Local Man Celebrated for Spending $100,000 to Climb Mt Everest

SEATTLE — Upon his return from a successful trip in the Himalayas, locals on Sunday celebrated Charlie Baker’s great accomplishment of spending $100,000 to climb Mt. Everest.

Baker, an investment banker in Seattle, found the experience of spending the equivalent of a middle class annual salary for the opportunity to scale Everest to be incredibly rewarding. “It was the trip of a lifetime,” said Baker at the Maritime Brewery in Ballard, where friends and family were gathered to hear about his experience, “It took a lot of sacrifice, months of training, and the good fortune to have enough disposable income for something like this.”

As Baker was showing pictures of him with the $40,000-worth of REI gear he bought specifically for the trip, the crowd oohed and awed at his privileged standing of being able to take three months off of work with no financial consequence to him or his family.

“The Sherpas really helped us out. They are the lifeblood of the mountain and they do what they can to make us feel safe,” said Baker as he was showing photos of his mountain guides, who sacrifice life and limb every year to ensure Westerners can be safe as they spend more money than the Sherpas will ever see in their lifetime.

Baker was certainly fond of the other members in his group. “They say the true journey is the friends you meet along the way,” as he described some of his teammates: a mid-career anesthesiologist, a retired single man, and a woman on an inspiring quest to come back from a horrifying car accident in which she received a major settlement.  

“We were caught in a couple big storms that forced us into our massive dome tents at base camp for like seven days straight,” recalls Baker, “You’ve never really lived until you decide against giving a significant donation to a local charity and instead spend a large sum of money for the opportunity to poop in a tin can.”

The presentation concluded with a photo of Baker posing at the top of Everest, taken at an angle to conveniently cut out the line of 300 people looking to do the same thing.