Mark Fisher is a mountain climber.

He’s also a teacher, a father of three, a husband and associate pastor at Maple Valley Presbyterian Church.

And he’s found a way to bring all those things together with his love of climbing mountains.

“I understand God better when I’m there,” Fisher said. “It clears my mind. The other piece, truthfully, and it’s a really big piece, is that it gets me into God’s creation in a really powerful way.”

Fisher is a Maple Valley native, a 1971 graduate of Tahoma High, and he has only recently returned from a lengthy missionary trip to Peru and Ecuador.

He and his wife, Carol, and their three kids, all went to Peru in 1989 for a two year trip that ended up lasting 19 years and seeing them live in Ecuador, as well.
Fisher first began climbing mountains in the 1970s, but didn’t take the activity up again until settling in Peru.

He described himself as always being the adventurous type.

His family lived in the Highlands of the Andes mountain range in Peru and Ecuador for a total of 10 years where he taught in schools and “we climbed a lot of mountains while we were there.”

In his job at Maple Valley Presbyterian, Fisher is responsible for a number of events including weddings, funerals, visitations, and others areas that fall under the “care” umbrella. He’s also responsible for the church’s outdoor ministry, which includes hikes and summer trips climbing Mount Rainier.

Fisher has climbed Mount Rainier 20 times and attempted it 22 times. He’s taken his kids, friends, members of the congregation.

Though they are not professional guides, Fisher and his colleague Paul Gossman, senior pastor at Peace Lutheran in Covington, have a considerable amount of combined climbing experience serving as rope leaders for trips they lead during the summer.

“We actually coordinate with another church in the area called Peace Lutheran,” Fisher said. “Paul Gossman, he really helps me with these climbs. He and I used to do climbs together in Peru.”

Gossman said the way he and Fisher reconnected three years ago is “a pretty wild story, actually.”
The two pastors met in Peru in 1997.

“I didn’t know him but I was looking for someone to climb with,” Gossman said. “We connected and went climbing together. We didn’t have a lot of contact with one another because we lived in very different parts of Peru.”

Then in 1998 when Gossman and his family moved on, he lost touch with Fisher, and he “had no idea where in the world (Fisher) was living and he didn’t know anything about me, either.”

In 2008, Gossman had been in Issaquah for three years and was teaching at Trinity Lutheran College there, when one of his students told him about a new pastor at his church named Mark who had done mission work in Peru.

Gossman asked his student if this new pastor climbed mountains among other things and discovered this was indeed the same Mark Fisher he had climbed mountains with in Peru a decade earlier.

“Shortly thereafter I got this call from this congregation at Peace Lutheran Church in Covington,” Gossman said. “So, now my church is 10 minutes away from his church.”
Fisher and his family returned from South America in 2007. His mother was sick and his children had all

finished high school then returned to the United States to go to college. It made sense to move home on a lot of levels after so many years away.

“The pastoral response is that God led us back and that’s true,” Fisher said. “My mother had cancer so that allowed us to spend some time with her and that was powerful.”

Now Fisher lives in the home he grew up in on a lake in Maple Valley.

One could also say the reconnection between the two pastors was a divine intervention.

“If God had dirty fingers,” Gossman said, “we’d be all smudged up. His fingerprints are all over this. It’s been a fun thing.”

One of Gossman’s congregants, a church elder, has known Fisher for years. In fact, Peace Lutheran has supported Fisher’s mission work in South America in the past.

It seemed like a match made in heaven.

“It’s increasingly a partnership of sorts,” Gossman said. “We just know God’s in it.”

And, of course they had to go climb a mountain together.

Last summer they took a few groups up Mount Rainier, which was the first mountain Gossman climbed at the tender age of 15, and this year there are plans to take two more trips up the mountain.

The groups include members of both churches as well as people from the community, Fisher said.

On May 7, they’ll lead a group starting at 2 a.m. for a full day of climbing safety training, then in early June there is a three day climb planned and another set for after the Fourth of July.

“It is a ministry of the church, an outdoor ministry, we just organize the trip,” Fisher said. “Last year we had 35 climbers. We ask them to pay $150 to cover the cost of rope leaders and permits.”

Fisher said he has had a long and happy relationship with Mount Rainier.

“My wife, Carol and I, I kind of think we have a love affair with Mount Rainier,” he said. “We did the Wonderland Trail together for our 25th anniversary. If I wasn’t doing this pastor thing, I could probably live in the mountains.”

For Gossman, he enjoys climbing mountains, but he particularly enjoys taking people up Mount Rainier for the first time.

“There’s something about helping people get to the summit when they had not done it before,” he said. “It carries a level of commitment and a level of risk, as well, that heightens what the partnership is all about. There is something very potent, if you will, very clear and unambiguous about climbing to the top of a mountain.”

While his church may be about more than getting people to the top of a mountain, Gossman said, there’s a teaching opportunity and value in the trip that can go beyond the achievement of reaching Mount Rainier’s summit.

“Anytime someone takes that physical challenge on, there’s a deeper learning going on,” Gossman said.

“There’s a huge trust issue, trusting one another and trusting God. There’s something beautiful and inspiring about mountains. I don’t think there’s a way to get closer to a mountain than to climb it. It’s spiritual in a sense that by knowing the creation… the more intimate I become also with the creator. That’s one of my more compelling reasons to climb.”