By Angus Phillips
Sunday, August 12, 2007

He's gone in short order from waist-deep snow and piercing cold on one of the world's most inhospitable peaks to the sweltering heat of the Chesapeake Bay in August, but Chris Warner looks none the worse for it.

When his five-year quest to reach the summit of the world's second-tallest mountain ended successfully July 20, Warner, 43, became one of only two or three dozen climbers in the world to have conquered both K2 and Mount Everest. He lost 25 pounds on the two-month trek, which he's rapidly regaining eating homemade muffins slathered with butter. "It's nice to finally be taking in more calories than I'm burning."

A sign at the entrance to Hillsmere, the community outside Annapolis where he lives, reads, "Welcome Home Chris Warner," but he's hardly taken the town by storm. "Melinda and Wendy put that up," he says with a smile, acknowledging the handiwork of his wife and 2-year-old.

They are pleased to have him home after a harrowing trek that took the lives of two fellow climbers. K2 is a perilous place, far worse than its better-known neighbor Everest. Fewer than 300 people have made it to the icy, 28,251-foot top of K2 in northern Pakistan since it was first climbed in 1954. By contrast, more than 500 summitted Everest this year alone, Warner said.

Does that make K2 the hardest of all? "That's the iconic role it plays," said Warner, who got to the top after unsuccessful tries in 2002 and 2005, "based on the lack of success, the number of people it's killed [about 60] and the quality of the people who have tried and failed."

Everest generally has good weather in late May, while K2 has no predictable weather window. "Years go by when no one can summit," said Warner, and even when the weather cooperates "it's really steep, so every step is technical. There's lots of rock falls and avalanches, plus an ice fall you have to cross that's full of crevasses."

He and his climbing partner, Scotsman Bruce Normand, ran afoul of crevasses early in the attempt and barely survived. They aimed to pioneer a new route up the east face of K2, which meant crossing a glacier to set up base. Roped to his partner, Warner watched in alarm as an ice bridge gave way under Normand's feet and he fell into a 250-foot chasm. Warner tried to dig in to hold him when suddenly the ice gave way under him as well.

"I've been mountaineering since 1982 and I never heard of this before," Warner said. "He was dangling in one crevasse and I was dangling in another, with nothing but the rope between us holding us both up. It took awhile to figure out how to get out. He'd pull up and I'd slip down, then I'd pull up and he'd slip down.

"Finally we both got back up to the edge. Our heads popped up and we could talk it through. It was a miracle."

That mishap put an end to the east-face attempt, and after trying unsuccessfully to pioneer another first-ascent route, Warner, Normand and the third climber in their group, Californian Don Bowie, settled on joining six other parties attempting the traditional Abruzzi route to the top.

They got their chance when the weather broke July 20. By the end of the day, 17 had made it to the top, but two were lost to the Savage Mountain, as K2 is known. At 3 a.m., Nima Sherpa, a guide with a Korean team, slid off a steep ice slope on the summit attempt and fell 10,000 feet to his death as Warner and others watched.

Twenty hours later, Italian Stefano Svafka got lost on the hike back to base camp and froze. Meantime, Warner and Normand rescued a Czech climber who collapsed on the descent. "It was pitch black and snowing," Warner said, "when we saw what we thought was a black plastic garbage bag -- until it said, 'Help me, I'm dying.' "

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."