Edition: U.S. / Global

JERSEY; Climbing in Comfort: A Virtual Trip Up Everest

Published: March 21, 2004

''PEOPLE were crying. I heard someone yell, 'Don't let me die here!'''

Would you climb Mt. Everest after reading words like these, recorded after a 1996 mountain-climbing disaster that took the lives of eight amateur and professional climbers?

That event, immortalized by Jon Krakauer in his best-selling ''Into Thin Air,'' is one of many to have taken climbers' lives over the years. But it has not deterred Joseph P. Hughes and Elizabeth Ann Pace, New Jersey residents who, at this moment, are en route to Katmandu, where they will begin the first leg of their attempt to climb 29,035-foot-tall Everest.

If successful, Mr. Hughes and Ms. Pace will hardly be the first: 1,200 people have climbed to the top of Everest since Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first in 1953. It is likely, however, that the couple will be the first to convey their grunts, groans, sighs and exclamations directly from the Himalayas to middle-school students in a dozen towns around New Jersey. By means of a satellite hookup and computer equipment, they might possibly inspire your 14-year-old to send more intelligible e-mail messages than ''lol g2g ttyl.''

Their reason for involving middle-school students, the two admit, is partly superstition. ''Mountain climbing is a very vain activity,'' said Mr. Hughes, 38, who runs a fitness studio in Cedar Grove. ''It's all about you -- the climber.'' But the Nepalese believe that only those with honorable intentions -- the pure of heart -- reach the summit, he said. To that end, he and Ms. Pace have hauled crampons and ice axes into classrooms, speaking on topics that reach beyond the merely geological. ''It's really a crash course in personal goal-setting,'' said Ray Mead, principal of School No. 1 in Little Falls.

''Cold mountain - and we really mean it,'' a friend suggests as a title for their journey. After a brief stop in Katmandu, the Nepalese capital, the couple will fly by helicopter to Lukla, where they will begin a 17-day trek to the base of Everest. Yaks and the Nepalese guides known as sherpas will march with them. Several weeks and many freezing, oxygen-depleting, frostbite-inducing miles later, they plan to be en route back to Newark, having driven their ice ax into the tallest point on the planet.

And who will receive that ax? Not the best among the hundreds of middle-school students they have visited, but the one whose grades improve the most, Mr. Hughes explained.

The more relevant question, given that 175 have died attempting the climb, is ''why bother?''

Mr. Hughes, who was born in Belleville, says that from the time he was old enough to watch public television and read National Geographic, he wanted to be Jacques Cousteau and Sir Edmund Hillary. Raised in a tightly knit family missing a father - ''I haven't seen him since I was 2'' - Mr. Hughes went from mediocre student to fitness buff and inspired personal trainer. The Don Quixote of trainers, he has taught people in wheelchairs to mountain climb and scuba dive.

A stint in the army taught him discipline, but he attributes most of his success to his mother, his Aunt Pat and the grandparents who reared him. No wonder his apartment is filled not only with rocks from the hundreds of summits he's climbed, but also with old photographs and other antiques -- mementos from his family.

Ms. Pace, too, developed an early interest in travel. Born on the Mediterranean island of Malta, she was 10 when a nun visiting her school from Tanzania piqued her interest in travel. Years later, skiing in France, she discovered mountains, and has since climbed Kilimanjaro, Rainier and Washington -- expensive ventures she subsidized entirely from her own earnings. (A climb up Everest, for example, costs about $65,000.) She met Mr. Hughes in 2003, preparing for a hike up Aconcagua, the tallest peak in the Andes of South America.

What will the couple miss most while climbing?

''Wearing makeup,'' said Ms. Pace.

''Real food,'' said Mr. Hughes. ''Yak cheese, yak butter, yak jerky -- you fantasize about real food on these trips because you don't get to eat very much of it.''

Given the ratio of those who succeed to those who fail fatally -- a not-very-comforting 10 to 1 - are they anxious? Technology has improved dramatically since the 1996 tragedy that Mr. Krakauer described. Also, Mr. Hughes points out, unlike many of those climbers, he and Ms. Pace are hardly amateurs.

Even so, caution is their motto. A quilt they received as a going-away present from students quotes the American climber Ed Viesturs on the subject: ''Getting to the summit is optional. Getting down is mandatory.''

The message was reiterated by Mr. Hughes's mother. Instead of crying when she kissed her son goodbye, she merely said, ''Come home.''

Drawing (Drawing Nancy Doniger)