Heart in the Clouds: Anne Parmenter Summits Everest

It’s hard to imagine that at 22,000 feet you could look up at anything other than the stratosphere. Back in 1999, though, when Anne Parmenter stood atop a peak nicknamed the Matterhorn of the Himalayas, she craned her neck and sized up her next big mountain.
"You stand on Ama Dablam and you’re looking right at Everest," she said. "You want to reach out and touch it."
The highest mountain on earth may have been seven miles across the Khumbu, but it certainly wasn’t out of Parmenter’s reach. The Bristol resident had already climbed Aconcagua twice and Denali once, respectively the second and third most topographically prominent mountains in the world. To round out the top three with an Everest summit, she would have to draw deep into this cache of experience, which also includes the volcanoes of Ecuador and numerous ascents as a climbing guide in the Grand Tetons of Wyoming.
What complimented this resume best, though, was when Parmenter had asked if the restaurant we were meeting at was showing the World Cup- proof, I thought, that she truly does come from that land across the pond not only known for loving its soccer, but for producing great mountaineers, too.
"After seeing Everest for the first time when we went to Ama Dablam, especially as a kid growing up in England, with the history of Chris Bonington and the British explorers, I was like, ‘Wow, that’s Everest,’" she recalled. "That evoked something in me."
Brazil was playing Ghana on the corner TV while Anne talked about her first climbs as an eleven year-old in the Lake District. I had been to Grasmere myself during college and we agreed upon the beauty of the place better known for Wordsworth and his daffodils than the harsh moonscapes that these early climbs would lead to decades later.
Parmenter, the Head Field Hockey Coach at Trinity College, turned forty seven on the Fourth of July, a date, she says, that made her destined to become an American.
Not to mention the twentieth American woman to reach the top of Everest.
Stacy Allison was the first back in 1988, but not before Junko Tabei of Japan smoothed the snow for all women in 1975. If there is a name that inspired Parmenter at all, however, it was Alison Hargreaves.
"She was really pushing the barrier for women mountaineers," said Parmenter.
Hargreaves was the second person to climb Everest both solo and without supplemental oxygen. In 1995, Hargreaves reached the summit of K2, but died on her descent, an event Parmenter remembers like yesterday.
I asked Anne if she had any interest in climbing K2, second only to Everest in height, but certainly more difficult- and deadlier.
Anne paused then looked up suddenly.
"Yeah," she said. "I would like to say that I’m not interested. Will I ever climb it? It’s just such a. . ." Her words again get lost somewhere on that summit, which only six women have reached. Just one of them is still alive today. The other five have either died on the way down K2 or on subsequent climbs on other Himalayan mountains.
"I’m not superstitious, but I would say I’m calculating," she explained. "I hope that I’m now mature enough that I don’t have this ‘summit or die’ mentality."
Parmenter proved this discipline in 2004 as a member of the Connecticut Everest Expedition that was full of team tension and that became a captivating story in the media. At 26,000 feet, Parmenter had a gut feeling, paid attention to it, and turned back.
In contrast, this year’s team was a better fit and that made all the difference.
"I knew them and I trusted them," she said. "I trusted them with my life."
As a result, Parmenter came down from the summit six weeks ago with relatively little physical harm. In that time, a small wound from her oxygen mask has healed into a faint, pink smudge on the bridge of her nose.
The possibility of serious injury or even death is not lost on Parmenter, though. She witnessed what frostbite had done to the second South African to ever summit. The distinction, however, may cost him part of his hand.
Nine people died on Everest this season, with five in just one week. Parmenter walked by the British climber Dave Sharp just ten days after he died, while she had to step over other bodies that have been there for decades, preserved in the cold Himalayan air, still in the outdated gear of their times.
Such reminders of these risks make the boredom of base camp even more difficult. Aside from completing countless Sudokus and trying to stay healthy, there’s not much to do but wait for your chance to summit. While Parmenter’s team had planned for a late-May summit push, watching other teams summit as early as May 14 made them anxious. But that waiting, of course, doesn’t last forever.
"You know you’re going to have four days of hell," explained Parmenter. "North Col, Camp Two, Camp Three, summit. Each day, you’re getting progressively higher, progressively more tired and your body is breaking down more quickly. Can you hang in there? It’s like hitting mile 18 in a marathon."
She should know. She’s run eight of them.
But there’s only one Everest, so when the summit becomes a reality and dreams come true, the feeling of accomplishment is intense.
"When you’re very close to the summit you have to do this bizarre rock scramble and I literally got off the rocks, turned right and there’s the summit," she said. "There was a thump in my chest and I was just completely overwhelmed with emotion and started to cry."
She wasn’t there yet, though, and she had to remind herself that people have gotten even this far and died.
"‘You’re going to make it to the top of Everest,’" Parmenter told herself. She refocused her sights, and at 7:19 on the morning of May 25, she reached the top of the world. For fifty minutes, Parmenter looked out through the perfect window of weather, at the curvature of the earth and at peak after peak, some named, some not. One of them looked really familiar and this one did have a name: Ama Dablam.
"It was pretty neat to be on Everest and to look down on Ama Dablam," she said. "You’re looking at the panorama and you can just see all these peaks and you say, ‘I was on that summit.’"
For now, all Parmenter knew about her next climb was that it would be later this afternoon with a friend at Pinnacle Rock, that weekend crag in Plainville.
What she has learned on each of her bigger ascents, though, she has brought back and applied to this ordinary world at sea level. She even related it to soccer.
"I think so often nowadays people look for excuses," she explained. "Why didn’t the U.S. team win in soccer? ‘Well, it’s Bruce Arena’s fault.’ No, it isn’t. You need to be willing to accept the consequences in the same way that two years ago, I turned around."
The real lesson is in that she tried again.
"Truly set your sights," she said, "and you can do anything you want."

Notes:
1. Photo of Anne on summit was taken by Scott Woolum.
2. Anne Parmenter is available for slideshow presentations at schools, corporations and community groups. Contact her at anne.parmenter@trincoll.edu.