With a 'Miracle' and Some Moxie, He Came Out on Top

All in a day's work for Warner, who grew up in the New Jersey suburbs near New York and caught the outdoor adventure bug at age 15, when he was sent into the woods for five days with a dozen fellow teenage miscreants and a parole officer. He came to Baltimore in 1986 to work in Outward Bound and has been roaming the globe climbing forbidding peaks ever since.

Warner started Earth Treks, a mountaineering instruction operation, in Columbia in 1990. Earth Treks opened an indoor climbing center there in 1997; indoor centers in Rockville and Timonium followed in 2001 and 2006.

Isn't Maryland a funny place to have a mountaineering school? "I think it was a brilliant idea," Warner said immodestly. "You have an area where people have high disposable incomes, good education and a willingness to try new things. We don't need climbers -- we make them!"

Today, Earth Treks has 100 employees and evidently is going well enough to send its founder on far-flung adventures. On K2, Warner and his mates took video for an upcoming segment on "Jeep World of Adventure Sports" on NBC. They defrayed some of the $100,000 cost with sponsor donations from Under Armour, PNC Bank and Deer Park Water.

The K2 climb, Warner said, was the most satisfying in his long career. Why? "I think it's the way the summit day came together. Somebody had to step in and be the leader after Nima Sherpa died. No one knew what to do. A lot of people wanted to quit."

Warner said members of the Korean team who had hired the guide came down the slope, headed for base camp. "We embraced them. We acknowledged the death. Then I just started going back up, laying rope."

He said Normand and Bowie organized climbers from each camp to push forward and sent four men from a strong Russian team, who were fortified by oxygen, to the front to help break trail (Warner himself does not use oxygen).

In the end, Warner said, "The reason 17 people were able to summit that day is because seven people, the four Russians and us, took charge."