How did you come up with the name "Hillary Dogboy Expedition"?
At every slide show
that we have given on this trip, someone asks this question. Unfortunately the answer is
one of those "you had to be there" type answers, but here goes anyway:
First, the origin of "Hillary". Geoff
and I came up with the idea for this trip. He and I had gone through the High Altitude
Mountaineering School together, and also tented together on the graduation climb of Mount
Rainier. He and I had become pretty good climbing buddies, and we climbed a lot of the
Colorado mountains together in 1993 -1995. Somewhere along the line we came up with
nicknames for each other "Reinhold" and "Tomo", after the famous
climbers Reinhold Messner and Tomo Cesen.
When Chuck joined the team in January of 1994,
he wanted a nickname too, so during one of our car rides we all tried to think of a good
nickname for him. We rattled off names of famous climbers, and Chuck blurted out "how
about Sir Edmond Hillary"! Someone responded "that's it, Hillary"! Chuck
replied "No... No... No... not Hillary", "Sir Edmond"! Well, you know
how those things go, the more he didn't like "Hillary", the more we did. So for
about a week we teased him with that name "Hillary". Boys will be boys!
Next, the origin of "Dogboy". In
January of 1994 Doug also joined the team. He and I had gone through the Intermediate Rock
Climbing School together. We became very close friends, and were climbing together very
regularly in 1993 - 1994. My good friends call me "Stevo", and I started calling
him "Dougbo". Somewhere along the line this became "Dougboy", and
finally "Dogboy".
At one of our planning meetings we tried to
think of an original name for our expedition, and we came up with "The Hillary Dogboy
Expedition". We got quite a good laugh over this, but like I said "you had to be
there".