Valley man reaches goal with 7th summit

WASILLA — Sometimes you can catch Chris Longacre talking about the giant mountains he’s climbed the way some people talk about an album collection or baseball cards.

There’s a lot of comparison involved.

“Everest is all altitude. McKinley is weather. Vinson would be logistics,” he said.

Most people are familiar with the first two — the tallest mountain in Asia, Mt. Everest, and the tallest in North America, Mt. McKinley. The last one is decidedly less famous. That would be Mt. Vinson, at 16,050 feet the highest peak on Antarctica.

And, if you’re noticing a theme here, that’s because in early January, Longacre, 32, realized a dream he’s nurtured since climbing Mt. McKinley as a 17-year-old Alaskan — he has reached the summit of the tallest mountains on each of the world’s seven continents.

“Carstensz, I would say was culture,” he said of Carstensz Pyramid, or Puncak Jaya, an Indonesian peak that, at 16,024 feet, is the highest mountain in Oceana.

Longacre said there’s actually some controversy there. If you consider Australia to be the continent rather than Oceana — Australia and the rest of the land masses on the tectonic plate it sits on — then that peak should be Mount Kosciuszko.

But, Longacre said, that’s just a 7,310-foot peak and Indonesia is so close. He’s in the Carstensz camp.

Over the course of 2013, he climbed Everest in May, Carstensz in October and left for Vinson in December.

He was gone from work for multiple months. Actually, getting the time off work was part of the challenge.

“It was quite the year,” Longacre said.

For the last one, Vinson, he also needed to get sponsors to help pay for the excursion. In the end, he got 13 sponsors onboard and said he is grateful to them.

Getting sponsors is kind of a risky deal. Longacre said it’s a hard sell to get someone to sponsor something that’s going to happen years in the future, and then you have a hard and fast deadline.

“Who’s going to want to sponsor something that’s already happened?” he said.

So he gathered up sponsors weeks in advance and signed up for the Vinson trip just two weeks before leaving.

But, he said, that kind of logistical challenge is part of the fun. It’s a puzzle to solve. Training kind of comes naturally from that.

“Once you set that goal you get driven to train,” Longacre said.

Climbing the mountain is the easy part. It’s the fun part, at least, the goal he had been working toward.

Longacre said that to get to Antarctica, you first fly to the very southernmost point in South America. Then you take a Russian-made cargo plane to a camp the expedition company he went through runs on a glacier. Form there, you take a small plane, an Otter, to the mountain’s base camp.

There are more people than you’d think wanting to climb Vinson and almost all of them are at the very end of a seven-summits tour.

In his group, Longacre said there were two Brits, a Frenchman and a New Zealander. He and the other four were all left-handed.

Climbing McKinley, Longacre said, set the hook for him. He and his longtime girlfriend, Rachel Spicer, joke about his need to always be active on vacation, always looking for something to climb.

Now that he’s back, people ask him what he’s going to do next.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll figure something out.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270

or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.