For 14 years, Neal Kirby was the principal at Edison Elementary. For eight years, he was principal at Centralia Middle School. Now retired, Kirby has climbed Mount Rainier five times “since qualifying for Social Security,” as he puts it.
“I used to hike all the time, you know, like crisscrossing the national parks with really well-cleared trails and you can't possibly get lost. And whenever I saw signs to mountaintops, I used to always think, 'You know, there's something different about that. I'm not qualified to do that,’” he said.
When Kirby joined One Step At A Time (OSAT), his attitude — and consequently, his altitude — changed.
The OSAT program began in 1991, taking people from the Puget Sound area who are recovering from addiction through any 12-step program and teaching them the skills needed to climb Mount Baker.
“And if they're successful in everything they do there, then they graduate from the class, but they also get an opportunity to climb Rainier. And most of them do. That's the main theme is, you know, ‘hey, we can teach you other ways to get high,’” Kirby said.
In late June, members of OSAT, which include folks in recovery as well as their family members and friends, went to Antigua, Guatemala.
The trip involved a combination of humanitarian work and adventure. Members climbed a mountain, kayaked, saw an exploding volcano and worked with Antigua-based charity From Houses to Homes and a Guatemalan family to build two houses for the family to move into.
“It’s one big room. For us it would be like a yard shelter. But, it's all cinder block, it's all solid and gives them protection and protects them from the weather. Their kitchen, they have a big sink outside,” Kirby said. “They have a toilet outside, the government does provide sewer systems, but it’s very rustic otherwise.”
The family was made up of a married couple with 20 children, all from individual births. Eight of their children had moved out of the home while the rest lived with the parents in a house made of corrugated tin with one large bed, according to Kirby. The second of the two houses they built was for one of the older kids and their spouse and family.
“The house we built is not a whole lot larger, it’s just more secure. One of the things I often heard the family say is now that they have a place that has locking doors and locking windows that they can all live together and feel secure,” he said.
The adventure part of the trip included kayaking at Lake Atitlán, the deepest lake in Central America, located in the Guatemalan Highlands of the Sierra Madre mountains. And summiting Acatenango, a 13,045 foot volcano. Kirby was the only member of his 11-person team to make it all the way to the top.
Camping at 11,700 feet the night before summiting, Kirby saw something even more dramatic than the views from atop Mount Rainier: a bursting volcano aptly named “Mount Fuego.”
“We kept hearing the volcano blowing up with big explosions. And then as we got closer, we saw little explosions with lava spewing out,” he said.
To learn more about OSAT, visit osat.org. For more photos of the trip and a video of the exploding volcano, visit The Chronicle's Facebook page.
