François Langlois off to conquer another summit

Giving himself before the end of 2010, 42-year old François Langlois has every intention to conquer the magic cap by overcoming the last obstacle: Mount Vinson in the Arctic region, one of the coldest places on the planet. “We go to Chile and from there a Russian military plane will take us to the foot of the mountain. If the weather is bad, we could be stuck there for weeks. I have to plan for a month’s absence and make provisions for food and drink so I am well-prepared.”

François Langlois left on September 12 and took one plane after another. From Montreal to Los Angeles, on to Sydney, Jakarta, Timika and to the small village of Sugapa, which is not even on the map. “From there, a 70-kilometre walk in the jungle of Papua New Guinea to reach the mountain called the Carstenz Pyramid. The forest is so dense that if you deviate from the path, you’re in big trouble. Only 14 white men have taken this path before me. We passed by some areas belonging to tribes and each time we passed one, we had to ask for the tribe chief’s permission.”

The Carstenz Pyramid is the most difficult to climb from a technical standpoint. One needs a lot of equipment to deal with 12 roped sections and a Tyrolean traverse at an altitude of 4700 metres. “It was a rocky climb – with zero vegetation. When we did the Tyrolean traverse at an altitude of 16,000 feet, it was something else; at this height, oxygen is reduced to half. Only 200 people on earth have climbed it before me. It rains constantly and it so humid that our clothes were soaking wet all the time. At the summit, nothing much could be seen because of the clouds. But the satisfaction of taking up the challenge is what matter. I met a Korean was on his seventh summit, two Americans, one Polish woman, a Mexican woman and a Spaniard.”

Returning from Indonesia, François Langlois stopped in Sydney, Australia. He rented a car and ended up climbing Mount Kosciszko, the highest mountain in this country (2000 metres)), located midway between Sydney and Melbourne. “We took the ski lift and then had to climb up on foot for six kilometres more. The view was magnificent and of course a great degree of emotional satisfaction.”

In January 2009, François Langlois will again lead a group of volunteers to climb Mount Kilimanjaro (19,000 feet in Tanzania, Africa) to raise funds for the Charles-Bruneau Foundation to fight cancer.”

Then in May 2009, he will take 30 trekkers to the base camp of Mount Everest. “We will visit the sherpas of the Himalaya mountains and the Buddhist monks, and this will be for the Make a Wish Foundation for sick children. It was a promise I made at Mount Everest. I was born prematurely with under-developed lungs. I spent five weeks in an incubator and I weighed just 1 kilo. Thirty-five years later, my lungs developed allowing me to set foot on Mount Everest. Doctors recently found a benign cyst the size of a grapefruit in my left bronchus. When they took it out, it burst and released a litre of fluid outside, instead of in my lungs. I was spared from a pulmonary oedema on Mount Everest which would have been fatal.”

You can visit his web site at www.francoislanglois.com.