Comments & Curiosities:

Ever climbed a mountain? I have. In my dreams.

I’ve climbed Mt. Everest a couple of times. It was hard. I’ve climbed the Matterhorn, although I’m not sure if it was the real one or the one in Disneyland.

That’s the way dreams are. Even when things are right they’re a little wrong. Oh, and I was climbing Mt. Saint Helens when it went ka-boom and had to run all the way back down really fast.

I don’t remember if I lived or not, but I was a total sweat ball when I woke up. There are people who do such things in real life though, as hard as that is for the rest of us to understand — climb mountains, sail around the world solo, eat Velveeta.

Maybe it’s thrill seeking, which is fine, everyone should do their thrill seeking whenever and wherever they can. Then there’s British mountaineer George Mallory’s answer to why he wanted to climb Mt. Everest — “Because it’s there” — the most famous three words in adventuring lore, except I don’t get it.

The Golden Gate Bridge and the Empire State Building are there too, but that doesn’t mean I plan to climb, hang on to or jump from either of them any time soon.

Among those men and women brave enough to try to climb a really big mountain that’s real slippery and windy are a pair of unlikely soulmates of George Mallory and Sir Edmund Hillary — two Newport Beach moms named Mindy Cameron and Debra Miller.

The mountain that Cameron and Miller have in their sights is the dazzling and stately Mt. Rainier, which presides over Seattle and is the crown jewel of the Cascade Range, along with Mt. Hood and Three Sisters in Oregon.

In the wee small hours of this very morning, Mindy and Debra were scheduled to begin their final assault on the summit of Washington’s Mt. Rainier. Hopefully, all is well and they are nearing their goal even as you read and I write.

Trying to subdue a 14,000-foot mountain means climbing before dawn, while the ice and snow are still firm and fully packed — yet another reason why I try hard to never climb mountains.

“They say that you would never do it if you saw what you were climbing over,” Miller said.

I don’t know who “they” are, but they sound pretty smart to me. Is Mt. Rainier some sissy-girly mountain that amateur climbers can conquer without intensive risk or excessive wheezing? It is not. Only about half the climbers who try for the top on Mt. Rainier ever make it, and an average of three climbers a year don’t make it at all — and we’re not talking about the top.

So what’s the deal? What makes two Newport Beach women take a whack at standing atop one of the highest peaks in the western hemisphere and waving to the rest of us when neither of them has ever done anything remotely like this? A bet with a girlfriend? Reality TV? Temporary loopiness?

The correct answer is none of the above. They’re doing it for a reason that is way better than any of those or George Mallory’s cryptic response. Miller and Cameron are doing it to raise money for their young sons, who are 12 and 8 respectively, and who have Duchenne muscular dystrophy, or DMD, a genetic disorder that typically strikes young boys before the age of 6 and for which there is no cure — although I wouldn’t bet on that with Cameron, Miller and the 10 other climbers doing the “2009 Climb to Cure Duchenne” on the case.

As the 12 climbers crunch their way up Mt. Rainier, they will raise a buck for every foot they climb, which comes to $14,410 per cruncher for CureDuchenne, a Newport Beach-based nonprofit that raises money to do research on DMD.

“I’ve never done anything like this before, but I’ve never had a son with Duchenne muscular dystrophy before either,” said Cameron, who has been training for the climb by hiking with a 40-pound backpack for the last four months and doing an hour at a time on a stair-climbing machine.

I tried a stair-climbing machine once. I was on it less than a minute when the screen said, “One person at a time, please.” Hurt my feelings.

“We have to do things like this because our sons don’t live long enough to raise awareness,” Miller said. “We have no Lou Gehrig or Michael J. Fox. We don’t have any rock stars.”

That gives me an idea, which doesn’t happen often. If you’d like to step up and be a rock star for the 2009 Climb to Cure Duchenne, just make the trek to the CureDuchenne website at www.cureduchenne.org and it will all become as clear as an August morning on Mt. Rainier.

You’ll also see the most excellent corporate sponsors of the event, which include REI (love that stuff), Ruby’s in Corona del Mar (love those sliders) and Advanced Turbine Support (don’t need any turbines right now, but two thumbs way up for them.)

“Climb every mountain, ford every stream. Follow every rainbow, ‘til you find your dream,” which is all well and good, but that part about crunching around on the ice in the dark at 5 a.m. still worries me.

Doesn’t matter. If Mindy and Debra are going up, I say DMD is going down. I gotta go.

PETER BUFFA is a former Costa Mesa mayor. His column runs Sundays. He may be reached at ptrb4@aol.com.