Everest 2013: Interview with Robert Kay – Nepal Connections
This interview with Robert Kay is one of an ongoing series I do each season with Everest climbers. Not the famous, sponsored ones who get plenty of publicity but the regular people, who often have full time jobs, full time families and climb for the love of the climb. I welcome suggestions for anyone climbing in 2013 I should interview. Now here’s Robert: Originally from Australia, Robert and his family visited Colorado back in 1973, and never left. An avid skier, Robert has skied some of the Colorado 14,000 foot mountains, Europe’s Mt. Elbrus and Mont Blanc plus Orizaba and Manaslu.. In spite of this love affair with the mountains, he now lives in Nebraska where he owns the motorcycle dealership, Star City Motor Sports recognized as one of the top 100 dealers nationwide by Dealernews Magazine. Like many Everest climbers, Robert read Annapurna by Maurice Herzog when he was 15. He dreamed of climbing the big mountains and now has attempted Everest once, summited Manaslu (26,759’/8156m), Island Peak (20,305’/6188m), Lobuche East among other and is going back to Everest this year at age 51. Today, training is a big part of life including his beloved Jacobs Ladder: Robert says the culture is as important to him as the climb. This might be due to his family living in Bangladesh when he was six years old. Leading an international life continues today with Robert and his wife adopting two daughters from Nepal. Now, please meet Robert Kay: Q: You have two adopted daughters from Nepal. Can you tell how special that is? A. In 1993 my wife and I decided we wanted to adopt a child from a Third World country and since we’d both spent a lot of time in Nepal and loved the Nepali people we quickly settled on this special place. We went through all the home study requirements in Colorado and by November, 1994 we had completed a one month stay in Nepal and signed the last of the documents to complete the adoption of our daughter Soni. Fast forward more than 18 years and she is mid-way through her pre-med training at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. Soni is incredibly smart, hard working and has a beautiful and outgoing personality. She is everything anyone could wish for in a daughter. No boy is worthy of her in this overly protective father’s mind! Through all these years we kept in touch with Soni’s birth mother and in 2008 I returned to Nepal for the first time in 14 years and reunited with her. She lives in Jharkot, the first village below Muktinath and the Thorung La pass on the Annapurna trekking route. It was on this visit that I also first met her husband and two of her five kids, including Kalpana, who has a birth defect with her eyes. Our family stayed in touch and in September, 2011 on another visit to Nepal to climb Manaslu, I arranged permission to take Kalpana to visit some eye spets in Kathmandu. They didn’t offer much hope, but my wife and I felt more and more of a burden to help Kalpana so I returned to Jharkot in November to gain permission from her parents to bring her to the US for medical attention and also education. They granted this permission and then shortly after this Kalpana’s father unexpectedly passed away. With a tremendous amount of help from two wonderful Nepali friends plus Trish Crampton of Altitude Junkies fame, we finally succeeded in gaining a visa for Kalpana to come to live with us. Soni and I went to Kathmandu in May, 2012 to bring Kalpana home to Nebraska. After Kalpana had been with us for several months we found our feelings and attitude towards her changing and felt we should talk with her mother about adopting her. The mother visited us last winter and eagerly agreed and now we have almost completed the adoption process. Kalpana is 15 and has amazed us with how fast she’s learned English and come to love her new life in the US. She is a fun-loving, delightful member of our family. She also loves to ski which really pleases me! We feel such a huge debt to the birth mother for giving Soni to us and we also feel like she and her family are truly part of our family. With this in mind we are now arranging for the remaining four kids plus several cousins to all live in Kathmandu in one home and attend a quality school there. This will be the first time the four siblings have been together for any substantial piece of time as they’ve been “farmed out” to four different schools in four different areas of Nepal. We are very excited to do this and part of my time in Nepal this spring will be spent with them and ensuring that everything is as we have envisioned for these great kids. My son seems to get left out of these discussions because his story is “normal” but he’s also been a fantastic kid. He graduated from Point Loma Nazarene University last year and is now pursuing his MBA there. I’m very excited to see his career develop. I don’t deserve the family that I have! Q: You set a goal to climb all of Colorado’s 14ers, all 50 state highpoints (plus Washington DC) and all Seven Summits. How far along are you? A. I have reached 46 of the 51 state highpoints (I’m including DC). I have Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Texas and Wyoming to go. So far I’ve skied all or part of Colorado, Oregon, New York and Vermont’s highpoints. I have climbed 27 of Colorado’s 14ers. I’m disappointed with this as I consider myself a Coloradan in spite of living in Nebraska for the past 16 years. I grew up there and go there all the time so I have no excuse for being only half-way through this project. I will try to improve on this performance