Warren

WARWICK — Balanced on a fin of rock at the top of the world, stalled in the “death zone,” where the air is too thin to sustain human life, Timothy Warren felt fear grip him once more.

His icy perch offered just enough room for one boot. He sucked in another labored breath. His fogging oxygen mask pressed into his face. In the roaring wind and brutal cold that pierced his body, he looked down at the bottleneck of 10 climbers that threatened his life.

Moments earlier the 48-year-old Warwick chiropractor had stood on top of Mount Everest, the first known Rhode Islander to scale the 29,035-foot summit. Now, incredibly, gridlock far more perilous than Bald Hill Road at Christmas, had followed him up above the clouds to one of the most desolate places on the planet. The ascending climbers blocked the route down.

Warren and his Sherpa guide could do nothing but wince with the cold and force their oxygen-hungry brains to compute the time left in their small air tanks.

A slip off one side of the rocky backbone meant a 7,000 foot drop; the other side promised a 10,000 foot plummet into Tibet.

FOR ABOUT 50 weeks a year, Mount Everest is as hospitable as Mars, with monsoon-driven blizzards or jet stream winds approaching 200 mph. It is as equally populated. But each May, when the weather breaks for a brief two weeks or so, the world’s tallest peak crawls with dream-chasers.

Knowledgeable mountain climbers will be familiar with the spot where Warren stood that morning of May 23, after achieving his years-long goal. The Hillary Step is named after Sir Edmund Hillary, who in 1953, along with his guide Tenzing Norgay, became the first to summit Everest.

It is arguably the most technically difficult part of the climb, only 235 feet below the peak, and 10 to 12 hours after climbers have began their summit attempt. They reach the Step already exhausted, dehydrated and their bodies deteriorated from weeks on the mountain. It is more dangerous coming down for all those same reasons and one more: with your goal already attained there can be psychological slippage. People die every year on Everest, often coming down.

It is also one of the places these days that can get clogged with climbers, causing life-threatening delays. In his book Into Thin Air, author Jon Krakauer chronicled a 1996 expedition in which delays and bad weather cost eight lives on one day.

Tim Warren’s wait at The Hillary Step… shifting his weight from one foot to another… in minus 15 degree temperatures … 5 miles up into the sky, took 20 minutes.

Two and a half weeks later, he sits in his warm Warwick office along Post Road, altitude 64 feet above sea level, waiting only for the day’s first patient to arrive.

“I’m done climbing Everest,” he says.

“It’s miserable. It’s deteriorating. And I’m not going to keep hanging it out there.”

“This has been a goal that has been foremost in my mind for three or four years. It’s time to kind of relax a little bit. You don’t want to keep pushing the envelope more and more. A lot of people do that and end up dying. I’m not going to do that.”

Warren, who has been an athlete all his life, is leaner than usual these days after losing 18 pounds on Everest. He has run marathons, competed in triathlons and traveled the world to climb its highest mountains. Climbing mountains, he says, is the most physically and mentally demanding of challenges anyone can face; a pursuit that requires absolute precision and concentration every step along the way. Or else.

“It’s a very simple life,” he says. “You’re completely focused on making sure you have a good crampon placement in the ice, making sure you’re clipped in to the [safety] rope, making sure you’re safe and you’re warm.”

When you are traversing a vertical wall of ice and rock, your life held in place by a rope and a toehold, not much else really matters, he says. “You are completely in your head and concentrating.”

Warren’s first attempt at Everest, last year, failed when he could not overcome a painful cough and throat infection. He returned home to Saunderstown disappointed but determined to try again.

He made more trips up Mount Washington, the highest mountain in the East with some of the worst weather in the world. He hiked with heavier packs. He fine-tuned his technical climbing skills.

Warren also hired a different trainer, who directed him through a new, painful, workout regimen: a combination of multiple muscle group weightlifting and cardio exertion exercises without rests built into the routine.

“It gives me nightmares to think about those workouts to this day.”

Warren’s Everest expedition took roughly 70 days, during which time friends and staff helped keep his chiropractic office running through April and May.

Much of a successful summit is based on the luck of good weather and proper acclimatization, giving the climber’s body the time needed to get used to the thin air, to produce more red blood cells to carry more oxygen into an environment where there is so little.

Everest stands in the Himalayan mountain range separating Nepal and Tibet. It took Warren 10 days from the time he left Rhode Island to get to the Everest base camp at 17,500 feet, a broken plain of ice and rock sprinkled with hundreds of tents.

Climbers spend the first several days at base camp resting or playing cards in the larger expedition company tents. And eating, eating everything they can.

One side effect of thin air is increased heart rate as the muscle works ever harder to supply the body with oxygen-rich blood. As your metabolism races, “you simply can’t take in enough nutrients,” Warren says. “You eat and overeat. And still you’re just dropping weight, just getting emaciated. In the first two weeks you can look at your quadriceps, look at your arms, and see they’re already deteriorating.”

Gradually the climbers begin making forays up the mountain to further acclimate to the thinning air. As their summit attempt approaches they spend nights at campsites set up at different elevations on the mountain.

The forays require them to repeatedly cross treacherous ice sheets that shift as much as four feet a day and are creased with deep crevasses.

In the ice sheet outside of base camp, “33 people have died since ’53,” Warren says. The ice chunks “can just move and shatter and you fall in and you are squashed like a bug.”

In his mountain tent, Warren hung photographs of his girlfriend, Rose, and his 16-year-old son, Kurt, who feared so much for his father’s safety this year that he pleaded with him not to go.

Warren tried to soothe his son’s fears, though he also shared some of them.

“Fear,” Warren says, “is a great motivator.”

Everest provides ample way stations to tank up on fear and motivation, including the sights of the exposed bodies of past climbers embedded in the ice. Warren was determined not to become gripped by it, to become so scared as to become immobilized. So sports psychology became another component of his training this year.

Climbing Everest is “certainly a physical battle but it’s also a long emotional battle, too. It’s a hard thing to be away from home, it’s a deteriorating environment and people get a little crazy. So you have to keep yourself in check. One thing I learned from last year was I didn’t want my mind getting in the way, I wanted my mind to be an asset.”

So as he traversed the vertical wall of rock and ice known as the Yellow Band — an area just below where the death zone starts at 26,000 feet and most climbers begin relying on oxygen — Warren chanted his learned affirmations: I’m strong, I’m a wonderful climber, I’m a safe climber. This is well within my ability.

“My affirmations really came into play,” he says. “I wouldn’t buy into those feelings of not being a good enough climber or not being strong enough to climb Everest. And it got me over the hump.”

Still, anything can happen on Everest, and Warren didn’t allow himself to believe he had a chance to reach the summit until he had scaled The Hillary Step and had about 45 minutes left to climb and a football field in elevation to go.

“You’re not concentrating on what could go wrong, you’re just aware objectively that things could go wrong. And so, you just keep putting one foot in front of the other.”

He and his Sherpa reached the summit after 14 grueling hours, shortly after 5 a.m. in the dawn’s light.

The two men shared a cry.

“We were the two highest things in the world for about five minutes before two other climbers came up.”

His next adventure?

“I want to put an addition on my house. I want to do some landscaping and buy a tractor and work on gardening. It’s really horribly boring. It’s not what people want to hear. But it’s reality. I’m really excited about that.”

tmooney@projo.com