Baruntse Trek for BISRA

Baruntse Peak 7,129m and for the old fashioned amongst you, 23,389ft. A reasonably interesting mountain wonder, I think. The photograph above was taken when I trekked to Makalu Base Camp, Tshering pointed out Baruntse as it’s often used as an acclimatization peak for Makalu, the 5th highest mountain in the world. I was supposed to climb Baruntse in Spring 2015 whilst using Mera Peak as an acclimatization peak, but the weather had other ideas and the deep snow left over from the previous Winter put paid to my ambition of climbing both peaks and I had to settle for Mera Peak only. There are two peaks that I have in the past failed to summit, that keep calling from the Himalaya, Cho Oyu (the Turquoise Goddess) and Baruntse. Cho Oyu is an 8,200 metre peak and I’m getting a little bit old for all the palaver that goes with an 8,000+ metre peak. Plus, I’d already been to 7,100 metres on the Turquoise Goddess, so Baruntse won out. It’s remote and at the centre of three vast glacial valleys, the Imja, the Barun and the Hunku and has stunning summit views of Everest, Lhotse and Makalu, assuming that the weather plays ball! So being on the summit at sunrise would probably bring a smile to my face as well as a couple of hundred photographs.

Matthew, my youngest son, asked me if I’d use the climb to raise money for the Bantry Inshore Search & Rescue Association. An organization that he volunteers for and is on call seven days a week, 365 days a year. Bantry Inshore Search and Rescue Association (BISRA) is, like the Air Ambulance in the UK, a charitable organization funded solely by donations and provides an emergency lifeboat service for the Bantry Bay community.

With the exception of my first trip to the Himalaya in 2007 trekking to the Annapurna Sanctuary, I have never used any of my expeditions as a means of raising money for charity, mainly because I feel that all I would be doing is asking the same people time after time to sponsor me and I’ve never felt that is the right thing to do. This could well be my last full-on expedition to the Himalaya and as I’ve had some dealings with BISRA, Matthew thought that it might be a good idea to use the expeditions to help raise the money for a new search and rescue boat.

So here I am begging for money to help buy a new search and rescue boat at a time when money is tight and the world seems to be going mad… if you have any pennies to spare, I know that BISRA will be grateful, but more importantly so will the people whose lives are saved.