Last November, Brenda and I signed up for an event that will push us to our physical and mental limits. The event is called 29029 Everesting and the goal is to climb a mountain multiple times until you’ve climbed the equivalent vertical feet as the height of Mount Everest, 29029 vertical feet.

For us, the event will take place at Stratton Mountain Vermont and it will take 17 ascents straight up the mountain to accumulate 29029 vertical feet. We have 36 hours to accomplish this and the good news is we get to ride the Gondola down the mountain. We begin at 6 am on Friday and finish at 6 pm on Saturday.

We’ve been training hard for about 6 months now and at this point, we are as ready as we are going to be. We had a few obstacles to training in the last few weeks including Brenda pulling her calf muscle after stepping in a groundhog hole while training, selling our house and moving all our stuff right at the peak of training and then Brenda getting a cold during the last two weeks of training. Although those things certainly didn’t help with our preparation, thats life and we’ve done what we could do. We’ll find out very soon whether that’s enough.

We did a little reconnaissance trip to Stratton in July to do some training climbs. The trail is steep and relentless. No switchbacks or flat spots. It starts out steep and only gets steeper as you go. This is going to be hard. Very very hard.

The weather is not looking good. The current forecast is for the event to start with cloudy skies and temperatures in the low 40’s. Around noon on Friday, rain is forecast to begin with heavy, steady rain expected for the last 30 hours with wind gusts up to 35 mph at the summit. Its going to be cold, wet, windy and very slippery.

Packing is a big challenge as we need several changes of clothing, socks, shoes, gloves, hats and rain gear. We want to get all of our gear in a bag the we can drop at the gear tent at the bottom of the mountain. We don’t want to have to make the 10 minute walk back to our hotel room if we don’t have to. If we go back to the room, its going to be very hard to force ourselves to go back out and keep climbing.

If any of you are interested in following our progress, you can go the this page to watch the “ascent board” (our bib numbers are 227 and 228). This page will keep track of the participants as they achieve each of the 17 summits. You can also go to this link to watch the live webcams from the mountain. There is one camera at the base where you may see us getting off the Gondola and one at the summit where you might see us completing one of the climbs.

You can also text us words or videos of encouragement as we will have our cell phones with us on the climb and I’m sure any encouragement we get will be very helpful with motivation to keep going.

Its time to Climb!

29029 Stratton 2023

Big Training Hike