While most college students spent this past spring cramming for final exams, Sean O'Keefe had loftier goals. The Reed College undergrad and native of Ipswich went on a six-week foray into northern India along the Greater Himalayan range, home to the world's most precipitous peaks. O'Keefe ascended to altitudes as high as 18,300 feet. It was a defining milestone in this budding mountaineer's life.
"It was unreal realizing I had the ability to do this," says O'Keefe. "I liked the idea of taking care of yourself and the sheer fun of pushing yourself physically. And getting to the top was such a rush."
O'Keefe is indeed no stranger to tests of endurance and the perpetual expanses of the great outdoors. At the age of 5 he traveled along the trails of the White Mountains with his parents. His father was an avid climber and inspired O'Keefe to take it to the next level. And since then, O'Keefe has gone onto expeditions into the Rocky Mountains, Alaska, and Mt. St. Helens.
"My old man and I made an attempt at St. Helens but got totally sucked in by the fog there," he says. "We weren't that far below the summit but had to follow our own footsteps back out."
O'Keefe started planning for the Himalayas after hearing about the courses offered by the National Outdoor Leadership School, or NOLS. NOLS offered O'Keefe a 42-day journey from April 2 to May 14. The course would orientate him with route-finding, self rescue, technical planning and glacier practice resting.
"This seemed like the natural next step," explains O'Keefe. "It was an opportunistic moment for me. But how does one prepare for such an audacious task? "I'm stubborn when it comes to stuff like this and worked myself pretty hard. A large amount of preparation went into this trip. I'd do lots of running and biking three or four times a week which lasted three to four miles."
The climber started his arduous adventure on a bus in Delhi with 13 fellow travelers and four Hindu guides. From there the team hiked seven days to base camp after the roads disappeared. O'Keefe was enthralled with Indian culture.
"It was really nice. We hiked through a bunch of villages and stayed in some," says O'Keefe. "When we got there the big news was of all the riots in Tibet. When we came back out everyone was talking about the earthquakes in China. My team jokingly talked about how once we got out of the mountains, we'd know who won the Democratic Primaries back home."
During their hikes, the wayfarers came across deserted towns, once prominent before China invaded Tibet.
"There'd be shepherds scattered about along the way," says O'Keefe. "We entertained serious suggestions of buying a goat or lamb for dinner. I lived on rice and beans for most of the trip. I missed meat for sure."
Atop the ridges and glaciers weather varied in two extremes: scorching hot and freezing cold. Once the sun came down it was T-shirt weather. Each team member was carrying 60-85 lbs in his backpack. The Ipswich resident also went without a shower for 35 days. Of course, there's also the issue of the lack of oxygen at such towering levels. According to O'Keefe, the travelers could get sunburned from the heat of the day after a mere half hour. But not just from that.
"You can also get burned from the solar glare coming off of the snow and glaciers," explains O'Keefe. "Glacial glares cause sunburns inside your nose and the top of your mouth."
At night, O'Keefe needed to wear up to four layers of pants and jackets and use a minus-15-degrees sleeping bag while resting on bamboo mats and stone floors. The team would sleep until 2 a.m. and get moving.
"Everything freezes over during the night," says O'Keefe. "We'd travel before the sun rose to soften the snow which could possibly cause avalanches. Also, it makes it soggier and you don't want to be sinking into the snow while wearing big heavy boots. There was an avalanche a couple hundred yards away from base camp."
When trekking across the glaciers team members were split into individual groups connected by ropes.
"There were stretches of ice that went on for 20 to 25 days," says O'Keefe. "These were usually 100 feet. They're smaller than they used to be. We were on the Shalang Glacier and Kaphni."
O'Keefe is currently taking summer courses at Boston University and working at EBSCO Publishing here in Ipswich. He hopes to travel in the near future to Mt. Rainier and Denali. In the fall O'Keefe plans to continue his studies at Reed College in Oregon.
http://www.wickedlocal.com/ipswich/news/lifestyle/x1423543638/OKeefe-takes-it-to-the-top
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