On May 29, 1953, Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay of Nepal made the first successful ascent of Mt. Everest. That makes 2003 the 50th anniversary of that groundbreaking expedition and brings back to the public arena the powerful story of determination and obsession that drove two men to climb 29,028 feet above sea level to the highest point on earth.
The anniversary also serves as a fitting time for the publication of a new book on the subject of "extreme sports" written by Hanover resident and self-proclaimed "extreme sports connoisseur and cowboy" Bruce Generaux.
Generaux's book, "Beyond the Comfort Zone -- Confessions of an Extreme Sports Junkie," is an autobiographical adventure narrative in which Generaux literally drags the reader with him through his years of extreme skiing, kayaking, rock climbing and adventure racing. In a slide presentation he gave Wednesday in Filene Auditorium publicizing his book, Generaux said that any activity that has a high risk of resulting "in a debilitating injury or death," counts as an extreme sport.
For Generaux himself, these activities have involved regular ski trips to Tuckerman's Ravine on New Hampshire's own Mount Washington as an undergraduate at Middlebury College (Generaux first skied the Left Gully as an 11 year-old), climbing El Capitan in Yosemite National Park and Mount Rainier in Washington State and kayaking on class five whitewater rivers in Chile's Patagonia.
For the audience in Filene Auditorium last night, the feats all seemed impressive. Yet slide after slide, crag after crag and waterfall after waterfall, one thing remained the same -- Generaux hurtling himself consciously toward the brink of disaster and loving it.That is precisely where one finds the connection between an "amateur" extreme sports enthusiast like Generaux and the "amateur" mountaineers Hillary and Norgay who summited the highest mountain in the world. None of them are or were in it for the scenery. Past great expanses of snowfields, seas of sandstone and rushing waves, each man found something in pushing himself to the brink--to what Generaux terms "The Comfort Zone."
Surprisingly, reaching this "Comfort Zone" (and Generaux himself is quick to admit it) often requires a good amount of unprepared ness and stupidity. One of Generaux's many "lack-of-foresight" anecdotes during the course of the slide show involved one of his first large lead climb attempts up an easy-to-moderate route on Giant Mountain in the Adirondacks.
Lead climbing is a form of rock climbing in which the climber places his or her own gear into the rock face while ascending the route. Two or three climbers will climb in a sort of leapfrog fashion, one after the other, taking turns leading and belaying, until they reach the top. When Generaux and his friends first reached the foot of Giant Mountain, however, they decided that the climb looked so easy that they would just run up it without ropes.
About 200 feet up, Generaux lost his footing and began sliding down the rock face, gaining speed until he pushed himself backwards off the rock and landed in a brush pile below. Generaux acknowledged the fact that the accident could have been fatal, but quickly added that besides gaining a new appreciation for safety, the brush with death didn't deter him in the least.
What Generaux conveyed in his presentation, and what other autobiographical "extreme sports" authors like Jack Krakauer ("Into the Wild" and "Into Thin Air") often conclude after reviewing their experiences, is that is takes a certain psychology for someone to live his or her life in constant risk of death. Such a state of mind craves the fear, the thrill and the surge of adrenaline that pushes one to the edge.
Last night many members of the audience were alumni or current undergraduate students at either Middlebury or Dartmouth College. Most were skiers, climbers or paddlers. This weekend, Dartmouth's own adventurers will drive to Mt. Washington and ski Tuckerman's one last time before the snow melts. Others will travel the 40 minutes to Rumney, N.H. for some of the most premier sport climbing on this side of the country and still more will wait expectantly for the snowmelt to surge and the rivers to rise.
