One Man’s Dream: Top of the World

Charlie Peck is a button-down Harvard MBA whose days spin at the billion-dollar pace of huge investment and high-rise development.

Board meetings for breakfasts, tax projections for lunch. Peck’s pro forma is proposals studied and counter-offers prepared aboard red-eye flights heading to other money centers where time and tensions are packed tighter by car phones and fax machines.

So Peck, 43, a Pasadena father of three and chief executive officer of Cushman Investment & Development Corp., has decided to get far and magnificently away from it all.

By climbing Mt. Everest.

“I have taken all kinds of normal vacations . . . on the beach in Hawaii, a tour through Europe, a long weekend here and there,” Peck says. Yet his unwinding is only partial; guilt always stirs for work undone. “You leave forwarding phone numbers and itineraries. You’re tempted to call back and have your mail Fed-Exed to an interception point.”

But on the more unusual breaks since his student days at Yale and Harvard, Peck has climbed the big mountains of Washington, Alaska, Norway and the Himalayas. There he has found silence, clarity and a solitude that does not allow the echoes of business cares.

“It has a lot to do with getting off to a remote corner and getting to the highest point of that remote corner and looking around at what the rest of the world is all about,” he says. “To sit there, on the top . . . to find perspective.”

Now, Peck says, he must sit atop the mountaineer’s ultimate perspective, the one Tibetans call Chomolungma, Nepalese know as Sagarmatha and we respect as Everest.

“Everest is special,” says this compact bantamweight who has scaled Alaska’s Mt. McKinley, attempted Annapurna IV in Nepal and succeeded several times against Mt. Rainier in Washington.

“I would say that (earlier) climbing has been more of a hobby, an escape, a chance to do something unique and different,” he adds. “But Everest has been the passion.”

Friday will be Peck’s last day before a three-month leave of absence from his office on the 40th floor of the rouge granite Wells Fargo Building in downtown Los Angeles.

Saturday he will fly to Katmandu, Nepal. From there by truck to Nyalam, China, where his slow acclimatization to high altitude will begin. Then, later this month--when lungs, blood and brain are tuned to the oxygen-weak air--Peck will move to the expedition’s base camp at Rongbuk Glacier at the 17,000-foot level close to the north face of Everest.

Ahead will be 10 weeks with a 21-man climbing team traversing moraines, glaciers and snowfields while packing supplies to higher expedition camps, four miles above sea level and ascending.

By this time next month, the American and New Zealand team should have climbed the near-vertical pitch of a path called the Great Couloir. It is the aisle to the expedition’s final camp at the 26,800-foot level of Everest.

On May 1--weather, physical stamina, mental health, terrain, frostbite, snow blindness, luck, oxygen supply and God willing--Peck hopes to be among the team’s final few (“those with enough strength left,” he says) to tread the 29,028-foot crest of Everest, the top of the world.

Everything dictates this should not happen.

“The altitudes above 26,000 feet are lightly termed the Death Zone,” Peck explains. “It is a generally accepted medical fact that above 25,000 feet or 26,000 feet your body is in a degeneration mode so long as you are not constantly on supplementary oxygen.”

Paranoia is common in such an environment. So are blood clots, delirium and an inability to control bodily functions. Peck knows that pulmonary edemas (fluid in the lungs) have killed climbers. So have cerebral edemas causing “pressure to build in your head and it is quickly fatal.”

Only with these enemies contained can there be Summit Day. “We will go from high camp to the summit and return . . . a maximum of 3,000 vertical feet,” Peck says.

It is not quite the stroll it sounds.

“After two-plus months of wearing yourself down, you have to wake up in the morning at 27,000 feet and say: ‘Now, I’m ready to start the equivalent of a marathon,’ ” he says.

Temperatures will be 40 degrees below zero. Putting on clothes and assembling equipment for one climber--a 15-minute job at sea level--becomes three hours of hard labor in rarefied air. Altitude removes appetite better than Dexatrim, so food and liquids must be crammed down.

Says Peck: “Then comes that all-out exertion designed to get you to the top and get you all the way down safely . . . so that just before you completely lose it to total exhaustion, the tent is within sight and you can stumble into it.”

If there is success for this 1991 Everest North Face Direct Expedition, Peck says, it will rest in large part on its formation and composition.

Its climbing leaders are no gentlemen mountaineers but toughs like Eric Simonson of Seattle, a senior guide at Mt. Rainier and a two-try veteran of Everest. Also, George Dunn (250 climbs against Rainier and three attempts on Everest) and Greg Wilson (two stabs at Everest), both of Washington state, Andy Politz of Columbus, Ohio, (three attempts on Everest), and Mike Perry of New Zealand (who tried Everest last year).

Peck well fits such serious company, says Jeff Tilden, a mountaineer and Seattle trial lawyer. He and Peck have twice shared attempts on treacherous Mt. McKinley in Alaska.

“That first time (in 1985) we spent 10 days snowed in a tent at about the 14,000-foot level, and it was a pretty miserable time,” Tilden recalls. “Of the nine in our party, Charlie was the only guy prepared to go back with me.

“So we came back the next year and climbed to the top. Physically he is very strong, emotionally he is very strong . . . he is unquestionably suited to Mt. Everest. And he’s one of the few people I know with the energy and discipline to be civil higher up.”

Phil Ershler of Seattle was another Peck partner on the McKinley climbs. He is a professional mountain guide and one of the few Americans to climb the north face of Everest. But victories, Ershler says, are not the best mark of a mountaineer.

“The true measurement is how dedicated, how sincere they are when a first major attempt turns into defeat,” he says. Peck, he knows, was not fazed by his first failure against McKinley. “And Charlie came back the next year to show that persistence and tenacity pay off . . . and a climber without those qualities had better be damned lucky.

“The bottom line is: Charlie has demonstrated his ability to be patient, to keep the eye on the prize . . . he can take the discomfort, he can take the disappointments. Yes, he could climb Everest.”

For funding, development and organization of the climb, Peck and his Everest group have collected men who do just that for a living--a tight team of managing directors, executive recruiters and investment bankers straddling both coasts.

They have founded the nonprofit American Foundation for International Mountaineering Exploration and Research--and collected more than half the expedition’s $450,000 budget from private and corporate contributions. Additional revenues are expected from adventure vacationers who have signed up for a 24-day drive ‘n’ hike to the expedition’s base camp.

Yet as this elaborate stage is set, there comes the simple question of why climb Everest at all? It has been done. Since the first victory by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay in 1953, an estimated 300 climbers have made a molehill out of Everest.

Last year, 20 mountaineers from one team made it to the top, and there was a small gridlock as rope teams had to wait for others to leave the summit before they could ascend. Fourteen women have climbed Everest. Even Peter Hillary, son of Sir Edmund, has followed in his father’s footsteps.

It has been conquered from northern, southern, western and eastern approaches. Clearly, Everest no longer is there.

“But it is still an extraordinary achievement,” Peck counters. “No matter when you do it, or how many people have done it, it is notoriety, it is a mark of something . . . and within the climber’s world it is among the top half-dozen mountaineering objectives in the world.”

In truth, he continues, there are 14 world-class peaks that top 25,000 feet, and “mountaineers will debate one against the other . . . that a certain route on Everest may in fact be easier than a route on K-2 (in the Himalayas), which is the No. 2 peak in the world.”

Everest from the south face, by the Hillary-Tenzing route, Peck says, is “the quote easier unquote route up . . . but to get to the base of the real climb, you have to go through one of the most dangerous places in mountaineering: the Khumbu Ice Fall.”

Of 103 deaths since humans first challenged Everest, most have occurred at the Khumbu.

“We have our own hazards from the north,” Peck continues. “It is a relatively easier access, but when you’re on the face the climbing is steeper for longer . . . particularly as you get nearer the summit.”

The arch-enemies, he says, are cold and altitude. Not any contortions of climbing. “We will be vertical, yes, but suspended, no,” Peck explains. “Climbing on Everest is not what you see on a calendar poster for Yosemite. That kind of climbing is just one step away from gymnastics . . . done at sea level in relatively warm temperatures where you are dressed lightly.

“On Everest . . . just the ability to remove your gloves becomes the difference between being able to get any handholds.”

Peck well remembers his first fascination with Everest. He was 6 and living in Oyster Bay, N.Y.

“I vividly remember reading, by flashlight, under my blanket in my bed, ‘Tiger of the Snows,’ which is Tenzing’s account of the climb. The pictures of them (Hillary and Tenzing) with their ice axes and their flags, with the oxygen masks on, the details of the march through India. . . . “

He recalls the exact moment when Everest moved a little closer within his reach. Peck was climbing Mt. McKinley in 1985 and talking with a man who had scaled Everest.

“I had a chance to touch somebody who had been to the top of Everest and who knew what it was all about,” Peck says. “I had romantic notions about it all . . . and asked him a lot of technical questions.

“How did he maintain his diet? What was it he ate when at High Camp? He told me that he personally liked Captain Crunch cereal. I knew then, this was an attainable human experience . . . “

Then, in 1987, Peck saw Everest. He had been climbing in Nepal and decided to top the trip with a sightseeing flight alongside the Himalayas and to the south face of Everest.

“I couldn’t take in enough,” Peck says. “My eyeballs wouldn’t open up far enough and my camera shutter wouldn’t work fast enough.

“I thought of Tenzing and Hillary. I knew every route on the mountain. I knew where critical features were that were obstacles in climbing. I was not looking at it as: ‘Oh, there’s a mountain.’ I was looking at it technically, trying to find the South Col, trying to find the Southeast ridge and where the Hillary Step was.”

Peck stared, thought hard, and made a decision: “I was going to figure out how to put together, or get involved with, or get onto, an Everest expedition.”

Now he is doing it.

The hardness, stubbornness, fearlessness, stamina and mental control developed through marathon runs, mountaineering schools and climbs from Mt. McKinley through remote Norwegian fiords are about to be tested.

So is Peck’s regimen of the past year, a daily weight and running program that a personal trainer, body builder Doug Brignole of Pasadena, has designed to build legs, back and lower body strengths.

Peck does not think cold will be a problem: “I’ve got an internal furnace that keeps me warm when most everyone else gets cold.”

Nor does hypoxia concern him: “I have never, knock on wood, had a problem with altitude.”

His anxieties have been considered: “For me, it is concern about how I will adapt and perform at the highest altitudes. I know enough about the character of the terrain, about the nature of the climbing and what the task is to get up to around 24,000 feet.

“But above that is the unknown world . . . it is colder and the conditions are more severe. And that’s the difference between climbing Everest and climbing almost anywhere else in the world.”

Peck’s savvy is in place: “That’s the most challenging part of this (climbing) . . . watching yourself, monitoring this, always being willing to throw in the towel or take a step back down the mountain and try to recuperate.

“There have been a lot of people who had died just by saying: ‘I think I’ll wait one more night. I’m at high altitude so I’ll see how I feel tomorrow.’

“And they don’t wake up.”

Peck can visualize standing on the marks of his heroes, Hillary and Tenzing. He also is realistic about the odds.

“I’m a financial person, so I tend to look coldheartedly at the statistics and the success rate on Everest,” he comments. “Among expeditions it is probably less than 50% . . . any one individual’s chances are probably 10% to 20% max.”

Climbers have prayed their thanks atop Everest. Hillary hugged Tenzing. Every expedition leaves a flag. Some have read messages of peace.

“I think I will probably cry,” Peck says. “It has been something magic for so many years, something that someone else could attain, something that leaves me in awe . . . I’ll probably get up there and be speechless.”

Peck is not intimidated by Chomolungma, which in Tibetan means the Mother Goddess of the Earth. He admires its beauty, respects its place as a religious monument, knows the protocol and recognizes the communion of the mountain.

“You go onto Everest cautiously, carefully and respectfully,” he believes. “You don’t conquer it, you don’t buddy up to it and say: ‘Hey, I’m the climber and you’re the big mountain.’

“And when you’ve done your thing, you don’t do a war dance and trample all over it. You carefully and quietly exit and leave Everest preserved and thank the mountain for the privilege of being there . . . and for not flicking you off like a flea.”

Three sons, many close friends and his colleagues at Cushman Investment and parent Cushman Realty Corp., worry for Peck. They know the death toll of Everest.

He shrugs off their fears.

Nothing on Everest, Peck says, can match the enormous dangers of being in commercial real estate in Southern California these days.