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Al Hanna: Climbing for the Love of Climbing
Base Camp - Thursday, April 20, 2000

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Editor's Note: The following story was emailed from Everest Base Camp by Dan Morrison, Quokka Sports/MountainZone.com correspondent.

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Sometimes it's all worth it, and this seems the perfect career. Like today, when I got to meet Al Hanna.

Hanna is just one of the many who hopes to summit Mount Everest this season. What sets him apart is that he hopes to reach the summit just a few weeks before his 70th birthday.

The current record for the oldest to summit Everest belongs to Lev Sarkisov of Georgia, who summitted in May last year, at age 60 years and 161 days. Sarkisov bested the previous record of Ramon Blanco, who reached the summit in 1993, at the time one day younger than Sarkisov. If Hanna reaches the summit he will shatter the current record by nearly a decade.

Hanna is part of the Alpine Ascents International Expedition, and when I caught up with him he was arranging his gear for the team climb up the mountain through the Icefall to an overnight at Camp I. He is a small man, with an infectious impish grin. Within a few minutes you find yourself laughing with him about almost everything he says. President and CEO of Mid-North Financial Services, Inc., a $1.3 billion mortgage banking firm in Chicago, Hanna seems to be a man having more fun than should be allowed. He absolutely radiates levity and humor.

If he reaches the summit of Everest not only will he be the oldest to do so, but he will also be the oldest man to summit all Seven Summits. Not bad for a man who didn't climb his first mountain until he was 58 years old.

His first mountain was Denali. "Subsequently," he says with a grin, "I so enjoyed the thrill, and the excitement and the danger and the risk that I continued on about 19 or 20 additional climbs and expeditions, with a really intense effort starting about 1992."

The idea of knocking off the Seven Summits came to him about 1993. "After I came to Nepal," he says, "I gave Everest a try, and having been encouraged by many people to do it, I tried, and people talked about the Seven Summits, so since 1993 I've been on a campaign to try to do them."

"I didn't have a particular plan," for what order to climb the seven mountains, Hanna reveals, "my first summit was McKinley. That was followed by a climb on Ama Dablam, Everest, did Vinson in Antarctica, did Russia [Mount Elbrus] this last year, did the Carstensz Pyramid, did Kilimanjaro. One by one people said, 'Let's go climb a mountain.' And we did."

Vinson may have been the most unusual climb. "Very interesting," explains Hanna, "It's such a different world. There are no birds to speak of, no animal life, no vegetation, and it's such a remote, distant operation, that you feel strange. It's just a different feeling than coming here where you have prayer flags and good food. There you're nowhere. And you just know if you're deserted or a storm comes in, you're gone." It took him five days to reach the summit, a respectable time.

Hanna has been married to the same woman for 42 years, and has three children in their 30s. "They're encouraging and supportive, but they think, like the rest of the world, that I'm absolutely crazy." Hanna laughs when he tells me this as though it's just about the funniest thing he has ever heard. "They don't understand why I get up at 2 o'clock or 1 o'clock in the morning to exercise to get ready to climb. They don't understand why I want to go through all pain and agony, and yet they're very supportive."

On his first attempts of Everest, Hanna admits he was not properly prepared, physically, mentally or spiritually. He climbed to just below the Lhotse Face, but recognized he needed better training if he hoped to go higher. So he spent the next seven years preparing himself for the summit.

Hanna trains about 25 to 30 hours each week. Getting up before most of the rest of the world, he exercises in Lincoln Park in Chicago where he lives. "My exercise the last 20 months," Hanna explains, "is to get up about 1 o'clock, do some sit-ups, some pullups, some stairmaster, then go out to Lincoln Park. And there's a sled hill out there and I climb up and down that three, three-and-a-half hours with my 60-pound pack."

"Since June of 1999, I've been on three climbs," Hanna says, "Greenland, Elbrus in Russia, and Ecuador. And I have felt stronger and more in tune with my body and myself, with the rhythm necessary to make those steps. So obviously my intense training for the last 20 months have really been helpful."

Hanna admits he is pushing the physical limit of his body. "At age 70," he says "the bone density begins to diminish. And I think I'm endangering myself simply because I don't have the strength of a 40 or a 50 year old. I may have the determination, I may have the patience, I don't have the bone strength that I should to continue to risk my own body. And if you risk your own body, you're risking the people you're with. And I owe the people who have climbed with me these last 10 years the same consideration they have given me."

A very successful businessman, Hanna sees some spill-over. "I think the same characteristics of a successful climber are the same characteristics that a businessman must have. There is patience; there's determination; there's faith; there's courage; there's fitness. And they all go together. And there's teamwork. Teamwork is very important."

As a child Hanna was active in the Boy Scouts and loved the outdoors. And for the last several years he has merely been getting back to what he loves. "I loved the risk and the adventure of the outdoors," he laughs, "it's in my genes."

Unlike many climbers, Hanna will talk about the risk of Everest. "There's a great deal of danger," he admits, "but I'm with the greatest climbers in the world, the greatest people in the world, and that reduces the risk. Secondarily, I'm very mentally prepared to accept the risk, so I don't get concerned with the risk.

"And part of my training this past 20 months in Lincoln Park," he continues, "was to turn off my mind, and to blank out all the disagreeable things that go on in business and life. The question is, where do you put your anger? You try in the training process, the mental training process to be rid of all anger, to be rid of all disruptive thinking. And I think that has gotten me ready for this trip."

"I'm very optimistic. People are going to watch out for me. I'm going to watch our for myself."

"And if I don't come back," he laughs again, "I've lived."

Come back, Al Hanna, do come back.

— Dan Morrison, Quokka Sports/MountainZone.com Everest Correspondent

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