7 Up

By Sarah Tuff '95
Portrait by Dennis Curran
Other photos courtesy Britton Keeshan

Britton Keeshan '05 is out of breath. Near the top of 980-foot Snake Mountain in Addison, Vermont, a guy who has recently climbed 29,035-foot Mount Everest is out of breath.

OK, so he's not exactly doubled over, gasping for oxygen, as he peers down at the quilted farms and twisting waterways of the Champlain Valley. And his breathless state on this cool August morning has less to do with conditioning than with the fact that he's been asked to summarize his climbing accomplishments—at just the moment in the day's climb that requires a modest amount of physical exertion. Though short of breath, he begins to list the peaks he's summited—and it's a rather long list—while continuing to climb. He speaks in a modest, casual way, and it quickly becomes apparent why he didn't at least pause to catch his breath before honoring the request: he's too polite. He was asked a question, so he answered it; lack of oxygen be damned. It's comforting to see that a guy with one of the loftiest hobbies in the world is so down to earth.

Though Britton is still a college student, David Letterman has given him a seat on the Late Show, multinational companies have handed him the microphone to inspire their executives, and bloggers constantly sing his praises because last May, Britton Keeshan became the youngest person ever to have climbed the Seven Summits, the highest points on each of the continents. From mighty Everest (Asia) to diminutive Kosciuszko (Australia), these peaks have caused many a daydream among office-bound workers. But while the rest of us only dream of adventure—bringing the mountain(s) to us through our mind's eye—Britton walked out of his home in Greenwich, Connecticut, and took himself to the mountains.

At Middlebury's Porter Hospital, where Britton works part time as an emergency-department technician, the man who climbed the Seven Summits is better known as the grandson of Bob Keeshan—who was Captain Kangaroo on the longest running children's show of all time and who lived in Vermont for 14 years. From 1955 (after a stint as a clown on the Howdy Doody Show) until 1984, Bob Keeshan marched to "Yankee Doodle Dandy," listened to talking clocks, and stood under showers of Ping Pong balls. He also opened up a world of learning, literature, and exploration to several generations of children.

"My grandfather was a person who believed in reading to kids, getting them to be creative, and opening their minds to bigger things," says Britton. "I'm a really extreme example of my grandfather's ideology. I've opened my mind; I've explored the world—I just did it a little more literally."

Naturally, Britton watched television as a kid, not only Captain Kangaroo, but shows like Rescue 911 and Trauma: Life in the ER, which sparked an early interest in medicine. Climbing mountains, however, took a greater leap of the imagination. "There wasn't a hint it was going to happen," says his father, Michael, a marketing consultant.

"He had always been extraordinarily curious, and I think the climbing and his love of the third world and its medical issues are manifestations of that curiosity."
He was a spirited hockey and soccer player as a youngster, but, frankly, not a talented one. (He garnered lots of "best sportsmanship" and "most improved player" awards, the type of honors generally reserved for scrappy benchwarmers.) One day when he was 14, he decided he'd like to spend his summer climbing the Grand Tetons instead of going away to tennis camp.

"I was ready to get away from Greenwich," Britton says, "and it was so different from anything I'd ever done before, just a complete shift." The following summer, in 1997, he went backpacking in Alaska and laid eyes on North America's tallest peak: 20,320-foot Denali. Britton was smitten; he had to climb Denali. And so he prepared himself for the tough technical climb with a month-long course, in 1998, at the glacial Waddington Range Traverse in British Columbia. "It was the hardest thing I'd ever done in my life," he says, remembering the first-day slog of 3,000 feet, carrying 80 pounds of gear in the relentless heat before collapsing in his tent. "When I woke up in the morning, I thought, This is never going to happen; I'm not going to last 30 days out here. But you take one day at a time, and you pull through it. You have incredibly hard days."

You also have incredibly hungry days, as Britton learned when the group ran out of food for the final week of the trip. Waiting for the bush plane to pick them up in the wilderness, the haggard climbers stumbled into a logging camp, where a shorthanded lumberjack asked for help moving one of his trucks that had been left on the mountain. Though he'd never driven a car with a manual transmission (much less a truck), an exhausted Britton volunteered and chatted up the logger as they drove to the site. When he arrived back at the camp—white-knuckled from craning his neck over the steering wheel and operating the stick shift on a steep road—Britton found that he and the other climbers had been repaid with a hearty dinner and breakfast the next day.

"It was just an incredible experience," he says, "not to have eaten for four or five days, and then you're having authentic lumberjack food—flapjacks and steak and potatoes—with authentic lumberjacks."

Altruism seems to come naturally to Britton. In grade school, he regularly visited the elderly, and shortly after arriving at Middlebury, he joined the Middlebury Volunteer Ambulance Association. A double major in molecular biology and religion, he aspires to practice medicine in developing countries, which explains why he lugged a 1,300-page medical school entrance exam prep book to Everest. And when not at school—or climbing—he volunteers in medical clinics in third-world countries.

Last February, Britton worked in a medical clinic in Ethiopia, living in Addis Ababa with Middlebury biology professor Chris Watters (who was teaching on a Fulbright) and Watters's wife, Cynthia. "I guess he didn't have anything else to do, in between climbing in Antarctica and Everest," Cynthia Watters laughs, "so why not come volunteer at a clinic in Ethiopia? Of course! What else could spring to mind?" Then Watters adds, seriously, "Not many people think this way, of course."

But as Britton learned at the logging camp, reaching out to others is the only way truly to understand the culture of a people, be they Ethiopians or burly lumberjacks. This anecdote, in a way, seems to offer a glimpse of the balance in Britton's experiences—the immediate, visceral payback balanced against what his father calls a holistic and philosophical approach to climbing mountains.
"It's about much more than the technical process of undergoing a climb," says Michael, who with his wife, Lynn, and younger son, Connor '09, has taken a crash course in mountaineering. "It's self-discovery and awareness of the people you're climbing with and the people who are supporting you on your way to the summit."

It is also, no doubt, about an addiction. "Whenever you're on the mountain, you can't stop thinking about Big Macs and showers and all that kind of crazy stuff," says Britton. "But when I get back, after about a week, I want to be back in the mountains. Every time I climb something I want to climb something bigger and have that same kind of rush from going back to civilization after 30 or 40 days on the mountain."

Nearly 20 years ago, Texas businessman and ski-resort founder Dick Bass climbed to the highest point on each continent, setting off an avalanche of interest in "peak-bagging." Ever since, mountaineers, mothers, and midlife-crisis victims have aimed to set their own records, which have been complicated by competing claims over the seventh summit: Australasia's Carstensz Pyramid in Irian Jaya or Australia's smaller Kosciuszko. Thus, the list of summiters is riddled with asterisks indicating who did what first, when, how, and where.

In any case, only 150 men and women have climbed the Seven Summits, a feat that requires not only a passion for mountains but superior physical conditioning, patience for unexpected obstacles (such as a shower of SUV-sized ice chunks, which narrowly missed Britton on Denali, and the severe cough and fever that sidelined him on the expedition in Australia), and the ability to handle the complicated logistics. But whether or not Britton was fully aware of just what lay ahead, he decided at age 17, just three years after his first real climb, that he would attempt to reach the Seven Peaks, starting with Kosciuszko. ("I chose not to go to the cannibal-surrounded jungles of Borneo for Carstensz Pyramid," he says. "If you don't want to call it a record, so what?")

After summiting Denali in 1999, Britton intended to postpone college until after the Seven Summits, but his parents pushed him to pursue an education first. Accepted at Middlebury for February 2001, he spent the fall of 2000 in India, where he landed a job plucking maggots from the wounds of leprosy patients. He flew home in December, ducked south to bag Aconcagua in Argentina (a climb of 22,841 feet that took three and a half weeks) and then arrived at Midd, where he discovered he could climb and study, with judicious planning. "The College has been very important in giving him the right mindset to do this," says his father. "He finds the environment extraordinarily encouraging."

In July and August 2001, Britton scaled Russia's Elbrus, and then Kilimanjaro, where he stared out at the Serengeti and began to cry at the beauty of the African plains below his feet. "Britton is unique in that he goes out there, and he's understanding the mountain in a different way," says Gordon Janow of Alpine Ascents, the company that has guided Britton on several mountains, including Everest. "He absorbs the knowledge of the mountain and the surrounding culture, and that is very rare for younger climbers."

Britton also possesses his grandfather's aptitude for mood-lightening moments. On one of the first climbs, a fellow mountaineer was struggling to reach the summit, so Britton thought he'd lighten things up—by launching into an impromptu chicken dance, flapping his arms and craning his neck back and forth at 20,000 feet. The dance worked. In fact, the moment made such an impression—on Britton and his compatriots—that upon reaching each subsequent summit, he would step aside and, at some of the world's highest peaks, perform the chicken dance.

Antarctica's Vinson Massif would prove to be a more serious undertaking. For one thing, the Ellsworth Mountains, in the underbelly of the earth, are so remote and so locked in a deep freeze that planes must skid for several miles on the icy runway before coming to a stop. For another, spending time at the bottom of the planet takes money—much more money than the Keeshan family could spare. But, as Michael says,

"In typical Britton fashion, he figured out how to make it a financial reality." Sponsorship would be necessary, but the climbing boom of the 1990s meant that corporate dollars had mostly vanished. "You can't just walk into an international company and say, 'I want to climb these mountains, will you give me some money?'" says Britton, who, after a bit of arithmetic, discovered that he could play the Seven Summits game to his advantage by besting the record of 23-year-old Japanese climber Astsushi Yamada. He typed up a 40-page PowerPoint proposal and mailed it to more than 20 major corporations. AT&T called back, agreeing to fund expeditions to Antarctica in January 2004 and Everest in May 2004. "For me it was never about being the youngest person to climb the Seven Summits," says Britton. "It was just a great outlet to accomplish my bigger goal."

It was in Antarctica, on January 23, 2004, that Britton received the disturbing news that his grandfather had died in a hospital in Windsor, Vermont—10 days after Britton had reached his sixth summit on Vinson Massif. "He knew that I had made it to Antarctica," says Britton. "But I didn't get to see him afterward. He was an inspiration in my life, a mentor, a confidant, everything a grandfather should be."

So, along with his iPod (loaded with Hindi pop and French hip-hop) and his MCAT textbook, Britton packed two special 8-by-10 photos in his bags for Everest. He said good-bye to his family and his Bernese Mountain dog, Denali, and on March 27 flew to Tokyo, then Bangkok, and finally Kathmandu. In the 11,585-foot-high village of Namche Bazaar, the team loaded up the 200 yaks and two dozen porters who would carry enough gear for two months up to base camp. They shared milk tea with the mother of their head Sherpa, began to snack on the boxes of Oreos, Twizzlers, and Pringles that Alpine Ascents had shipped over, and learned how to acclimate to the altitude—and to each other.

"It's nice to have a big climbing team, in our case 8 climbers, 3 guides, and 26 Sherpa," Britton wrote from base camp on April 26. Before arriving in the Himalayas, he had tested the way his body reacted to altitude by attempting to climb Cho Oyu on the Nepali-Tibetan border. But he had no way of testing how a group of people would react to each other in extreme conditions. "Sometimes it can be walking on eggshells," he wrote, "even among the best of friends, at 21,000 feet."

Of course, mountaineering at that level is extraordinarily dangerous; Everest famously so. Yet Britton—whose mom escaped from the World Trade Center in 2001 and who urged him to keep climbing—has the gravitas to be aware of his passion's dangers and the carpe diem attitude to continue while he can, before he has a wife and kids. He recalls the trekkers he met just before the summit attempt. "When we said good-bye to them at base camp, I swear they looked at us like we were about to die, that we were never going to be seen again," says Britton. "And it could have gone that way."

Indeed, ominous signs were everywhere: the twisted wreckage of a rescue helicopter, silver sculptures memorializing those who lost their life on the mountain, the names of dead climbers painted on rocks and boulders. On summit day, a lama blessed Alpine Ascents' climbers; perched atop a tent pole was a bird believed to be one of the lost souls of Everest.

It was dark and cold on the final ascent, so dark that the digital camera Britton had been using to document the trip became useless, so he tucked it into the folds of his outer parka. As he neared the summit, thunder rumbled and lightning flashed in the distance, and Britton became overwhelmed with emotion. "The last 50 feet to the summit, it represented so much more than just Everest," he says. "It was me at age 17 saying I'm going to set a goal that I wanted to work toward . . . It was so humbling."

The mountaineers huddled at the summit until the sun rose, at which point Britton pulled out his camera and began to click away. Before starting the descent, there was one last thing to do. He pulled from his bag the two 8-by-10 photographs—both of Bob Keeshan, one as Captain Kangaroo and one as himself. Britton placed them in the snow, where soon they would be buried in a Himalayan storm, adding another layer to Everest's rich history. And with his grandfather beside him and the world below him, Britton showed the Sherpa how to do the chicken dance.

Sarah Tuff '95 writes from Burlington, Vermont. She has climbed to the summit of Snake Mountain without supplemental oxygen, but still can't do the chicken dance. Her stories have appearedin National Geographic Adventure,Men's Journal,Skiing, andAdventure Sports.