Mt. Everest Climber's Talk Takes Cub Scouts With Him

It’s not every day Cub Scouts hear from someone even more prepared than the Scoutmaster or den mother, but then again, few people are more prepared than Gabriel “Gabe” Viti, Jr., who’s climbed to the top of the world.

Viti spoke about his experience summitting Mt. Everest to about 40 Cub Scouts and parents from the Lake Forest Cub Scout Pack 48 Tuesday evening at Lake Forest’s Cherokee Elementary School.  If there were two lessons to take away, they were the classic Scout message of preparedness and what so many successful athletes and businesspeople – Viti is both – tell others:  you must have the mental will to succeed.

Raised in Highland Park and Highwood and once a Scout, he’s now chef and owner of Gabriel’s Restaurant, Miramar and Gabe’s Backstage Lounge, successful restaurants and night spots in Highwood. Viti began climbing three years ago after reading John Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. He made the 29,029-feet-above-sea-level summit his goal and reached it on May 22, 2010.

To start, he contacted Russell Brice, the well-known king of Everest and eventually Viti’s expedition leader, who asked the chef what he had done to date.

“The climbing wall at Evanston Athletic Club,” replied Viti, who then began climbing in earnest, from a peak in Ecuador to Mt. McKinley, Mt. Kilamanjaro to Russia’s Mt. Elbrus. He also slept for a year in a high-altitude chamber in his home to accelerate building his hemoglobin, enabling him to more quickly acclimate to the altitude once he arrived in the Himalayas.

And that was just the pre-Everest preparation.

“You pack just about everything,” said Viti, who rattled off and displayed gear he brought, from a full-body, down-filled, ultra-cold-weather suit, special boots, mittens and goggles, to a satellite phone, solar panel mat for a battery charger, mini laptop and satellite beacon so he could call home via Skype and update his Facebook page.

Facebook posts from Everest? Viti used the expedition to raise $150,000 for Keshet, a Northfield school for special needs children, and he wanted to keep donors informed during the two-and-a-half-month trip.

Viti shared with the Cub Scouts his account, including the chronology of days spent in Kathmandu and the tiny-plane flight into Lukla , in the mountains, and the 12 days of hiking just to get to the main climb’s base camp. Yaks, mules, and Sherpas helped transport food, tents, ropes, and other equipment. Every day they climbed stairs, difficult trails of rocks, visiting tea houses and staying overnight from one village to the next.

As they went higher along the mountain’s South face, the climate, terrain, mental and physical challenges became increasingly more challenging.

“Every day we were acclimating to the altitude just to get ready for the actual climb,” explained Viti. Base camp was at 17,590 feet of elevation – three-and-one-third miles above sea level. “Russell wanted us to go up to 23,000 – to Camp Two – just to see if we could make it. We lost two more climbers there,” meaning Brice felt they were not fit enough to continue higher.

They did a lot of night climbing, too. At 5:30 in the morning they were walking carefully on ladders laid across crevasses – big gaps on the high-alpine ice falls with as much as 350 feet to drop below. “These shift all the time. If they’re covered with snow, you call it a snow bridge and that’s why we cross at night, because it can melt. That’s what people fall through."

Asked one young Cub Scout, “Were you scared?”

“No, not at all. I had been doing these types of climbs to prepare,” replied Viti with a smile.

One Scout’s dad, Tim Fitzgerald, of Lake Forest, asked, “Were those just regular extension ladders?”

“Yeah, just like you see someone using to paint a house. Some were actually just two separate ladders tied together,” the chef said, surprising the audience, as he continued recounting the trek to the summit.

At Camp Four, 26,000 feet, it was 60-below at night, but, again, the Highwood native was ready for it with a special sleeping bag and other gear. “The only thing I was bummed about was that my iTunes froze up.”

The drop offs at times were quite steep, and one fellow climber warned him to never go out of the tent – even for a quick trip to relieve himself – without his boots and ice ax.

Upon arriving at the Hillary Step, a point at 28,840 feet and dedicated to Sir Edmund Hillary, who in 1953, with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, became the first people known for certain to summit, Viti said, “On that day, I wasn’t the fastest of the group but I passed a lot of people because I had climbed on a lot of rock (before) and others hadn’t.”

They would stay one or two nights to acclimate even more and not get edema.

In the higher reaches of the trip, Viti used supplemental oxygen, as do many climbers.  “I felt good the whole time,” he said.

Then, on May 22, Viti, with a Sherpa behind him for support, reached the peak at 29,039 feet.  “It was a perfect day to summit,” he said as he told the boys and their parents of his brief visit to where Nepal and Tibet, China, meet.  “That was as high as you can get on the planet.”

Descending, somewhere near Camp Four, he took a seat on a rock and just sat. “I tried to just take it in all that we had accomplished over the last few months.”

His next goal is to summit K2 in Pakistan, the most dangerous mountain on the planet and the second highest on the planet. Only about 220 people have done it, and nobody in the last two years.

“The mental challenge was everything," he said. "If you were mentally fit, that was everything. The restaurant business prepared me to be uncomfortable because of the long hours, the stress constantly. I felt I was ahead of the game.  A lot of the guys, businessmen, (even) professional climbers, they weren’t ready."