Scaling great heights helps father and son to transform

You don’t need special climbing gear to climb what is called Everyman’s Everest, author Tim Ward says.

Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest peak, is mostly a long, gentle slope to climb, Ward said, though climbing it still a feat for nonmountaineers.

“It takes determination, luck and if you get severe altitude sickness, you just have to turn back,” Ward said in an email to the Journal.

	“Zombies on Kilimanjaro, A Father-Son Journey Above the Clouds” by Tim Ward Changemakers’ Books/John Hunt Publishing, $16.95, 233 pp.

With that in mind Ward and his 20-year-old son, Josh Holober-Ward, climbed Kilimanjaro, which is in Tanzania. That experience in 2010 was transformative in their relationships as father and son, as men and as friends.

“For me as a father, witnessing my son take this on and persevere even though he had pretty bad altitude-related headaches, gave me new respect for him as a man. There was nothing I could do as a parent to make it feel better,” Ward wrote in the email. “I saw what he was capable of. He didn’t need me to take care of him. That was part of what shifted my identity as a parent, helped me to let go.”

Despite suffering the altitude sickness, Holober-Ward made the trek to the top and back down.

On their climb, Ward wrote, he and his son encountered others who experienced their own transformations; a woman who had just retired from teaching climbed Kilimanjaro, “as a symbol that her life was not over; a new life of possibilities was beginning”; a young recently engaged couple told Ward and his son that they held hands on the peak and vowed to each other that if they can reach the top of the mountain, they can do anything together. Ward said he learned that a legless young man climbed Kilimanjaro “as a message to others about what is possible in their lives.”

Tim Ward discusses, signs “Zombies on Kilimanjaro” at 7  p.m. Thursday, Aug. 23, at REI Albuquerque, 1550 Mercantile NE; at 4:30  p.m. Friday, Aug. 24, at The Ark Bookstore, 133 Romero St., Santa Fe; and at 3  p.m. Saturday, Aug. 25, at REI Santa Fe, 500 Market St., Suite 100, Santa Fe.