Trekking to
Pay Tribute
By Heather Tomlins
One morning in early May, my neighbor Sakina tapped on
my door so early that I could barely discern the sun peeking
above the eastern horizon. Wha....? Then I remembered: we
were trekking on the mountain today, and the bus left at 6 a.m.,
sharp - and despite the fact that I have begun to observe meeting times with a certain amount of looseness, I figured today,
being on time might be a good idea.
Snow still wrapped the upper ridges of Baba Mountain in a
solid layer, and I don’t have any mountaineering equipment to
speak of, aside from some 10-year-old leather boots that have
long since lost their “gore-tex” waterproofness. I packed lots
of extra warm layers, my ski shell, and a few extra sandwiches.
(What I wouldn’t have given that morning for a Clif bar!) When
we arrived at the waiting buses, I laughed at my gear-panic: the
crowd gathered in the early morning light did not appear to be
headed to the same place. Half the group were in tennis shoes
and jeans, the other in serious mountain gear: wind-proof jackets, heavy duty mountaineering boots, gaiters.
Every year, around May 10th, the local mountaineering
club organizes what it calls a “traditional march” up to the top
of Pelister’s peak (2,601m), to honor a local legend and hero,
Dimitar Ilievski-Murato. On the 10th of May, 1989, he was the
264th person to reach the summit of Mount Everest. A member
of the first successful Yugoslavian expedition to that mountain,
he slipped and fell on the climb down, and perished at the age
of 35. A Bitola native, and father of two, he has been honored in
this way for twenty years. This year, the twentieth anniversary,
was a huge occasion with hikes planned for mountain peaks all
over Macedonia. In Pelister, his family climbed up there along
with all 400+ of us.
My friends and I labored up the mo