By LESLIE EIKLEBERRY
Salina Post
In a number of ways, Salina's Milt Allen is a modern-day Renaissance man.
Allen and his partner, Nancy Steele, operate Harmony Hideway, a multi-use facility that offers space for retreats, lodging, gatherings, live music performances, and fostering creativity.
READ: Harmony Hideaway: A retreat and meeting space, arts haven in NE Saline Co.
Allen's lifelong love for music shines in a number of other endeavors. He plays a monthly gig (7 p.m. the second Wednesday of every month at Ad Astra Books & Coffee House, 135 N. Santa Fe Avenue). In the more than 40 years since he graduated from Salina Central High School, he has performed at the Olympics and for a presidential inauguration, he has taught music at the secondary and collegiate levels, and served as a music clinician. In 2015 he started a nonprofit organization called The Music Guerrilla that focuses on underserved and underfunded music programs.
If that wasn't enough, he also finds time to climb...mountains.
In December of 2020, Allen climbed Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro. More recently, he has climbed to Peru's 15th-century Incan citadel, Machu Picchu, and to the base camp of the highest mountain above sea level: Mount Everest.
Allen said that his Mount Kilimanjaro climb took an emotional toll on him that he didn't expect.
"That was very scary with the huge health concerns with that. It affected me emotionally a lot more than I thought, and I was just afraid of everything," Allen said. "So I thought, well, I've got to get back on the horse, and the biggest thing was altitude, so I thought 'OK, I'm going to trek the Sacred Valley to Machu Picchu.'"
After training for a while, Allen went to Peru in May of 2022.
"The trick about Machu Picchu is, you fly into Cusco, which is kind of the Incan capital. And the thing about Cusco is that when you fly in, it's at 12,000 feet, so you're already at an altitude that's going to make you sick if you're not prepared," Allen explained.
"So I flew in there and tried some things different and just had a great time going to Machu Picchu, and staying above 12,000 feet the whole time. Never got sick. It was great. Felt strong. Felt great. And I thought, well, another big one I wanted to do was Everest basecamp, and now I had some more confidence so I thought, 'well, I'll just use Machu Picchu as a training hike, and focus toward Everest basecamp,' and so that's what I did," he said.
Allen changed up his training routine in preparation before heading to Mount Everest the first weekend in October of 2022.
"Everest basecamp is a different climb," he said. "Also, when we say 'basecamp,' we're not talking like at the bottom of a mountain. Everest basecamp is 17,600 feet, and you're at 53 percent oxygen, so the trick about Everest as opposed to Kilimanjaro, Kilimanjaro is what's regarded as a quicker ascent, which means that if you get into trouble with oxygen and things, you can go down quicker. Everest has far more rescues, more helicopter rescues, because it's a slower ascent, and as a result, a slower descent. So in that regard, it is much tougher because you're spending more time at higher altitudes the whole time."
Allen said that there was a 10-hour and 45-minute time difference going to Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, and his first day there, he was unable to sleep.
His climbing group was made up of people from nine different countries.
"Our schedule said we would fly out of Kathmandu and go to the world's shortest runway, to Lukla, which is an interesting flight, on the first day, and then we would start up from there," Allen said.
That changed, however, when the Sherpa leading the group informed them that they would drive for five hours and then fly out.
Allen explained that while many people think of a Sherpa as a porter, that isn't the case. Instead, Sherpa is a culture.
"The reason people confuse the two is because when Edmund Hillary summited Everest, he used a Sherpa. What Hillary meant was using someone of that culture, not a porter," Allen said.
The group made what turned out to be a harrowing five-hour drive to their new destination.
"The drive was terrible. Horrific. There were washed-out bridges, washed-out roads, occasional rock slides, there was a festival, avoiding head-on collisions," he said.
When they got to their hotel, they found out that a group that had been staying in the hotel and was supposed to fly out was unable to do so because the airport was closed, so rooms were not available for Allen's group. Instead, Allen's group went to another nearby hotel.
"We get up the next morning. It's foggy. And that's when we find out the airport is closed again. So, our Sherpa says, 'Here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna drive seven more hours' (through all these roads and everything), 'and go to this other place where I think we can get a flight into Lukla,'" Allen said.
Allen said his group questioned whether that meant that they would lose an acclimatization day. The Sherpa told them it would, but they would still have one and would be fine.
The group took off on its seven-hour journey, but about an hour away from the destination, the 15-passenger van broke down on a mountain.
"We're going nowhere. Dark's coming. There's not enough places to pass," Allen said. "I had mentioned that there was no way you're going to fix this problem because you've got a chip problem in your fuel pump. So they finally called a couple of Jeeps, two or three, and they carted us all the way. So our seven-hour day turned into 10 hours on these roads."
Allen said he found out later that the road they were on in Nepal was the most dangerous road in Asia.
"There's even a place called the Wall of Mirrors where people will bring mirrors and place them on the wall for a certain god to watch over them as they drive this road," he said.
"So, we get up the next morning. We have one acclimatization day left. Not sure how that going to work, and, of course, I'm a little nervous. We go to the airport - landing strip, had a fence around it. Nobody was really watching - and it's gorgeous. We see a couple of planes take off. We're enthused. And then it slows down. And then, nothing," Allen recalled.
"Well, Sherpa is on his phone because he knows other Sherpa people who work in certain spots. We keep being assured that we're going to do helicopters now. 'Helicopters coming in in two hours.' We heard this all day long. Nothing. So we're getting a little nervous," he said. "Finally, at about 4:30, he points to me and three other people and says, 'grab your gear. Go down to the strip.'"
When the group of four asked what was going on, the Sherpa told them they were going to fly out by helicopter. The rest of the group, the Sherpa said, would follow the next day.
"So this small helicopter lands and the blades keep going. He says, 'Wait, we've got to unload first.' They start pulling out big plastic gas cans of diesel fuel, which they had loaded in the helicopter in case it needed to refuel. And I mean, it was packed with diesel fuel," Allen said. "So we get in there and it smells. It's sickening.
"We're kind of excited because we think we're going to go, but we're very sad because we didn't have time to say goodbye to the other group members," he said. "So we take off. The first five minutes were cool. And then it got dark. And then it got rainy. And then it got foggy. And all of a sudden, he says, 'we've got to set it down.'"
So the helicopter descends to what appeared to be a little patch of grass with a building.
"There's a bunch of people. We see two or three other helicopters. So he (pilot) goes to the ground and then noses forward with his props and blows people back and their luggage and then sets it down because of the weather," Allen said.
Another Sherpa, the assistant guide who was with them, was able to secure lodging for the four people through his connections. That lodging was right beside a raging river, Allen said.
Because of a late-ending monsoon season and a typhoon that had come up in the Bay of Bengal, a great deal of snow had been dumped on the Annapurna Circuit, a trek within the mountain ranges of central Nepal.
The next morning, the group found out that "two people had died. There were avalanches. There were people stranded. All of these helicopters had been busy on rescue missions. We also found out that our helicopter pilot took off again that night in the dark, in that weather to retrieve a body from up on the mountain."
They also found out that the airport they originally were supposed to have flown into, Lukla, had been closed for 10 days because of weather. Thousands of people were stranded.
"So our Sherpa said, 'Here's what we're going to do. We're going to hike out. It's not fair. People have been here waiting for a week, two weeks. We're not going to take this helicopter. They need it,'" Allen said.
"So we just started in the rain and the fog and hiked, initially, a really steep route for 90 minutes, and then just hiked, and hiked, and hiked. And it was hard and wet and cold, and we couldn't see anything. And got through that first day and then there was Plan B, which involved supposedly more helicopters, which did not pan out the next day, but strangely enough, after two days of hiking, the four of us ended up meeting our group again in Namche Bazaar. They had flown in on helicopters," he said.
Allen said the weather after that "was stunning, which is one of the reasons I went in October. It's the clearest time to see the mountains. It was just beautiful. Full of yaks, full of donkeys.
"Having been born and raised here (Salina), you know you read about these mountains and these places and what's happening, but to actually be there. The same thing with Machu Picchu. To actually be there," Allen said and smiled.
"There's a very sobering spot in Lobuche Pass. Lobuche Pass is one of the last places you go through on your way to Lobuche, and then another day or two and you're up, but that's where they make cairns and monuments to people who have died on Everest. It's how many are there. It's heartbreaking. Very sobering. It's just a graveyard you go into, and again, they're memorials, but you really realized how serious this was," he said.
Sixty-seven percent of the people going up Mount Everest make it to the base camp, Allen said.
"I got a completely new appreciation for those who attempt to summit Everest. And it's not very many who make it. First, you gotta have $50,000-$60,000. You gotta carve out 60 to 90 days to do it," he said. "One of the things I learned this time, I think more than any other, was that you are completely at the whim of the weather. It doesn't matter who you are, what you are, what you have. If the weather's bad, bad things happen."
All in all, the trip was "pretty spectacular," Allen said.
As for what is next, Allen said he wasn't yet, sure.
"I don't know. I'm always getting into something, it seems," he said and laughed.