From Larkin High to really high up

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Jeff Reynolds

Updated: March 23, 2012 8:03AM

Jeff Reynolds has seen some pretty amazing sights atop some of the world’s most remote and challenging mountains, often with just a few close friends.

In March through May, the 1983 Larkin High School graduate and Elgin native — along with just four experienced mountaineers in his group — is set see the top of the world when the group scales Mount Everest.

A total of 19 people are heading with Reynolds to Nepal for the trek, organized through S2 Mountaineering, a nonprofit group he helped organize to promote safe, responsible mountaineering. Rather than a for-profit trekking company, S2 is a way for mountaineers to connect.

“We aren’t reliant on a paycheck from S2” and can therefore be picky about who can come with, Reynolds said.

One of those people going to base camp — but not necessarily going up the mountain — is Beth Walz, a 1982 Larkin graduate and founder of the website Adventurewoman.com.

Although the two graduated just a year apart, it wasn’t until they were reintroduced through a Facebook friend that the two area natives — Walz living in Florida and Reynolds in Virginia — realized they both were lawyers and were both promoting adventurous living through their respective websites, Reynolds said.

Walz began her adventures following a stint working in London, backpacking through Europe and then, by age 30, visiting every continent.

Reynolds discovered a liking for rock climbing at age 14, when he first spent a summer at Sioux Narrows, Ontario, at McGhie’s Wilderness Camp. Back in the late 1970s, he said, many Elgin youth went to the camp and learned how to fish, canoe, camp and climb.

Two summers later, he went back to McGhie’s as a climbing instructor.

Calling him back

Then, on a Colorado skiing trip with his family, Reynolds saw real mountains for the first time.

“I wanted to jump out of the car, run to the mountains and never come back,” Reynolds said.

He spent seven years in the U.S. military, which paid for law school, and he kept climbing rocks and mountains along the way. He is now a environmental attorney in Virginia, with a wife and child, but the mountains keep calling him back, Reynolds said.

“Skiing, rock climbing, ice climbing, Alpine mountaineering … it all ended up merging into one for me,” Reynolds said.

While Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world, in feet above sea level, the climbing isn’t the hard part of the trek, Reynolds said. It is the freezing cold, sometimes with 100-below-zero wind chills and lack of oxygen that challenges climbers. In fact, the last section of the climb is known as the “death zone” for those unprepared for the elements.

Climbing Everest “is like a marathon. You must be well-paced, and have really strong cardio and muscle strength. The tech skills aren’t as important. You are not climbing a vertical wall” of rock, he said.

In fact, he turned down three people who asked to join the trip because their climbing experience hadn’t prepared them for the challenge ahead, Reynolds said.

The group has a six-to-seven-week window on “the hill” as Reynolds called it, with the hope to reach the summit in mid-May.

“We will watch the weather patterns, position ourselves, and be ready to summit when the weather window hits,” he said. “You have to use experience, with common sense, before you start moving up to take advantage of ... when the weather window is optimal.”

Mountain decides

“Optimal” weather, Reynolds said, means that it might be minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit, not minus 40, to make a bid for the summit.

“My philosophy is that the mountain will tell you when it’s ready to be climbed … or you will miss the bid. You have to conform to the mountain,” he said.

The other challenge is the fact there may be many other teams also attempting the quest, Reynolds said.

“There could be another 20 teams at least out there, in different sizes and large teams,” he said. “That is pretty scary. The hazard won’t be Everest — it will be other climbers. You will hear other people say that, that what they fear the most is the others on the hill with varying levels of experience.”

This won’t be his first time in the same Himalayan range. He was on one of Everest’s sister peaks, Lhotse, a few years ago.

“We got blown off,” he said. “It was one of the few I didn’t succeed on. We got torn apart by a storm … and got down in time. I was on that peak because I wanted to be there. It is the same with Everest. I am not excited about all of the people but excited about being on that hill. This is the Super Bowl. That is the best way to describe it.”