Although I have been an attorney for 25 years, my hobby was climbing the highest mountains in the world for 20 of those years. Of those 50 or so expeditions, I climbed six of the highest mountains on each continent of the earth, the exception being Vincent Massif in Antarctica. It’s just too cold for my frost bitten fingers now. No seven summits for me.
High altitude mountain climbing has a governor on it called “age.” However, I climbed Mt. Aconcagua (the highest mountain in both Americas at 22,841 ft.) with the strongest 55 year old climber I ever met. And I summited Mt. Kilimanjaro with four lifelong friends who were 65 years old. One of those friends, a judge, never climbed the stairs after the knee injury he sustained. But he did marry my wife and me in South Lake Tahoe the following year.
Kilimanjaro is over 19,000 ft. high and we witnessed two deaths on the way up; each climber being brought down on a raggedy orange gurney. It’s the only way you get taken down that mountain on a gurney, no matter how bad your knee injury.
I was only 50 years old at the time (year 2000) and estate planning was the last thing on my mind. Getting to the top of the mountain was the first, and as we got higher, putting one boot in front of the other was all I could think of besides the lack of oxygen. That’s when I learned to sing chants when I was in the most pain. That’s what the porters do, and it works.
These two deaths were not the first I had seen on a mountain, but it always amazed me how those climbers certainly had no intention of dying on this mountain when they decided to go on the trip of a lifetime. Neither of their deaths was caused by accident. Their bodies just failed them.
That means they were most likely lured to the mountain because there are no technical climbing skills required for Mt. Kilimanjaro, a beginner can do it; but you must be in extraordinary shape to withstand the endurance and cold of 19,000 feet. Somebody told them climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro was a “walk in the park.” That “somebody” had never climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, or so I imagined it.
These days, not even nine years later, I wonder if the dead climbers, or even the 65 year old men I climbed with, had their estate plans in order. And it also amazes me that at 50 years old I didn’t feel the need to have my estate in order. Even though I had been divorced for 15 years and knew by law everything I owned would go to my daughter, she was still only 20 years old. How could I be so irresponsible so as to not have set up a trust for her?
This mind set is the perfect example of how you spend the first twenty years of your young adult life sowing the seeds of your work, but it is not until around that thirtieth year of toil that you begin to reap all the fruits of your labor and your estate begins to blossom into fruition.
My book is named ESTATE PLANNING: The Heroes Way for Baby Boomers because it is the Boomers that have had the time on the planet sufficient to reap what they have sewn for the last thirty or more years. But it does not mean you should ignore having an estate plan while you are in your thirties, particularly if you are more responsible or fiscally successful than the other thirty-somethings.
When you consider the overwhelming shock for the families of the two climbers that didn’t make it, what comes into focus, if there is no estate plan to instruct their next move, is that it is complete nonsense to not have a Revocable Trust or Will at any adult age. Otherwise you leave behind chaos, with people guessing, and a list of chores to be accomplished. It leaves no time for those that love you to deal with their grief.
The moral of this story, and the way to begin your New Year’s Resolution of getting your estate plan done, is to start off with a long walk through Alameda or Alice Keck Park, if you are in Santa Barbara, or better yet, a hike into the mountains behind Santa Barbara – somewhere along the labyrinth of trails between Cold Springs and Romero Canyon. Or you could go hike the continental divide, but I don’t suggest it.
You will see and smell the most natural delights and hear the messages of the scrub oak blue jay which will help everything become clear. Get a vision in your mind of how you would like the world to be if you never returned. Then, sit down and write it all out, exactly the way you would want it to be.
No opinion herein is a “marketed opinion” and no information provided herein can be used to avoid tax penalties for which the taxpayer would otherwise be responsible. Mark S. Cornwall has lived in Santa Barbara for over 30 years and practiced law in the same location for 25 years. His book, ESTATE PLANNING: The Heroes Way for Baby Boomers can be purchased via his web site www.TheHeroesWay.com, Amazon.com, or locally at Chaucer's and Border's. If you have any questions, please feel free to email him at mark@babyboomerpublishing.com .
