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Patrick Hickey is just two peaks away from the high of a lifetime.
Since 2001, Hickey has been on a personal quest to climb the highest mountain on each of the seven continents, known as the Seven Summits among mountaineers, in seven years. He's topped five summits and will leave Dec. 12 to climb Mount Vinson in Antarctica. He will attempt to complete the Seven Summits--seven in seven--with Mount Everest in late May 2007.
"The Seven Summits of the world are kind of like the holy grail of mountaineering," said Hickey, a clinical assistant professor in the College of Nursing. Hickey received his master's of science and doctor of public health degrees from USC's School of Public Health, and this semester will graduate with his master's degree in nursing from USC's College of Nursing. "When I started researching the possibility of climbing the Seven Summits, I found that there had been fewer than 100 people in the world who actually had done it at that time, and today the number still remains less than 100."
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Hickey, 51, who admits that he loves vistas but is afraid of heights, had never climbed a mountain until 1993 when he and his wife, Carol, were backpacking through Latin America. He was in Banos, Ecuador, when he ran into a group of Israeli tourists in an outdoors shop.
"One of the gentlemen turned to me and said, 'Hey, you, you want to go climb a mountain?' I looked at my wife. I had never considered anything like that before in my life, and I said, 'Sure, why not?'"Hickey said. "Five days later, I was summiting a 20,000 foot mountain, my first experience ever. I had no training at all, but I was hooked--the thrill, the excitement, pushing myself to the limit, to the envelope."
With the high of his first climb still fresh, Hickey began challenging himself with 14,000-foot peaks in Colorado when he returned home. "So, I started looking into climbing higher mountains, and that's when I heard about the Seven Summits," he said.
Hickey began with Mount Aconcagua (elevation 22,841 feet) in Argentina in 2001. In 2002, he and his wife together summited Mount Kilimanjaro (elevation 19,340 feet) in Africa. In 2003, he topped Mount McKinley (elevation 20,320 feet) in Alaska.
"To date, that is my most favorite mountain," Hickey said. "McKinley has been the most beautiful and quite the challenge--severe, severe cold weather, 50 degrees below zero, living on a glacier for three weeks, crevasses everywhere. You name it, dangers happen."
In 2004, Hickey climbed Mount Elbrus (elevation 18,510 feet) in Russia. In 2005, he and two other climbers became the first to climb Carstensz Pyramid (elevation 16,023 feet) in Indonesia, just north of Australia, in three years. The mountain had been closed to climbers because of political unrest.
"It was an Indiana Jones adventure from day one," Hickey said.
A helicopter pilot dropped the climbers off at the base of the mountain but, with the mountain socked in, never returned with their support team and provisions.
"So here we were with no communications, no walkie-talkies, and no food. So, we took inventory, and among us, we had three or four power bars," Hickey said. "We determined we were going to have to summit the next night."
Exhausted, the three climbed a 3,000-foot rock face all night and made it to the summit, but "it took forever to get down and back to our base camp totally exhausted. We slept as best we could."
The next day the group retuned to where they thought a helicopter would pick them up, but it never appeared; and they started hiking down the mountain through the highest mine in the world at 12,000 to 13,000 feet.
"We were about half an hour on to the mine's property when we were arrested by the military at gunpoint for trespassing," Hickey said. "We spent the day in the barracks. Initially, it was kind of nerve-wracking because nobody could speak English, and we couldn't speak their language.
"Our guide wasn't there with us. He'd been taken someplace else. Finally, he showed up with this military commander and a bunch of boxes, and they threw them at us. We opened them, and it was food. We hadn't eaten in like three or four days. Knives and forks aside, we just ripped into the chicken and rice.
"That broke the ice, and then all the military guys were friendly with us. We have pictures of them with their arms around us. Their pictures of us are probably posted somewhere in their barracks now--crazy Americans."
"But we successfully summited and made a lot of headlines at the time because we opened the summit for the world. That was very exciting."
For his trip to Antarctica, Hickey will take a Russian jet from the tip of South America and land on the ice. Another plane will take him to the base of Mount Vinson (elevation 16,050 feet) for the climb, which will take two to three weeks.
"You have good communications there," Hickey said. "Everything depends on the weather down there because things can be frigid. It's their summer, but it still can be 40 or 50 below zero as we're climbing."
The climb on Everest (elevation 29,028 feet) this spring will take from two to three months. Climbers must acclimatize and get accustomed to the altitude before making the summit.
"You go up and down the mountain until the weather is right, and the stars align," Hickey said. "Then you make your push for the top."
12/06
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