Personal Journey
Alumna Conquers Mt. Everest
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Sunrise at the summit of Mt. Everest. Photo courtesy of Val Hovland
In the early hours of her 64th day of climbing, Val Hovland 98, SM '98 could barely see the sun-lit icecaps around her as her eyes swelled beneath their lids. At 29,000 feet—roughly five and a half miles above sea level—the oxygen around Mt. Everest's summit is so thin that many climbers turn back or require emergency medical attention because their brains swell, causing confusion, impaired judgment, and hallucinations.
For the first time on her climb, Hovland says she was genuinely scared. "This wasn't something I knew about. We made it back to camp and waited. After an hour, it still wasn't better."
Val Hovland is from Colorado, a state where outdoor adventure and recreation is a big part of life, and she grew up going on frequent hikes with her family. In 1998, she earned both her bachelor's and master's degrees in mechanical engineering from MIT. Shortly thereafter, on a trip to Seattle, she saw Mt. Rainier for the first time. "That's when I knew I wanted to climb a high mountain with glaciers," she says.
Hovland set to work preparing for such a climb in a prototypical MIT engineering fashion. She figured out what she needed to know—everything from ice axe and altimeter usage to crevasse rescue techniques—and set to work. The Colorado Mountain Club offered classes in mountaineering skills, and she was able to augment her physical endurance with overnight and multi-day climbs and hikes.
But the challenge of climbing Mt. Everest requires more than knowledge and fitness. Of the more than 6,000 climbers who have tried to summit Everest since the early 1920s, less than one third succeeded. They may have prepared their bodies for months or years in advance, but without a resilient mind and deep-seated psychological balance, the tension from two months of uncertainty over the weather, their equipment, and their abilities can be too much.
"One of the things I did to prepare," explains Hovland, "was a 50-mile running race through the mountains with 12,000 feet of elevation gain. With something that extreme, you need all the parts to come together. You have to be able to reach your wall and figure out how to get through it."
In 2006 Hovland completed that race, the San Juan Solstice. Two times she had tried and failed. That year, with her success, Hovland asked the environmental consulting company that she works for if she could take a few months off in 2008. She wanted to try Everest.
Up near Everest's summit that icy day in May, though, Hovland's preparations and past accomplishments probably seemed like distant memories. Her vision was still blurred. It was so cold at the top that she had been physically unable to unfurl a banner and place a few family photos, as she had planned. And her climbing partner had left after coming down with an uncontrollable nose bleed at camp two.
What kept her going?
"There's a drive to do something unique," says Hovland, "which is probably a characteristic of a good chunk of the folks at MIT. It's a drive to explore boundaries that takes a lot of problem solving—because there are always things thrown at you that are new. You have to learn how to deal with them and adjust."
Hovland's vision eventually steadied and she and her Nepalese Sherpa guide were able to continue their descent. After seven weeks of toiling up Everest, it took fewer than three to come down.
Nearly a year since Hovland's Everest adventure, the will to climb and push herself further doesn't seem to have diminished. In four weeks, Hovland is flying to Alaska to hike Denali, the highest mountain on the North American continent.
By Liv Gold
Published April 17, 2009
