CARBONDALE — Acclaimed mountaineer Conrad Anker said he’s scaling back on climbing the world’s highest peaks to spend more time studying them.
Concerned about global warming melting away the glaciers that cover the roof of the world, Anker is going back to school to study glacial recession, with a focus on the Himalayan peaks he has explored so many times as a climber.
Around the world, Anker said, former ice routes have disappeared, leaving dangerous rock ascents up loose rock as the ice has melted.
“There are routes that were done in 1988 where the ice line is up 3,000 feet,” said Anker, one of the speakers at this weekend’s 5Point Film Festival in Carbondale. “It’s melting back so dramatically.”
Twenty-eight years after Anker was a student at Carbondale’s Colorado Rocky Mountain School, the Bozeman, Mont., resident is going back to school to study at Montana State University.
On Friday, he spoke to CRMS students and warned them that global warming may be the biggest challenge they’ll face.
“We’re going to be facing change that’s unprecedented across the planet,” Anker said.
When it comes to glaciers, it’s not just climbers losing routes. It’s billions of people who depend on the meltwater for drinking water. A fifth of the world’s population relies on the five rivers that flow from the Himalayas, Anker said. Half a billion rely on the Ganges River alone.
Closer to home, Glacier National Park’s namesake glaciers are expected to vanish by 2020, he said.
“There are no glaciers on our planet that are growing right now,” said Anker, who was featured last month on an episode of the PBS show “Now” that focused on shrinking glaciers.
Anker is less known for defending glaciers than for climbing them, though. A member of The North Face climbing team, his extensive climbs in the Himalayas have included scouring the slopes of Mount Everest for the remains of legendary climber George Mallory.
In 1999, he narrowly survived an ice avalanche on Shishapangma that killed climbing partner Alex Lowe and cameraman David Bridges. It was a moment that changed his life, Anker said. Anker would marry Lowe’s widow Jenni Lowe-Anker, also a speaker at the weekend film festival, and help raise their three children.
The event also refocused him on giving back to the planet he climbs.
“I was given this second chance at life,” he said. “When you go through something as heavy as that, you learn there’s more to life than yourself and you want to do something for other people.”
Anker helped establish the Khumbu Climbing School to train Nepali climbers, who often bear the brunt not only of expedition gear but their fatalities, in part because of a lack of technical training, he said. He’s been involved with efforts to combat cataract blindness.
He’s been climbing, too, most recently in Borneo, where he plunged into the 10,000-foot-deep abyss of Low’s Gully, on the flanks of Mount Kinabalu.
As school gains priority, Anker said, he’s trimming back his major expeditions to one a year, freeing up more time to study the glaciers he’s made a career of climbing.
Anker and Lowe-Anker will appear this morning at 9 a.m. at a book-signing at Dos Gringos Burritos, followed by Lowe-Anker conducting an Art in the Park presentation at Dandelion Day at Sopris Park. The two will appear at a panel discussion Celebrating Our Common Spirit: Turning Desire into Mission at 3:30 p.m. at the Carbondale Recreation and Community Center. Tickets are $12. They will also be the special guests at the Saturday program of films starting at 7 p.m. Tickets are $20.
For more information, go to www.5pointfilm.org [1].
dfrey@aspendailynews.com
