Firefighters tackle stair climb

Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Firefighters representing 300 departments across the United States and six countries prepare for the 23rd Annual Scott Firefighter Stairclimb, held Sunday at the Columbia Center in Seattle. The event raised more than $1.55 million for cancer research.

Step by step, eight members of the Mountain Home Fire Department tackled a yearly challenge that ultimately will help in an ongoing quest to find a cure for cancer.

The firefighters were among the nearly 1,700 individuals competing in the 23rd Annual Scott Firefighter Stairclimb, held Sunday at the Columbia Center in Seattle.

Representing Mountain Home at this year's event were Ron Bergh, Chris Corbus, Edie Corbus, Danny Downen, Chuck Garvey, Eugene Rogers, Hank Patrick and Chuck VanMeer. The other competitors came from 300 fire departments located in 27 states and six different countries.

As the name implies, the event required each firefighter to scale the 69-story skyscraper -- a trek involving 1,311 steps around the building's stairwell. However, the biggest challenge involved having each person make the climb while wearing nearly 60 pounds of firefighting gear, including an air tank and mask.

The annual stairclimb helps raise money for the national Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Together, the teams helped raise more than $1.55 million to benefit the charity.

The Mountain Home community contributed nearly $25,000 toward that final tally. While the local team came in seventh place in terms of total contributions, they were first in per capita donations.

Garvey thanked the Mountain Home community for its support of the team as well as its generosity.

Each member of the Mountain Home team had very personal reasons for competing this year, according to Corbus.

"Every one of us has been affected by (cancer) one way or another," Corbus said. "In the past couple of years, we've all had a close encounter with cancer."

In fact, Corbus lost his grandmother to cancer one year to the day he competed in Seattle.

The team spent weeks preparing for the climb, which involved "intense circuit training" at a local fitness club, Bergh said.

At the same time, the firefighters donned their gear and took turns on the fitness club's stair climbing equipment. Those 20-minute sessions gave them just a brief taste of what they would face once they got to Seattle.

But that was just the beginning. Each Friday, the team drove up to the U.S. Bank building in Boise and scaled the 22-story building while wearing their gear.

"We didn't want to do it anymore. It was overwhelming," Rogers said regarding their first trek up that skyscraper in Boise.

But they never gave up. "You can't quit," Garvey said. "You would never be able to live it down."

A lot of that motivation was fueled by the community's pride in the team. It served as that extra level of motivation that kept them from wanting to quit.

"We built a name for ourselves," Garvey said. "There were a lot of people in the community... keeping track of what was going on."

The team simply didn't want to let these people down by giving up, he added.

Their biggest challenge dealt with hitting the proverbial "brick wall" -- that point where they wanted to quit as they scaled that skyscraper in Seattle.

"We trained to get to that wall and to... push through it," Bergh said.

Instead of going as a single team, the Mountain Home firefighters were split up with each of the eight competitors placed in 40-person divisions. At 8 a.m. Sunday, the first firefighter began the climb with others following once every 15 seconds.

Garvey was the first from Mountain Home to make the climb.

"I was good. I didn't feel too nervous until I started getting my gear on the bagpipers started playing to lead the first team up the stairs," Garvey said. "Once I took a deep breath, I was fine."

Meanwhile, Chuck VanMeer admitted that he felt "alligators in his stomach" when they prepared to scale the building.

Volunteers stationed along the way cheered and inspired the firefighters to keep moving forward.

At the same time, Garvey remembers seeing all of the posters hung on the stairwells, each one showing the face of someone currently battling cancer or a person who lost the fight against the disease. It was another source of motivation that kept him moving upward.

Andrew Drobeck from the Missoula City Fire Department in Montana topped this year's list of competitors, scaling the skyscraper with a final time of 11 minutes, five seconds.

Bergh was Mountain Home's fastest firefighter with an official time of 17 minutes, two seconds. It took him an average of 15 seconds to clear each flight of stairs.

"It was 17 minutes of hell, but it was good to get to the top," Bergh said.

It was a mental game climbing those stairs, Corbus said. Each firefighter had to get through at least the first nine floors before they were able to calm down and settle into a steady groove that carried them the rest of the way.

As one of the department's stairclimb veterans, Corbus remembers the first time he competed back in 2006.

"We learned a hard lesson that first year," he said. "We trained hard and wanted to take on the world."

But that euphoria quickly faded as the reality of having to climb all of those stairs set in. "It was an ego buster," Corbus added.

Mountain Home's firefighters remain proud that each person on their team made it all the way to the top of the skyscraper. However, it was anything but easy.

"It was pretty grueling," Corbus said. "As soon as every one of us crossed the finish line, we were ready to collapse."

There were three individuals holding up each firefighter as they peeled off their gear.

Others were not so lucky. Corbus saw a number of the firefighters taken away by ambulance every several minutes. One suffered a heart attack.

Despite their ordeal, the team is already looking forward to competing again next year. They also hope to add at least three more people to their team.