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Summit Coach is Alan’s consulting service to help aspiring climbers reach their summits. It leverages his 30 years of climbing and 30 years of business experience. The primary benefit to you is that Alan is not a professional climber but has professional results, with summits of K2, Everest, seven of the eight Seven Summits, and 225 Colorado 14,000-foot summits.
Personal
Alan retired from a 29-year career with HP in early 2007 to oversee his mother’s final years with Alzheimer’s. He enjoyed different jobs with HP in several U.S. states and European countries. His work ranged from sales to marketing to product development to running worldwide businesses, almost always in a management role.
Climbing
As a mountaineer, he has been on 38 major climbs worldwide since age 38. He has climbed well above 6000 meters over ten times and Everest (29,035/8848m) four times, summiting on May 21, 2011.
His other 8000m summits include Manaslu (26,759′ /8,156 m) in October 2013 and K2 (28,251’/8611m) on Alan’s 58th birthday, July 27, 2014. He is the 18th and oldest American to summit K2.
Alan has climbed all of Colorado’s 58 14,000-foot mountains almost 225 times, with repeats. Between November 2010 and October 2011, Alan completed climbing seven of the eight ” Seven Summits. ”
Alzheimer’s
For Alan’s last area, being an Alzheimer’s Advocate is his life’s work. This disease has no cure, impacts over 50 million worldwide, and took four of Alan’s aunts plus Alan’s mom, Ida, in August 2009. Today, Alan’s climbing is to raise Alzheimer’s awareness and research funds so our children’s generation will never experience this robber of memories and lives.
Why Choose Alan as your Coach?
Simply put, he has experiences unlike anyone else in the industry with climbs, summits, sponsorship, and organization. In addition, Summit Coach offers highly personalized attention that is rarely seen in the climbing industry.
Summit Coach leverages Alan’s experience with hundreds of other climbers, guides, and climbs. As a result, Alan can relate to and offer benefits to his clients, as demonstrated by his climbing career as a regular person (not a guide) with a full-time job and family starting at age 38.
Alan has not summited every mountain and thus gained valuable lessons he will pass on to you. In addition, Alan secured sponsorship for some of his climbs, a rarity in today’s world. These included extensive public relations campaigns, live television and radio interviews, and print and online media events.
His website and Blog have over 3 million followers. Outside Magazine cited Alan as “one of the world’s most respected chroniclers of Everest.”
Alan’s approach is to help the client have a positive experience, not summiting at all costs.
Alan has conducted three large-scale projects for Alzheimer’s: The Road Back to Mt. Everest in 2007/8 with climbs on Denali, Shishapangma, Aconcagua and Orizaba plus Everest. In 2011, The 7 Summits for Alzheimer’s: Memories are Everything® campaign where Alan climbed 7 of the 8 of the world’s highest peaks on each continent, aka The 7 Summits and in 2014, Climbing K2, the world’s hardest mountain to fight the world’s hardest disease, Alzheimer’s.