My Everest Odyssey Memoir
The remarkable story of one of the earliest trekkers to the base camp of Mount Everest. In 1967, with $200 in his pocket, twenty-two-year-old Peace Corps Volunteer Russ Staples heads for Nepal. Join Russ as he travels from a small village in South India, with little more than a borrowed backpack and youthful enthusiasm, to the base of the tallest mountain in the world, a journey that took forty days and included travel by planes, trains, busses, and rickshaws. Fifty years ago, the trek to Everest was not what it is today.
“Russ Staples’ 1967 trek to Everest Base Camp stands in my mind as great an adventure as can be for this young man. Leaving Kathmandu in late November with only a few hundred rupees in his pocket, no maps and 180 miles of rugged Himalayan terrain ahead of him, against all odds, it was certainly amazing that he and his friend Ken French could pull it off.
”In 1967 Russ followed the original trek route taken by Sir Edmund Hillary’s successful 1953 ascent of Everest and that of the 1963 American Everest expedition. In 1967 there were no teahouses or trail signs. Rivers were crossed on weather-worn rope bridges and there were no regular flights into Lukla. Russ and Ken lived off the kindness and hospitality of the local people and pulled off the trick on a shoestring.“Relive his great adventure described in this book, My Everest Odyssey .”
—Rick Wilcox, President, International Mountain Equipment
$16.00 / paperback / 179 pages / 6 in. (w) by 9in. (h)
Beech River Books / 2018 / ISBN 978-1-930149-40-3
Over 100 historic interior illustrations
Russell Staples gained his love of the mountains and hiking early in life by fishing, camping and hiking throughout the White Mountains of his native New Hampshire. A graduate of the University of New Hampshire, Russ joined the Peace Corps in 1966. After three years as a Volunteer, then as an associate director in India, Russ returned to the States to spend a few years as a Peace Corps recruiter. He spent twelve years as Scoutmaster to the local Boy Scout troop and was a foster parent to ten boys with special needs.
After sixteen years working in the field of special education, Russ retired. He now resides in the foothills of New Hampshire’s White Mountains where he is an avid gardener, hiker and fly-fishing enthusiast..
