Her Lofty Goal: to Be Sitting on Bottom of the World

Shirley Metz exemplifies the California surfer girl: blond, trim, tanned, energetic.

So you might wonder why she wants to take a 680-mile trek on an ice-covered route to the South Pole, where the temperature gets to 35 degrees below zero.

“The walk will be the most exciting thing I will ever do in my life,” said Metz, a 38-year-old merchandise manager for Hobie Sports in Dana Point, a catamaran company founded by Richard Metz, her husband of 18 years.

“When she told me about the trip I was shocked,” he said. “But she’s a very competitive person and needs this kind of challenge.”

Shirley Metz said she believes that not many people know enough about the beauty and grandeur of the Antarctic. “Someday I hope to educate people about that part of the world,” she said.

She already has a videotape laced with facts about that continent.

While most of her life experiences are in water skiing, surfing, beach volleyball and diving in Hawaii, she learned alpine skiing at resorts in Utah. “I’ve done that for 18 years, so I know what I’m doing,” she said.

The ski walk, which will take an estimated 40 to 50 days, will be a grueling grind covering about 15 miles a day. For that reason, Metz has been training three hours daily, including runs along the sand by her Capistrano Beach home.

Then she straps on a knapsack loaded with 37 pounds of newspaper and hikes the hills above the ocean.

Today she is to arrive by plane in New Zealand to begin a demanding week of survival training atop a glacier with the other nine expedition members.

Later, after more intensive training in separate locations, they will regroup to begin the walk from Vinson Massis at the base of the highest mountain in Antarctica.

“I hope to become the first woman to walk to the South Pole,” said Metz, who explained that she got hooked on the beauty of the Antarctic while on a three-week cruise with her mother earlier this year.

“When I cam back from the cruise, I spotted an advertisement about the expedition to the South Pole,” she said. “And I knew it was for me.”

Metz figures that her part of the expedition will cost $100,000, but she said she hopes to find sponsors who will pay the bill.

She said only 12 people, all men, have ever completed the ski walk to the South Pole. And three people have died while making the trek, she said.

In addition to the cold, Metz said, the group will be buffeted by icy winds that sometimes gust to 100 m.p.h.

The biggest surprise to career guidance specialist Pam Anspach during mock job interviews at Sonora High School in La Habra was the anxiety shown by many of the 300 seniors who participated.

“The overall response was positive,” she said. “But many of the students were fearful, even though it was a mock interview.”

Employers who were Chamber of Commerce members conducted the interviews--”which may have accounted for the reluctance on the part of some seniors to participate,” she said. Some of the students, however, received some preparation a day earlier when they filled out applications for specific jobs.

Because most of the seniors already hold jobs and had gone through some sort of job interview previously, Anspach mused, “Maybe we should hold the mock job interviews in earlier grades.”

A 100-mile ride Saturday to San Diego by the Anaheim chapter of the Christian Motorcyclists Assn. will be more than a joy ride.

The chapter and other members of the nationwide motorcycle group want to raise enough money to buy 1 million Bibles to send behind the Iron Curtain, as well as some motorcycles to send to Central America, according to the association’s founder, Herbert Shreve.

The motorcyclists will leave Anaheim at 8:30 a.m. Sponsors can sign up at Ross Cafe, 1098 N. State College Blvd., Anaheim.

Acknowledgments--Santa Ana’s Valley High School’s reading tutor Rosa T. Manriquez of Santa Ana was named winner of the 1988 Orange County Reading Assn.’s Outstanding Reading Specialist award, presented at the group’s annual conference. She has been a reading tutor for six years.