Colorado Springs – She’s 21, a bright-as-the-sun student at Colorado College, and she has a circulatory problem that limits the blood flow to her hands and feet. In a few weeks, she’ll begin an icy ascent of 20,320-foot Denali in Alaska in temperatures that regularly plunge to 20 degrees below zero even in the summer. So how will this young woman keep her fingers and piggies from freezing?
“I’m taking Viagra,” said Sheldon Kerr, who is not kidding. “It increases blood flow. … (and) keeps my fingers warm.”
Which might also explain why you hardly ever see a photo of Hugh Hefner wearing mittens.
Kerr and fellow Colorado College students Libby Bushell and Nancy Calhoun embark on their Denali odyssey today, flying to Anchorage and then on to a base camp Thursday at the foot of the massive mountain, also known as Mount McKinley.
The climb to the summit of North America’s highest peak will take, more or less, three weeks. And the trio will go it alone. No guides. No support team. Just three women who have a maniacal passion for adventure. And a cause.
They’ve raised about $25,000 in donations leading up to their journey. The money will go to the American Breast Cancer Foundation. They all have a reason. Bushell, for example, has an aunt and a grandmother who are breast cancer survivors.
“I know that my mother and I are at extremely high risk just because of genetics,” she said. “It’s not cancer from the sun or cancer from smoking. I might get cancer just because I’m me.”
The plan was born 18 months ago in a dormitory room. A plan to go big. To reach for something that seems to most to be unreachable.
They became linked as freshmen, drawn together by a passion for the outdoors. Together, they climbed to the summits of Colorado’s Mounts Princeton and Sneffels and have since endured punishing desert hikes in Utah to get in shape for Denali.
Not that the punishment didn’t bring a few laughs. Take last year’s mid-summer trip to Utah’s Canyonlands National Park.
“We call it the freakishly weird trip to Utah,” said Bushell, who is from Homer, Alaska. “We sort of got lost. It was 100 degrees and then we ran out of water. It got all crazy. We’re dehydrated and stumbling around and all of a sudden there’s a camp and people invited us in for gourmet food.”
“Organic chicken and brownies,” Kerr said.
The women laugh then. They do that a lot. They’ve given their expedition on a route known as Denali’s West Buttress a, well, an interesting name: Breasts on the West Buttress. (For more information on this memorably named adventure, or to donate go to their website at www.botwb.org)
“We had several important meetings about the name,” Bushell said. “We liked that one best.”
But Denali, they know, is nothing to laugh at.
“We’ve trained hard, but I don’t know how you replicate 20 degrees below zero,” said Kerr, who grew up in a wild place in extreme northern Vermont along the Canadian border where her father builds traditional wooden boats. Her mother is a doctor.
“I do know, though, what it feels like,” she said. “Where I grew up it was 35 below zero pretty often.”
Calhoun, who grew up in the woods outside Greensboro, N.C., draws the connection between the Denali expedition and their cause.
“I have a fear,” she said, “of falling off the mountain. But I believe the adventure of conquering breast cancer is similar to the adventure of conquering Denali. It’s about never giving up. It’s about surmounting.”
And, they agreed, both quests are about being able to lean on a friend.
“It’s a different energy with the girls than it is with boys,” Kerr said. “It’s not about beating each other up the hill. It’s about helping each other up the hill.”
“With other girls,” said Bushell, the Alaskan, “there’s no feeling of competition.”
Unless, she added, with a smile, “someone is trying to steal my boyfriends.”
They’ll leave that and the rest of the world behind today. They hope to stand atop the jagged peak of Denali early in June.
Kerr said the most important thing she’ll bring with her – in addition to special boots, high-tech gloves and the unusual circulatory pills – will be an attitude.
“I honestly believe,” she said, “that we can do this.”
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@ denverpost.com.
