The historic ascent by normal wheelchair to the summit of 14,246ft (4342m) White Mountain is old news now.
4WheelBob Coomber made the front page of the San Jose Mercury News.
Mercury News
No doubt, the editors of Backpacker Magazine are kicking themselves they did not send someone to cover his third successful attempt. They had sent a crew on his two previous unsuccessful efforts.
Tom Mangan of the Mercury News and the Two-Heel Drive blog was there. Tom took the photos, captions, wrote the headlines, and even wrote a sidebar piece called Bob wheels to the top, proving me way wrong:
Bob on summit day
Bob crawling backwards (which he did 3 times on the final day when the chair could not get past a scree section)
Two-Heel Drive: Favorite images from our White Mountain adventure
The week prior, Tom had invited me to join the support team and I’m glad I did. Bob is an inspiration!
How hard could it be? Some poor military sods at some distant time in the past were ordered to build a ROAD to the top of a high mountain. Yeesh!
Bob kept reminding over the 3 days ascent that “he couldn’t do it without us”. He’s right. Bob did no more than 97% of the work himself.
It’s much, much tougher than I expected. Much tougher than it looks in this photo. At times Bob could gain only an inch or two for each wheel stroke.
It was harsh. A monumental challenge, accomplished.
Congratulations Bob. And thanks.
I posted 50 photos of the climb on flickr.
