Everest

On December 23, 2004, ERMA M. EVEREST (nee Hood); beloved daughter of the late Pearl and the late Clark Hood; beloved wife of the late George L. Everest; devoted mother of Louis R. Everest; grandmother of Richard William Everest, Sr.; great-grandmother of Jennifer Lyn Everest, and Richard William Everest, Jr.; great-great-grandmother of Larry Creese, Jr. and Jordan Ohmann. Friends are invited to call at the Burgee-Henss-Seitz Funeral Home, Inc., 3631 Falls Road, on Sunday from 1 to 4 p.m. Services on Monday at 10 a.m. Interment in Moreland Memorial Park.

The new Mount Everest restaurant in Nottingham looks like it's ready to serve a banquet. Located at the Fullerton Plaza shopping center, the restaurant is as big as a health club - a Spa Lady used to be there - and dozens of tables are set and waiting for hundreds of customers. It's pretty, though, with splashes of sherbet-y colors - mint-green chairs and raspberry cloth napkins that match the prettily painted drop ceiling. The dining room is divided in two lengthwise, but there is still the problem of having too many tables for too few diners, at least on the recent weeknight when we visited.

The National Federation of the Blind had the money, and sightless climber Erik Weihenmayer had the guts. At 1 a.m. EDT Friday, he stood at 29,035 feet, atop Mount Everest, the first blind person to accomplish the feat. The NFB, headquartered in Baltimore, is planning a welcome-home party for Weihenmayer, one of just 1,000 climbers to conquer Everest, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. June 19. Eye disease took Weihenmayer's vision when he was a teen, but it hasn't clouded his "big-V" vision as he sets out each day to smash another stereotype.

POP CALEB STINE & THE BRAKEMEN / / 10:30 p. m. Saturday. The 8X10, 10 E. Cross St. $8. 410-547-7328 or ticketmaster.com. ....................... Caleb Stine, a fixture on the Baltimore indie scene, sidesteps the category-defying mash-ups usually heard around the city. He earnestly sticks to the dusty acoustic sounds of Americana. His evocative songs echo his influences, namely Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie. October 29th, Stine's independently released debut with his band the Brakemen, came out in May 2006.

A brave and balletic climber, George Leigh Mallory also proved to be a pithy wordsmith when, in some exasperation, he explained to a persistent reporter his quest to stand atop Mt. Everest -- the world's highest peak -- with the memorable phrase, "because it is there."On June 24, 1924, improbably clad in a fur-lined motorcyle helmet, tweed coat and hobnailed boots, the British climber and his novice companion, Andrew "Sandy" Irvine, were spotted by a fellow climber, Noel Odell, "moving expeditiously" only a thousand feet beneath the 29,028 foot summit.

On a nightmarishly challenging day 35 years ago, four American mountaineers inspired a generation of climbers by ascending and surviving the night on Mount Everest, the world's highest mountain at 29,028 feet. Now, only one of the four is left.On Oct. 31, while leading nine trekkers up Kala Pattar, an 18,192-foot mountain considered an easy walk-up with a breathtaking view of Everest, Luther G. Jerstad, 61, owner of a climbing and trekking business in Portland, Ore., died of a heart attack.

After two months of battling white-out conditions, avalanches and thin air on Mount Everest, Ellicott City resident Chris Warner is poised to make his final assault on the world's highest peak. Time is running out for the veteran mountaineer. Summer monsoon soon will rip the Himalayas, making further attempts impossible. If Warner and the other climbers in his team don't make it this week, they'll have to try again next year. "Walking away just isn't an easy option," Warner, 35, wrote in an e-mail message he sent using a solar-powered satellite phone.

As other Marylanders slept early yesterday, Chris Warner stood on top of the world. The Baltimore County man joined an elite club of 1,000 climbers when he reached the summit of 29,035-foot Mount Everest. He is believed to be the first Marylander to conquer the world's highest peak. He posed for photos on the summit - a pool table-size slab of snow and ice - and left a few mementos, including a gold cross given to him by a nun in New Jersey. Hours later, in classrooms across Maryland, students who had followed Warner's expedition on the Internet as part of a "Shared Summits" curriculum cheered.

Everest has taken his dream, but it did not take his life. Chris Warner, who spent 20 years preparing to conquer the world's highest mountain, is on his way home to Maryland today without experiencing the thrill of standing on top of the world. After huddling for 18 hours at 25,000 feet in tiny tents being shaken apart by high winds and driving snow, Warner and seven other members of the party were ordered down Wednesday by expedition leader Russell Brice. They are believed to be the last team off the mountain this season.

Under a cobalt-blue sky that seemed just beyond reach, Chris Warner placed his boots yesterday on the snow-encrusted summit of K2, the world's second-highest mountain, where few others have gone and that he had only pictured in his dreams. Just three days shy of his 43rd birthday, Warner, an Annapolis resident and owner of three Baltimore-area climbing gyms, became the first Marylander to stand atop both 28,253-foot K2 and Mount Everest, 782 feet higher. It took more than 15 hours for Warner and more than a dozen other climbers to cover the 1,850 vertical feet from Camp 4 to the summit, plowing through chest-deep snow, picking their way across ancient ice slabs and hauling themselves up slopes that reached an 80-degree pitch.

Sir Edmund Hillary, the mountain-climbing New Zealand beekeeper who became a mid-20th century hero as the first person to reach the summit of Mount Everest, has died. He was 88. Sir Edmund, who made his historic climb to the top of the world's highest mountain with the Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay of Nepal, died yesterday at a hospital in Auckland, according to an announcement from the office of New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark. The cause of death was not immediately announced.

Under a cobalt-blue sky that seemed just beyond reach, Chris Warner placed his boots yesterday on the snow-encrusted summit of K2, the world's second-highest mountain, where few others have gone and that he had only pictured in his dreams. Just three days shy of his 43rd birthday, Warner, an Annapolis resident and owner of three Baltimore-area climbing gyms, became the first Marylander to stand atop both 28,253-foot K2 and Mount Everest, 782 feet higher. It took more than 15 hours for Warner and more than a dozen other climbers to cover the 1,850 vertical feet from Camp 4 to the summit, plowing through chest-deep snow, picking their way across ancient ice slabs and hauling themselves up slopes that reached an 80-degree pitch.

A frozen corpse. Pits of despair. Avalanches. Dead ends. The accommodations? "Cold, greasy and, God, that kind of wet, slimy, gummy feeling you get after being trapped in a tent with two other guys for eight days," said mountaineer Chris Warner, laughing and perched a little more than a mile from the top of 28,251-foot K2, the world's second-tallest mountain. Having struggled to get this high, the Annapolis resident and his climbing partners will have to retrace their steps back to base camp today, their summit bid postponed by an unexpected blizzard.

While most Marylanders kick back this summer and relax at the beach or the swimming pool, Chris Warner will be grappling with a mountain that chews up and spits out most adventurers. Twice, K2 has flicked away Warner's advances with a powerful display of biting cold, brutal winds and treacherous avalanches that earned the world's second-highest peak the nickname "The Savage Mountain." For a third time, the Maryland mountaineer is taking up temporary residence at its base, hoping to tag the top of Pakistan's 28,251-foot peak somewhere around July 4, using a route no one has conquered.

KATMANDU, NEPAL // The all-seeing eyes of Buddha stare blankly over Katmandu's Palace Square from a huge wooden portal. The door is shut tight. But standing here on the very day in November when Maoist rebels signed a peace accord ending 10 years of turmoil and isolation in Nepal, I could almost hear the giant door crack open, bidding visitors back. A Hindu adage says guests are like gods. But travelers have largely stayed away since 1996 when Maoist insurgents began a terror campaign.

I will probably never visit Prague in the Czech Republic. Though I once spent a month in India, I didn't tour the Taj Mahal. And it would take a live sighting of Shakespeare to make me return to Stratford-upon-Avon in England. That's because I don't like crowds, the trash they leave, tour-bus fumes, full parking lots, long lines. There comes a point when it's simply not worth seeing the Louvre's Mona Lisa or Italy's Leaning Tower of Pisa if it means being pushed, squeezed, elbowed and distracted.

Three climbers died and four suffering the effects of high altitude were the target of a rescue mission yesterday as scores of mountaineers raced to reach the top of Mount Everest before bad weather sweeps in. A Russian, an Austrian and an Australian on separate expeditions died near the 29,035-foot summit of the world's tallest peak. More than 50 people reached the top from the Nepalese side and a smaller number from Tibet in a two-day span. The jet stream dictates when climbers can make their attempts, but usually the season lasts from mid-May to the end of the month.

Mallory and Hillary -- the Englishman George H. L. Mallory and the New Zealander Edmund P. Hillary -- are forever linked to Mount Everest and to two of the most famous quotations in mountaineering.Mallory's body was apparently found this month on Everest, 75 years after he and Andrew Irvine were last seen inching toward the summit. He -- not Hillary, to whom the quote is often attributed -- wanted to climb the world's highest mountain "because it's there."What Hillary said, after he and Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers confirmed as reaching the summit in May 1953, was: "Well, we knocked the bastard off."

Renata Chlumska has looked down on the world from its highest point. Now she's seeing the United States from sea level. With a battered red kayak as her constant companion, the Swedish athlete is making her way around the perimeter of the country, an 11,000-mile journey just beyond its halfway point. When bad weather or terrain prevent her from paddling, she hitches her 240-pound load to a harness and pulls it behind her as she mountain-bikes or in-line skates. Early yesterday morning, she paddled into Maryland with a full moon illuminating a sparkling welcome mat from southern Assateague Island to Ocean City.

You can't say Disney doesn't listen. Guests have been complaining for years that Orlando's Animal Kingdom needed more rides, that the parks needed more roller coasters, and that Walt Disney's magic needs to be based more on the authentic vision that the man himself once embodied. The answer: Expedition Everest: Mission Himalayas. This new thrill ride, the first in this park since Primeval Whirl opened in 2002, is a 200-foot peak that takes riders for nearly a mile aboard a runaway train through the Himalayas, the habitat of the yeti, a mythical creature protecting the sacred mountains.