Greg Mortenson

In 1993, a soft-spoken trauma nurse from San Francisco found himself on the flanks of K2 for the 78th day, plodding feverishly toward the summit despite near-crippling hypoxia and fatigue.

He hoped to dedicate his ascent to his sister, Christa, who had died from epilepsy a year earlier. And he was eager to add another notch to his climbing belt.

“It was the pinnacle of my climbing career. If you have climbed K2, you have arrived,” recalls Greg Mortenson.

He never arrived.

But six years after turning back, Mortenson, 41, has achieved much more than a mountain climb in his sister’s memory.

The day Mortenson made it down K2 alive, he started a program that has raised $1.2 million and completed 84 humanitarian projects for impoverished villagers living in the rugged Karakoram Mountains, providing new schools, cleaner water and improved heath care.

In 1998, Mortenson received the American Alpine Club’s David Brower Conservation Award, the highest recognition in the field of mountain conservation.

He’ll host a slide show at 7:30 p.m. Friday at the American Mountaineering Center, 710 Tenth St. in Golden.

It all started when Mortenson stumbled into the remote mountain village of Korphe “physically wasted, and having a hard time walking out” after retreating from K2. The Muslim Balti people took him in and nursed him back to health.

Once rejuvenated, he toured the ramshackle village and discovered a place without electricity or plumbing, where broken bones go unattended, burns are left untreated and malnutrition runs rampant. The infant mortality rate is 35 percent and the literacy rate hovers at about 3 percent.

Nearby, India and Pakistan spend and estimated $1 million per day on a 50-year-old high-altitude border dispute, scaring away any international aid groups, Mortenson said.

He was compelled to help.

“I saw 83 children sitting in the dirt doing their school lessons. They shared five slate boards and (wrote with) sticks dipped in watered-down mud,” he said. “I believed that K2 was pretty insignificant once I saw that..”

He returned home, sold his car and his climbing gear, and began fundraising — an effort that got off to an agonizingly slow start. But his efforts have since flourished.

To this day he is the only Westerner to work wit the Balti people.

“He is a very shy, humble sort of guy who is doing great work,” said Charley Shimanski, executive director of the American Alpine Club. “He is doing it in the classic humanitarian style, which is to get the people involved in the projects.”

The Balti people migrated to the region from Tibet 800 years ago and enjoyed a self-sufficient lifestyle for centuries. But since the influx of mountain-climbing Westerners, Balti men have begun leaving the village to seek work as porters, leaving the women behind with a heightened workload, Mortenson said.

To help, Mortenson has had to win the trust of the local Shiite Muslim mullahs and work around the watchful eye of Pakistan intelligence agents.

He has also risked his life.

When caught in the crossfire between two tribes near the Afghanistan border, he was recently kidnapped, blindfolded and held prisoner for eight days.

Unlike the final push to the summit of K2, helping the Balti people is a risk Mortenson is willing to take.

We’ve left tons of garbage on the mountain and we have chopped down trees and we have made the men leave the villages. We haven’t been very helpful,” he said. “I just really believe climbers should give back something to the local people.”

Copyright (c) 1999 Boulder Daily Camera

Tickets to Mortenson’s slide show are $5 at the door. Details: (303)292-3080