Firefighter climbs

Climb. Conquer. Cure. It’s a fundraiser for the Leukemia and Lymphoma society -to climb 69 flights (1311 steps) of the Columbia Tower in downtown Seattle. the second tallest building west of the Mississippi. On March 29 the climb is for anybody and full of kids, many who are leukemia survivors. The website says it can be done in 11 minutes (!!!) but more usually 30. But this sunday is the Fireflighters’ Stairclimb, limited to firefighters in full 50 pounds of gear, including oxygen bottles on their backs.

What you see here are part of the mere 300 or so steps H and I climb regularly on our neighborhood walk. I occasionally see a firefighter climbing with his gear on (there are women too of course, but I’ve not run across them here...yet) but either have forgotten the camera that day (rare) or the photo was rubbish. Today I ran into this very nice fellow from Vashon Island (forgot to ask his name...) who will participate in sunday’s climb up the Columbia Tower. He said there aren’t many stairs over on Vashon Island (!) so he heard about these and was coming to prepare -- he put on his gas mask (if you look large you can see it) but said the tank wasn’t full... otherwise, it’s all there....the bottles on sunday will be used and replaced on floor 40. He'll do more ups and downs than we do! (which is 1!) I wanted to show him front (at the bottom of this set of 9 flights of about 20 steps each) and back, a few flights up...--so a rare duplex picture….Not what I planned for today but how could I resist?

There’s a very nice 4 min video HERE, and some more info. Oh it does make one think about 9/11 and those amazing heroes!