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He's got rodeo in his roots, climbing on his mind and mushing on the table. Which means that you should not be surprised to see multitasking Bob Hempstead lasso the arch on Front Street in Nome when he finishes the 28th annual Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Don't laugh. Too loud. The mushing rookie has a long-term goal of climbing the Seven Summits - the tallest peaks on each continent - and performing a rope trick at the top of each. He also plans to whip out the rope and perform a cowboy-style trick at the finish line after driving his team 1,100 miles across Alaska. Yippee-ki-yay! "I want to do it under the arch," said Hempstead, who will think up an appropriate loop-de-loop maneuver from his vast repertoire of twirls. Hempstead, 42, of Kasilof, grew up in Nebraska and competed in team roping at rodeos when he was younger. But even if he's given up the broncs-and-bulls circuit, he still participates in the occasional Alaska rodeo. Now he's dreamed up a way to combine his passions. Hempstead says he's climbed Mount Everest, the world's tallest peak; Mount McKinley, the highest mountain in North America; Aconcagua, the tallest mountain in South America; and Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa. That leaves him with three to go. Vernon Tejas, an Anchorage mountaineer who has climbed the Seven Summits, knows Hempstead and even had a rope-trick lesson from him. "I'm still working on them," said Tejas, who said he is trying to master the Texas Skip. "It's impressive. He's good." Most people don't have the energy to do much more than stare at the scenery once they've expended the effort to reach the summit of such big mountains. But Hempstead has pulled it together long enough to pull out the rope during his brief visits to these high places. He said he did a loop-around-the-body trick on 20,320-foot McKinley that he was quite happy with but had some difficulty on 29,028-foot Everest. While climbing the final ridge to the summit, Hempstead slipped over the side and for a few minutes dangled on his climbing rope above nothingness. Not the rope trick he had in mind. Hauled back to safety by a fellow climber, Hempstead was shaky on the top. He hoped to do a butterfly, where he whirls the rope in front of his body, but it didn't come off as planned. "The trick I did on Everest was pretty feeble," Hempstead said. Hempstead got his first dog sled ride from Kenai Peninsula pal Dean Osmar, the 1984 Iditarod champ. He loved it. The dogs he's using for what will probably be his only Iditarod belong to Osmar. As payback for getting him hooked on mushing, Hempstead wants to get Osmar out on a horse. The appropriate rope trick for that adventure might involve tying Osmar to the saddle.
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