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^{Courtesy Danielle Fisher}

At home in the hills

Since her first difficult climb of Rainier, Danielle Fisher has quickly become a seasoned mountaineer. In fact, she’s somewhat embarrassed to tell people just how quickly. In January 2003, she and her father climbed Aconcaqua, the highest peak in South America. That summer, while her friends were headed for the beach to celebrate the end of high school, Fisher boarded a plane bound for Africa and Mount Kilimanjaro. She climbed that mountain, got on the next plane to Russia, and in the same month ascended Elbrus. In January 2004, she climbed Kosciusko in Australia, and that spring went on to Mount McKinley. The following January, she climbed Vinson in Antarctica, and in June 2005, with a team from Seattle-based Alpine Ascents, topped off the seven summits with Everest.

It wasn’t the best season for the world’s highest mountain. In 2005 there were only three days when climbers could even attempt to summit Everest. Part of it was a waiting game: weeks of waiting for a break in the weather, waiting for her teammates, and waiting for her body to adjust to the altitude. Fisher found she was better at it than many of her fellow climbers. In fact, most of her 12 teammates didn’t make it above Camp Two, the second of four stations on the way up the mountain. Some left because they were scared. Some were physically unable to continue because their bodies wouldn’t function in the oxygen-deprived atmosphere. “And then there were people who just lost the heart to go further,” she says.

“I was never going to lose heart and turn around,” says Fisher. “I thought, 'If I’m sick and throwing up, I’ll turn around, but not right now.'”

But then she got to the South Summit and realized she had the energy to make it to the top and back. “I started crying,” she says. She cried, as she trudged up the steep glacier, all the way to the top, where she sat down, buried some pictures for a teammate who couldn’t do the climb, said a prayer, took a picture, and worked with a Sherpa to change her oxygen bottle. Yes, her body was surviving the altitude, but “It was still incredibly hard for me,” she says.

There was some excitement at her setting new records, bringing TV interviews and newspaper articles, but Fisher went into the limelight with reluctance. “It’s not about the record for me, really,” she says. “I got to see the world and make some of my best friends.”

Today Fisher, like Viesturs and Roskelley before her, lives in two worlds. In Pullman, she’s a student majoring in materials science and planning for a career. None of her college friends climb, and none of her climbing friends come here to visit. And most who see her at WSU don’t know about her other life, the one she lives in the record books and on the world’s highest peaks.

Still, her heart often strays to places like the Himalayas. She still wears the orange prayer strings placed around her neck by the lamas she has met on her journeys.

“They’re for protection,” she says, as she untangles them from the silver cross she also wears. “You don’t take them off while you’re climbing. You’re supposed to wear them until they fall off.” She has already planned her summer 2006 trip to Pakistan to climb Gasherbrum 1 and Gasherbrum 2, the 11th- and 13th-highest peaks in the world.

And now that she can climb anywhere, is she ready to quit the Cascades?

“Never,” says Fisher. “That’s where I think you can find the best climbing in the world. There’s rock, there’s ice, there’s mountaineering. It’s clean. And it’s beautiful.

“You just don’t get that in many places in the world,” she says. “And that’s my back yard.”

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