A promise kept: Saskatchewan man carries friend’s ashes to Everest

Mick Bakke, a retired conservation officer who grew up in Assiniboia, went on an emotional journey last year, fulfilling a promise by delivering his friend’s ashes to Mount Everest Base Camp in Nepal.

Bakke said Don Borgerson, who died of cancer in 2022, wanted some of his ashes spread at the world’s tallest mountain. After some training he made the journey to Nepal to lay his friend to rest. Bakke joined The Evan Bray Show on Wednesday to recount the story.

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Listen to the full interview with Bakke or read the transcript below:

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

EVAN BRAY: Take me back to when you and Don were kids. What part of the province did you grow up in?

MICK BAKKE: Well, we grew up in the southern part, south of the community of Assiniboia. A little town, Rock Glen, is where we ended up going to school together.

I was about eight years old when I came into Canada from Wyoming, and our parents had been lifelong friends, and they were bandmates — the Polka Dots of all things — so our parents knew one another. They were best of friends, and we also became the best of friends.

BRAY: How do two farm kids from southern Saskatchewan dream of climbing Mount Everest?

BAKKE: Don and I shared so many passions. We love sports. We love the Montreal Canadiens — again, which is rare for western Canada. We love the Riders. Our Second World World War history we shared together.

And Everest, I think, came from Wyoming in the mountains, and I always been passionate about that kind of country. And so Don and I, we watched documentaries, we read all the books that National Geographic ever had, and we had that passion about Everest. We were just so fascinated with it. And we said “We should climb this. We should do it. We should become mountaineers, even though we’re flatlanders.”

BRAY: Tell me a little bit about Don. You were both giving back to your community through service. You a lifelong conservation officer. I know you retired a number of years back. Don was a firefighter and did a lot of firefighting up in the north and instructing.

BAKKE: Yeah, it’s interesting how we ended up bumping into our careers. Mine was a decision I’d made at a young age. Don, of course, took over his family farm for a while, and then eventually ended up in fire control, and he was training young firefighters. He flew bird dog officers, and so we were working for the same ministry for probably the last few decades of our career.

BRAY: So you stayed in touch, you were lifelong friends, and then Don is diagnosed with cancer in 2022. Tell me about that.

BAKKE: Yeah, that was a tough one. His sister Judy called me one day to say Don had passed away, and I had absolutely no idea he had kept this diagnosis away from almost everybody, and some of his friends in fire control had notified Judy, and they visited him, and he’s already been palliative, I think. So it was horrible, devastating news.

And so the family had a memorial celebration of life on their old homestead by Fife Lake, where his ancestors had settled, and his niece announced that it was his desire that some of his ashes could be placed up at Mount Everest Base Camp, and she was committed to doing that, and that’s when I knew.

BRAY: What did you do?

BAKKE: Well, the first thing I did was I stepped up to Stephanie, and I said, “I’m going with you.” And and then from there we started to plan.

During that process, Stephanie mentioned to me that she would like to defer our trip for a year because she had some family plans she wanted to take into account, and I just had to tell her, “Girl, I am too old to defer for another year. I just have to do it now.”

So that forced me to look for another trekking partner and I contacted my son, who was very interested in going but he needed to confer with his business partners in Halifax. Then I talked to another friend of mine who was very outdoorsy, and she agreed to come, and then my son agreed, and it became the three of us.

Mick Bakke said it wasn’t easy to get to base camp, with the journey including altitude sickness, rough terrain and other obstacles. (Mick Bakke/Submitted)

BRAY: What was the training like for what you ended up doing?

BAKKE: We were working out in the gym and we started biking in Grasslands National Park. We did hiking with full packs and heavier gear, we’re jogging and running for probably about a full year, just shy of a year before we actually made this trip to Everest.

BRAY: I understand you met with a couple of guides – is that what you would call them?

BAKKE: Carol and I decided, and Brad too, that it would be in our best interests to contact a trekking company.

Tourism is probably the biggest business industry in Nepal now, and because we’d never been there before, the guide and porters look after your meals and and tea houses and that sort of thing, and not to mention carry a lot of our gear, so we contacted a company and we met with them when we arrived in Kathmandu, and and then began our trip. It was a long time in the planning, and then before you know, we were actually doing it.

BRAY: I can’t imagine the thoughts you had of how much Don would have loved this kind of thing.

BAKKE: Yeah, he would have been thrilled. I had him in my pack for the majority of the trek.

Along the way it just poured rain on us for about the first three and a half days, so we couldn’t even see the mountaintops. We were sweating and wet and sloshing in mud and rock and a lot of cow and donkey poop along the trail, because that’s how beasts of burden carry everything up, right?

But Don would have absolutely been thrilled with it. And then when the skies finally cleared and the mountains were exposed to us, it was unbelievable.

BRAY: Was it hard to breathe?

BAKKE: I think here in Assiniboia, where I live, we’re around 2,400 feet, and we started our track at about 9,000 feet in a little community called Lukla that we fly into from Kathmandu, and from there we climbed to just about just shy of 18,000 feet at the base camp. So we suffered some high-altitude sickness.

My son started getting dizziness, and started taking his medication for that. We all prepared with a lot of meds for various possible things that could happen, and next thing you know he had a negative reaction to it.

He developed all kinds of rashes around his body and his feet and his hands, and Carol got a slight bit of dizziness but she was pretty good. Otherwise, she didn’t even take her medication, and I was good in terms of high-altitude sickness, other than the last couple of days I completely lost my appetite.

BRAY: How did you pick the spot, and what was that like fulfilling Don’s wish?

BAKKE: It was kind of interesting. Don was in my pack for most of the time, but on the day we knew we’re going to make it to base camp, I placed Don in my cargo pants in my pocket.

For days I’d been telling Carol, “Don’t let me forget Don. Don’t let me forget Don,” so about every two hours, she’d ask “You got Don? Do you have Don?” “Yeah, I got him. He’s right here. He’s right through my pocket.”

And on the final day, we’d shed most of your gear and were walking, and when Base Camp came into view, boom, I started to turn into a pup. And so it was about another probably half a mile down to the base camp, and there’s a lot of trekkers that do go up there annually. There’s probably 30,000, 40,000 people a year that go up there, but there was, I’d say, a couple of dozen people down there, and everybody wants their photo at the the iconic rock at Everest Base Camp with the elevation sprayed on it, and so I waited.

I hoped this fellow would climb off of the rock, so I could get in there myself, but he was busy, so I just placed both my hands on the rock and said a few prayers, and then walked around. I found the spot.

Mick Bakke said after a long journey it was an emotional moment to give his friend Don Borgerson “a permanent view of Mount Everest.” (Mick Bakke/Submitted)

BRAY: What is your takeaway, Mick, from this?

BAKKE: For me, it was a real sense of accomplishment. I did this with my son and a very good friend, and I stayed in contact with all of the family back home.

When I got there and I placed Don, I was just sobbing the whole time. But you think I could get the cap off of the pill bottle? I struggled with that thing, and then it popped open and ashes went into the air and all over my arm, so I apologize to Don. “Sorry, buddy,” but I got him into the ground and I texted Don’s youngest sister, Judy, and said “The Eagle has landed. Don now has a permanent view of Mount Everest.”