Mountaineer’s Friends Carry His Ashes to Top of the World : Memorial: Ex-math teacher from Studio City fell to his death training for Mt. Everest, so a group makes the journey for him.

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

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 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 up Mt. San Jacinto in Riverside County, just yards from the summit, Tollakson fell several hundred feet to his death.

“It’s a wonderful way to say goodby to my husband,” said 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 a longtime friend, Steve Reneker, who then fulfilled his own dream of reaching the top of the world’s tallest peak.

Early last week, after the original group of 40 climbers was whittled down to 13 summiters and a storm was fast approaching, Reneker began to doubt that he could 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.

*

It was just after expedition leader Paul Pfau, a Los Angeles County prosecutor, returned from a 1993 trip to Everest that he and Tollakson began planning 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, 58, 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. El’brus in Europe; Mt. Aconcagua in South America; and the 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 endurance and willingness to guide foreigners through their Himalayan home.

With a combined blessing of good weather, timing and teamwork, the group set up Base Camp with their 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.

Two power stations, one at Base Camp and another midway up the mountain, fueled the walkie-talkie communications that even now are allowing the trekkers to check in with the base.

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

But the yaks, which look like scraggly, long-haired cows, do not go higher than 12 miles up, where the group made their 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.

Then they went back down to Base Camp for several days to assess their health and the weather in the days ahead. “Putting an expedition like this together is like putting a man on the moon,” Pfau said.

Everything is a struggle. Breathing 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.

Each member of the group drinks a gallon of water and eats 4,000 calories per day, but the sheer physical labor involved in the climb is so rigorous that group members have nonetheless lost an average of 20 to 30 pounds each, Pfau said.

There are also the logistic nightmares of scaling a 29,028-foot mountain, in temperatures that range from minus-20 degrees to 100 degrees, through storms with wind gusts that swirl snow into an impenetrable wall.

Pfau leads from behind, shepherding his group to safety by pulling up the rear, and says he does not regret never having made it to the top.

“There’s a lot of vicarious and direct pleasure in being in this most magical of all places on the planet,” he said from his tent at Base Camp. “I started with an idea, created an organization and brought together people who share a common goal and work together to pull it off.”

After resting at Base Camp, Pfau and the four doctors accompanying the group decided that 13 members, in two teams, were strong enough to attempt to make it to the top.

The first team, made it to the top last Sunday. The second team, including Reneker and the remains of Tollakson, made the summit on Tuesday.

*

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, Mallory’s grandson was the first climber to reach the top. Mallory’s son, 74-year-old John Mallory, saw the mountain that is believed to have claimed his father’s life for the first time two weeks before.

And this George Mallory, who lives in Australia, 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.”