Recently while designing new business cards, I considered my title. With my early retirement after 30 years in high tech, I needed a new title and “retired” just didn’t fit.
I considered many choices but couldn’t settle on just one. Thus these three made it on the card: Speaker, Mountaineer, Alzheimer’s Advocate. And with this new blog for ϳԹ, I probably need to add writer.
Hi, I’m Alan Arnette and welcome to my blog. Some of you may know me from my own climbs and annual coverage of Mt. Everest on my website . With this new blog for ϳԹ, I hope to share my own adventures plus my thoughts on the world of mountaineering. And there is another objective; but let’s wait for a moment on that.
As a speaker, I am not the traditional motivational speaker but rather talk about my career of running global businesses through the eyes of my mountaineering adventures.
As a mountaineer, and I use that term loosely, I have been on 20 major climbs around the world since I started at age 38. I have climbed well above 6000 meters ten times and Everest three times with my best being 8400m, but that’s another story.
While I am fond of saying that I have turned back from more summits that stood on; my passion is climbing in all forms. And yes, I smile at the thought of blizzards, -40 nights and waist deep snow.
And for my last title, Alzheimer's Advocate, this is what my life is all about now. This disease has no cure, impacts over 30 million worldwide and took two of my aunts plus my mom, Ida, this past August. Today, my climbing is to raise awareness and research funds so that our children’s generation will never experience this robber of memories and lives.
In that spirit, I am planning to climb the 7 Summits with my partners the , and to raise $1 million. I call my effort “Memories are Everything: The 7 Summits”. All donations go directly to Alzheimer's organizations and zero to me.
The climbs are open to qualified climbers and guided by IMG’s professionals. However we still need a corporate sponsor to reach the millions of followers to generate the million dollars.
Meanwhile, I continue to climb all 58 Colorado 14ers, with 52 summits thus far. Longs Peak is my favorite with over 50 climbs and 17 summits – a great training peak for the bigger and more difficult climbs.
Also, I am ramping up my annual coverage of the 2010 spring Everest season. As I have done in the past, I will interview climbers and guides, bring focus to expeditions who emphasize safety and conservation plus track the teams as they work their way to the late May summit windows. You can read my on my site.
You can expect to read on this blog about Everest, my own climbs and other mountaineering topics. Thanks for coming along and let's go climbing!
Climb On!
Alan