Retired Ed Viesturs hears call of the mountain

Happy Earth Day, one day late. In honor of, we bring you a special commemorative green edition of the Big Gore-Tex Outdoors Mailbag, which is now in the midst of surviving its second — or is it third? — killer recession.

Straight from the middle:

Q: I read a dispatch recently that said local climber Ed Viesturs was on Everest. What's up with that? Didn't the retirement stick?

A: Not entirely. Our man Ed is, indeed, on Everest, guiding with Peter Whittaker and Dave Hahn on an Eddie Bauer-sponsored climb to test and publicize the company's new "First Ascent" gear line.

Viesturs, you will recall, said he was retiring from big-peak bagging in May 2005 after knocking off imposing Annapurna — on his third attempt — to claim his place in history: He became the first American to climb all 14 of the world's 8,000-meter peaks, and one of only five humans at the time to do so without using bottled oxygen.

His decision to retire, he said, was cemented a week after that climb, when Viesturs received word that an Italian climber had been caught in an icefall and killed on the very same route Viesturs and partner Veikka Gustafsson had been on days earlier.

"Enough is enough," he said at the time.

But he left the door open a small crack to guiding on some expeditions on big peaks he considers safer. And the pull of challenging himself in thin air proved irresistible this spring, when Whittaker's team came calling.

It couldn't have been an easy decision, given how wife Paula and three young kids have now grown accustomed to having him home, safe and sound, during summit season.

But Viesturs, who swore off the oft-overcrowded, commercialized Everest a decade ago, jokingly forming, along with some pals, a faux support group, "Everest Anonymous," doesn't seem to have lost many steps.

He said by e-mail Wednesday that he had just returned to base camp after spending three nights establishing Camp 2. He and Whittaker made the trip down, from 21,200 feet to 17,500 feet, in 2 ½ hours.

"The [Khumbu] icefall is a great motivator!" Viesturs writes.

He and other guides are prepping the route for South Col summit attempts in May. They've been as high as the base of Lhotse Face, and are resting back at base for a few days.

You can follow the expedition through words and some uncommonly good mountain video at http://blog.firstascent.com/. Viesturs has stood atop Everest six times.

Q: What have you done to help reduce the size of your carbon footprint? Please be specific.

A: Plenty. In order:

• New radials upped gas mileage on my commuter Kenworth 1.6 percent.

• Always bring my own cloth tote bag to purchase 844-pack of AA batteries at Costco; use same bag to transport dead ones later to landfill.

• Now line the walls of my home office — and the cosmonaut helmet I wear at all times at my desk — only with 100-percent recycled tinfoil.

• Could have run my gas-powered weed whacker for the past couple of hours. Chose to write column instead.

• Planted two sapling coat trees.

• Ordered book, "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Green Living" from Amazon.com. With one-day shipping, it'll be delivered tomorrow afternoon by large, smoke-belching brown truck sent here specifically for that purpose.

Q: When will some of that federal pork, sorry, stimulus money trickle down into our wildlands, like National Parks and National Forests?

A: Actually, fairly soon.

The National Park Service Wednesday announced expenditures of $750 million for 800 projects from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. About $58 million of that will go to Olympic National Park, which will spend it thusly:

• $54 million for nine "mitigation projects" to prepare for the removal of those two heinous dams on the lower Elwha River. (Comment: Fine, but get on with it, already. Some of us would like to see this happen before we die, and we're not getting any younger.)

• The rest for a new power line to Hurricane Ridge, converting the 2 miles of closed road below Olympic Hot Springs in the Elwha drainage into a trail (and rehabilitating the former campground at Boulder Creek); a new sewer system for Hoh Rain Forest; and new road bridges at Hoh, Lake Crescent and Rialto Beach.

Ron Judd's columns are published in Sunday's Sports and Thursday's Northwest Weekend, The Seattle Times' weekly outdoors/recreation section. He can be reached at 206-464-8280 or at rjudd@seattletimes.com