No Mountain High Enough

 HUMAN INTEREST BRIAN VUYANCIH

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Have you ever been to Mount Washington Cemetery? It’s located right at the base of the Mount Washington Water Tower, and it’s kind of a hidden gem. It’s a cemetery, but it’s one of those cemeteries with so much history and character that its charm outshines its sacredness, inviting locals to explore its grounds rather than circumvent it.

I found myself there after I got a tip about a local man who trains in the graveyard to prepare for an upcoming expedition to climb Mount Everest.

“One loop in the cemetery is exactly a quarter mile,” Tony Ranieri told me. He said he used to run there when he went to McNicholas High School in the early 2000s.

“I leave in two weeks,” Tony said. His ascent to the summit of Mount Everest will take him 60 days. Tony expects to lose about 15-30 pounds during the climb.

These final two weeks will be the culmination of ten months of rigorous training for Tony. “No stone has been left unturned in my preparation for this climb,” Tony assured me.

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The adventurer

Interestingly enough, Mount Everest won’t be the first mountain Tony has climbed. In fact, it’s one of the last on his list. Tony is attempting to accomplish the Seven Summits, a mountaineering challenge to climb the highest summit on each continent. As far as he knows, no one from Cincinnati has accomplished this.

So far, Tony has scaled Denali (North America), Aconcagua (South America), Elbrus (Europe), Kilimanjaro (Africa), and Kosciusko (Australia). After Mount Everest, Tony will still need to climb Mount Vinson in Antartica. And due to some discrepancies in the mountaineering milieu about whether Kosciuszko is actually the highest point in Australia, Tony will also climb Carstensz Pyramid just for good measure.

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