A Final Resting Place at the Top of the World : Memorial: A mountain climber achieves his lifelong dream of scaling Mt. Everest--even in death.

Chester David Tollakson’s pallbearers, including Sherpas and yaks, donned thermal gear and snowpacks instead of traditional black.

Early last week they trudged among ice instead of flowers and were guided to Tollakson’s final resting place not by a minister but by an expedition leader whose job was to make sure everyone attending the funeral came back alive.

The trip up Mt. Everest was to have been the former Studio City math teacher’s most glorious climb, completing his record of scaling the highest mountain on each of the globe’s seven continents. But during a 1994 training climb, just yards from the summit of Mt. San Jacinto in Riverside County, Tollakson, 58, fell several hundred feet to his death.

“It’s a wonderful way to say goodby to my husband,” said his widow, Lynn Tollakson, from their Studio City home. “We used to joke about it. He’d say if he went first and he hadn’t done his seventh summit, I was to sprinkle his ashes on top of Everest. This way, he has made the seventh summit.”

Tollakson made it with the help of longtime friend Steve Reneker, who fulfilled his own dream of reaching the top of the world’s tallest peak.

After the original 40 climbers were whittled down to 13, and with a storm fast approaching, Reneker began to doubt that he would be able to reach the peak. So he handed off Tollakson’s ashes to another climber and pushed on.

“[Tollakson] taught me that if you’ve got the courage, you go for it,” Reneker said last week via satellite telephone from the Everest team’s 17,000-foot-high base camp. “So I went for it.”

And when he reached the top, Reneker said, he cried out with accomplishment and finality as he thought back on his journey and wondered how close he was to God.

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It was just after expedition leader Paul Pfau, a Los Angeles County prosecutor, returned from a 1993 trip to Everest that he and Tollakson decided to plan a 1995 excursion to Tibet and a climb up the mountain’s more challenging northern side.

Six months into the training and fund raising, Tollakson died.

He had been a rugged climber, born in flat, rural Wisconsin but always dreaming about faraway, mountainous places.

Tollakson and Pfau, longtime climbing partners, together scaled Antarctica’s 16,067-foot Vinson Massif, 700 miles from the South Pole, where the temperature never climbed above minus-15 and the sun never set.

Tollakson made it up Mt. McKinley in Alaska, arguably the planet’s coldest peak; the snowy Mt. Kosciusko in Australia; the windy Mt. Elbrus in Europe; Aconcagua in South America, and the glorious jungle, forest and arctic zones of Africa’s Mt. Kilimanjaro.

“He died doing what he loves,” Lynn Tollakson said shortly after her husband’s fatal fall. “I never tried to discourage him because he loved it too much.”

The other climbers continued making plans for the $500,000 adventure in Tollakson’s honor. Each climber contributed about $18,000, and the rest was raised through donations.

The group of 20 Westerners--17 men and three women--arrived in Katmandu on March 1 for a pre-expedition reconnaissance trek. On March 20, the group arrived in Tibet to meet its contingent of 20 Sherpas, the Tibetan climbers famous for their athletic ability and willingness to guide foreigners through their Himalayan homeland.

With a combined blessing of good weather, timing and teamwork, the group set up base camp with its six tons of supplies--including a 14-foot-diameter tent, solar generators, a fax machine and a satellite telephone hookup--15 miles from the summit.

Along with 100 head of 100-pound-toting yaks and a smattering of yak drivers ahead of it, the group headed up the mountain, dropping off pounds of supplies at prescribed spots along the way.

But the yaks, which look like scraggly, long-haired cows, do not go beyond a point still three miles from the summit, where the group made its advanced base camp.

From there, expedition members took three weeks to tote the last one-third of their supplies to Camp 4, at 23,500 feet; Camp 5, at 25,500 feet, and the last camp before the peak, Camp 6, at 26,800 feet.

They then returned to base camp for several days to assess their health and wait for good weather. “Putting an expedition like this together is like putting a man on the moon,” Pfau said.

Everything is a struggle. Being able to breathe in the oxygen-poor air is a constant worry; respiratory infections have plagued almost all the members.

Water is woefully contaminated, requiring a never-ending process of boiling and purifying that still has not prevented legion sweeps of dysentery and diarrhea.

After resting at base camp, Pfau and the four doctors accompanying the group decided that 13 members, split into two teams, were strong enough to attempt to make it to the top.

The first team reached the summit May 14. The second team, including Reneker and Tollakson’s remains, arrived two days later.

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If Tollakson was granted an ending at the top of Mt. Everest, George Mallory found resolution there.

The first George Mallory, his grandfather, was among the earliest Western climbers to attempt Everest in the early 1920s.

He never returned from a 1924 expedition, and historians are unsure if Mallory ever made it to the summit, thereby beating Sir Edmund Hillary to the challenge.

On the 1995 American Mt. Everest expedition, the younger George Mallory, from Australia, was the first climber to reach the top. Two weeks before, his father, 74-year-old John Mallory, saw for the first time the mountain that is believed to have claimed his father’s life.

The younger George Mallory made it back down, paying his respects to the grandfather he never knew by completing the circle.

“You think about all the people who have passed on when you’re on the top,” Reneker said. “It’s probably the closest you can naturally get to heaven.”