Mammut, one of my favorite climbing companies, is celebrating their birthday at 150 years and doing so they have this huge celebration called the “The Biggest Peak Project in History.” The celebration is a bit of a contest, which I am normally against, but I joined in because thought it would be fun trying to win some great stuff, I think. The first stage was trying to build the biggest mountain of friends where the top 300 mountains moved on. Having made it into the top 300 I moved on to stage two where I now have to assemble my team and wait for 50/50 change of getting the stamp of approval for stage three. In stage three you basically won and go on the trip you got to plan.
When I say plan, I mean plan everything, the dates, the location, type of expedition, etc. I choose to climb the famous ex-American National Monument “Mount Holly Cross,” a 14,000 Ft. in Colorado. Now, I don’t plan to have much, if any, trouble climbing the huge mountain but instead I quote Walter Bonatti, “Mountains are the means, the man is the end. The goal is not to reach the tops of mountains, but to improve the man.” And in that spirit I decided it would be great to just center the trip around finding craigs, rock climbing, climb to the top of a 14,000ft iconic mountain, and focus on improving (upon) the man.
So now that I have made it to the team building phase all I have to do is just find 5 team members and get approved by the panel. In an email I recieced I was told to note the following points when preparing my project and selecting team members.
- The tours will be selected one after the other up until September 2011. There is therefore no set deadline. As soon as the jury decides in favour of a tour, the status of the team changes to “Selected”.
- All team members must be available at the time of the expedition.
- The expedition travel costs are to be covered by the team and/or the individual team members. Mammut provides the team with the anniversary equipment and a mountain guide from the Mammut Alpine School.
- The team leader and all team members have the necessary physical and sporting skills for the expedition.
- By participating in the expedition, the entire team grants Mammut the rights of use for all photo and video material.
You can check out my Mammut Basecamp by clicking the link, my team is ever so cleverly named “Adventure Seekers.” Be sure to wish me luck on the wall, or if your skilled enough apply for a spot on my team.
Eric J. Schwarz
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