Denver Post - Style Section | March 05 2001
Dedicated Climber Aids Schools | by Jack Cox - Denver Post Staff Writer

After an exhausting assault of K2, the second-highest mountain in the world, Montana climber Greg Mortenson and one of this teammates spent a few weeks recuperating in a remote village in northern Pakistan.

One day, they were invited to visit the local school.

“On a open hillside, we saw 80 children sitting on the ground diligently doing their lessons,” Mortenson recalled. “Some, deprived of even a slateboard, were scratching their letters in the dirt with a twig. There was no teacher that day – the community could afford a teacher’s $1 daily pay only part of the time.”

But despite the primitive conditions, the children seemed happy and determined to apply themselves. So when they asked for help with their education, he realized he “would have to do something.”

That was in 1993. Since, Mortenson has put his mountaineering career on hold and has devoted his life to building schools, water projects and other improvements in the Karakoram region around K2, which sits hear Pakistan’s borders with China, India and Afghanistan. The 16 schools he has funded and built are beginning to put him in the same category with Sir Edmund Hillary, who has built 28 schools in the Everest region of Nepal.

For his efforts to promote sustainable, community-based development, he has received the David Brower conservation award from the American Alpine Club. Now 43, Mortenson does his work under the auspices of Central Asia Institute, a nonprofit he founded with seed money from Swiss physicist, Jean Hoerni, one of the early pioneers of the microchip industry.

He says that with donated land and local labor, he and his supporters can build a school for $12,000 to $ 15,000. That about what an American might spend on a used 4-wheel-drive vehicle, he noted, and about half as much as the Pakistani government would spend on such a project. Mortenson will be in Colorado next week to give fund-raising slide shows which have sold out in engagements in Bozeman, Montana and Jackson, Wyoming.

The 50-minute programs, “Where Spirits Soar,” will presented free at 7 PM, March 14 at the REI flagship store in Denver; and for $5 per person at 8 PM March 15 at Neptune Mountaineering Store in Boulder, and $5 per person at 7 PM March 16 at Paepcke Auditorium in Aspen.

For more about Mortenson’s humanitarian ventures, call Central Asia Institute at 1-866-585-1766 or visit its Website www.ikat.org.

Copyright (c) 2001 Denver Post