possible.
Warren knows what he's doing is slightly crazy, because only a crazy person would want to climb to 29,000 feet, risking altitude sickness, pulmonary embolisms and death, just to say he's been to the summit of Everest.
Warren still can't wait for his 10 minutes at the top of the world.
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