Mountaineering tradition is clear, says climber Corey Rennell of Anchorage. If you're first to climb a mountain that doesn't yet have a name, you get to name it.
And so Mount Powell -- a rugged peak in remote patch of Central Asia -- came to be named after Scott Powell, one of four Boy Scout leaders from Alaska who died in an electrical accident at a National Boy Scout Jamboree in Virginia in July.
Rennell and seven fellow members of the Harvard Mountaineering Club in August summited a clutch of peaks between 14,600 and 15,900 feet high. Members of the team made nine first ascents in the Borkoldoy Range of east Kyrgyzstan, near the Chinese border, the club reports.
Their names for the peaks are not yet official, but the club believes they will be accepted, certainly by the international climbing community and probably by Kyrgyzstan, said club president Lucas Laursen.
So now there's a mountain named Peak Harvard and another named Peak Adventure. There are mountains named Peak Freja and Peak Kelly and one called Peak of Theoretical Physics.
Rennell named a 14,945-footer for Powell on Aug. 13.
Powell, who was 57, had lived in Chugiak until moving to Ohio last year. He had been a scoutmaster to Rennell, who first met him at age 11 and went on to become an Eagle Scout and camp counselor.
"He molded the way I grew up to appreciate nature and to feel as though kindness and courtesy were the best things human beings could offer each other," Rennell said Thursday from Harvard.
"It's kind of sappy and lame or whatever, but Scott, I would say, was as influential as my parents in shaping the young man I became."
Rennell, 20, was in the southern African country of Namibia in July, serving an internship as a field geologist and training for the August expedition, he said. Days before he was to leave for Kyrgyzstan, his parents called him with news that Powell had been killed.
Club members understood they would name first-ascent peaks. Now Rennell had a name. So did another team member, whose father died of natural causes a week before they arrived in Kyrgyzstan.
Expedition members accepted Mount Powell and also Peak Fox for the father who died, giving those names to their first two summits.
Rennell is in his third year at Harvard, studying ecology, earth systems and cinematography, he said. In Kyrgyzstan he was the expedition's cameraman.
In high school in Anchorage, Rennell spent his free time in public service and politics, co-chairing the Youth Civic Rights Movement.
The Boy Scouts gave Rennell experience in the outdoors. He took up mountain climbing about six months before entering college. Once at Harvard, Rennell said, he climbed every week.
The Harvard Mountaineering Club, founded in the mid-1920s, is one of the oldest climbing organizations in America. Club members include map-maker and photographer Bradford Washburn, who popularized Mount McKinley, and David Roberts, the noted mountaineering writer.
From the 1920s through the 1960s, club members made numerous first ascents around the world. Washburn made several in Alaska. Roberts' 1963 expedition put in a new route, the Harvard Route, up the Wickersham Wall, McKinley's towering north face.
Laursen said the club seized the chance to make the first American expedition into the Borkoldoy range to honor its 80th anniversary and return to the tradition of visiting unexplored terrain.
"We have climbers who do all kinds of (climbs), but the motion in the last two or three years is to do things that used to be done," Laursen said. When club members asked a guest speaker who had climbed in Greenland for advice on visiting some place exotic, word came back that Borkoldoy was wide open and practically virginal.
But how could they be sure so many peaks in the range had not yet been climbed?
"From our research, and from talking to people, we're almost 100 percent positive that only four expeditions visited this area in the past 15 years," since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Rennel said.
The Soviet climbers were competitive and sought to challenge themselves with the hardest routes, usually on the highest mountains, according to Rennell. Peaks below 16,000 feet were off their radar.
Those who live in the region are primarily nomadic herders and marmot trappers, while as far as the team could discover, the nearest village was about 350 miles away, Rennell said.
The expedition was "basically injury-free," Rennell said.
"It was some of the easiest climbing I've ever done in my life, but also some of the most dangerous climbing," he said.
They enjoyed a few luxuries. A tour company they hired provided meals, a cook and mess tent at their 9,000-foot base camp, and drove them over the rocky, roadless countryside in an ex-Soviet military vehicle.
The tour operator also gave them the oddest event of the trip.
"We expected a cooler full of lamb shanks, and instead they threw a live (adult) sheep in the car," Rennell said. "It was kicking us and defecating on our stuff, so in the end, we ended up eating it anyway.
"... We had this sheep as a composition of every one of our meals -- sheep pancake, sheep and rice, sheep sandwiches."
They saw no sign of a previous ascent on any of the nine peaks. Seven were snowless on top; they marked them with small rock piles, or cairns. On each, they left tokens: containers with the names of the climbers who made the climb, the latitude and longitude and the date and time of the ascent, and a small U.S. flag.
Rennell and Laursen said the group's names for the nine peaks have been accepted by the Kyrgyzstan Alpine Club as well as the head of the tour company.
The climb has been reported to the American Alpine Club and the International Mountaineering Federation, and the club is waiting for official acceptance by those organizations.
A report of the expedition will appear in the 2006 issue of the American Alpine Journal, the leading mountaineering record in the country.
If the names ever appear on Kyrgyzstan maps, it's likely they will be written in the Russian alphabet, Laursen said.
"We don't know 100 percent if they ever will be on a map or will be official," he said. "I'm preparing an official report, to the sponsors and also to the Kyrgyzstan Alpine Club."
Ed and Caroline Powell of Venice, Fla., Scott Powell's parents, learned of Rennell's gesture to honor their son only on Friday when an Anchorage Boy Scouts official notified them, they said.
"As far as I'm concerned, it will always be Mount Powell," Caroline said. Her son, she said, would have loved the club's goal of visiting a generally unexplored area.
"We knew the boy (Rennell)," she said. "He'd written a lovely letter about his relationship to Scott" a few days after he died.
Rennell addressed his letter not to Powell's parents but to Powell himself.
"Dear Scott," he wrote, "I've tried to start this letter too many times now, but there's just no way to say goodbye. ... I must remind myself that you are not a person who can pass away, for it is your spirit that fuels the fire deep within my heart and surely within the hearts of all who were graced and touched by your soul."
Daily News reporter Peter Porco can be reached at pporco@adn.com or 257-4582.
