(See my 5 best memories here)
5. It was brutal on my body. I fell many times and came back pretty beat up – spending my final night in the hospital. I was actually there for a mountaineering school and it was the educational activities that beat me up so bad – like purposely falling down the mountain 12 times so that we could learn the self-arrest technique. Speaking of that…read # 4.
4. Self-arrest training. When you fall down a mountain, you will pretty much die unless you know how to perform self arrest. This is where, when falling, you jam an ax and your snow boots into the mountain to stop the fall. While mountaineers hope they never have to do this, not knowing how to do it is a bigger mess. To learn how to do this, we literally jumped down a VERY steep glacier face first, butt first, upside down, and more (with no ropes) to practice the technique. It was brutal….but now I know how to do it.
3. A mouse crawled into our tent late on the 4th night and fell on my tent-mate, Brian’s, face. Yeah, I’m serious. We never caught it but tried for 45 minutes until it apparently found a way out.
2. Pooping in a bag on a glacier in 15 degree temperature. Need I say more?
1. The danger. I pastor Courageous Church. I take risks….for a cause. I was regularly VERY close to death and often got the feeling like I was doing so needlessly. Going to Haiti has risks, but I am there advancing the gospel and helping disabled children. Jumping over a 100 foot deep crevice on a glacier and barely making it seemed like too big of a risk for me and not enough of a reward. I regularly took life and death risks and did not feel like I was honoring God by doing so. We walked on ridges that were 7000 feet in the air with nothing but cliffs on either side and just inches of margin to walk on. If I was doing that to save a child – maybe I would feel it a bit more, but doing it to say I did it….not sure I’m with it.