High

High energy and an international worldview characterize Gerry and Marja VanderBeek’s life together.  They met in Amsterdam, when Gerry crashed a party at Marja’s teachers’ college.  With the same goal-directedness that continues to characterize his life, Gerry courted Marja full time until she agreed to marry him.  The couple moved to North America from their native Holland in the 1960’s.  Here, Gerry continued a career in international banking, focusing much of his work on Latin America while based in Seattle, Denver, and Salt Lake City.   Marja specialized in early childhood education in Holland, but when her degree was not transferable to the US, she returned to school in Salt Lake City for a nursing degree.  She worked as a nurse for twenty years until she and Gerry moved to Glenwood Springs.

Gerry has a lifetime passion for climbing mountains.  An article about them in the Glenwood Post Independent of September 9, 2004 quotes Gerry: “I can’t stop.  If I see that something goes up, I gotta go up it.”  He has climbed mountains all over the United States, South America, and Africa.  In 2001 they summitted Kilimanjaro together.  Their travels often take them back to Central and South America.  In 2004 and 2005, they revisited Holland and traveled on to Marja’s birthplace in Indonesia, as well as to Viet Nam, India, Bhutan and Nepal. They make friends wherever they travel and often leave their used hiking and camping equipment with their new, less affluent friends before they return to the US. They enjoy their free time between international trips with their kids and grandkids in Denver and Salt Lake City.

World War II had a huge impact on each of them; Marja in Dutch Indonesia and Gerry in Holland.  When the Japanese occupied Indonesia during the war, Marja and her mother and four siblings were interned in a concentration camp along with other Dutch colonials.  She lived in the camp, under intolerable conditions, from age three until age seven.  At the end of the war, when the Indonesians revolted against the Dutch, the concentration camp turned out to be a place of refuge for the Dutch internees, protecting them from native extremists.  When Gerry was born, the Germans already occupied his rural village in Holland.  During his childhood, two German soldiers lived with his family. An uncle was part of the underground, hiding Jews and fighting the Germans. Gerry remembers a great celebration when the War ended and Holland was liberated.

In May, 1998, the VanderBeeks suffered a great loss when their middle son, Mike, disappeared during a rescue mission on Mt. McKinley in Alaska.  Mike shared his father’s love of alpine climbing and had devoted his life to teaching others how to live in extreme conditions and climb safely in the mountains.  He and Gerry had climbed together many times, and Gerry characterizes Mike as the professional who made it possible for Gerry to do technical climbs with only average skills.  As a memorial to Mike, Gerry followed Mike’s last route up McKinley with some of Mike’s friends.  They climbed above 17,000 feet before bad weather forced them to turn back.  In addition, Marja and Gerry established the Mike VanderBeek Memorial Fund with money received as a grief payment from the US Department of Justice.  The fund provides scholarships for young people to attend the Alaska Mountaineering School in Talkeetna.  Marja and Gerry expanded their bonds of friendship once again by maintaining contact with these scholarship students and with Mike’s friends at the school and in the Denali area.   And in her garden in Glenwood Springs, Marja has planted forget-me-nots, the Alaska State flower, among her Colorado flowers to keep Mike’s memory always close.

by Sue Ludtke