No Such Thing as Failure

by David Hempleman-Adams

  I’d managed to scrape together £1,000 in sponsorship, and having flown to New York we then hitch-hiked from the George Washington Bridge. We were carrying a Union Jack flag and people would cross four lanes and reverse back to pick us up, and truckers would arrange lifts for ‘these two Limeys’ over their CB radios. All the way across the Mid-West, past Chicago and into Canada, crossing to the west coast and all the way up to Anchorage and then on to a tiny hicksville town called Talkeetna. Quite incredibly the whole journey only took us about four days. From there we flew in a Cessna light aircraft up to the McKinley base camp on the Kahiltna Glacier. There isn’t much there, to be honest, apart from a shack christened the Talkeetna Hilton by the climbing fraternity, from where a meteorologist issues weather reports, but we stayed there for a week climbing around the foot of the mountain and acclimatizing until we felt we were ready. By now we were into August, which is pretty late in the season to be climbing McKinley, and apart from us there was just a Japanese team there that would be aiming at the summit.

  McKinley is a beast of a mountain. Some people view it as the highest of all in some ways, since the base rises from not much more than a couple of thousand feet above sea level, whereas Everest for instance begins from the already very much higher Tibetan plateau. More importantly it is very near to the Arctic Circle, so it is a bloody cold mountain, one of the coldest on earth. It’s also dangerous due to the mixture of snow and rock, with many crevasses and the constant possibility of avalanches. For both of us it was our first really big mountain, and we were obviously incredibly naïve. I thought I could recognize an avalanche path when I saw one, but the truth was that once out on the slopes we crossed several, any one of which could have swept us to our deaths. Just as with motorbike accidents, a lot of young men die because they are so inexperienced. If I was climbing McKinley again I would do things very differently. To be honest, how we got away with it is astonishing. Sometimes we were roped together, but at other times we would cross crevasses without doing this. We were very, very lucky boys to get off that mountain alive.

  One night while we were in our tent we felt the ground start to shake. Steve and I sat there absolutely petrified for several minutes as this went on, trying to keep still, but as soon as the actual shaking ceased the rumbling began. Even we knew what was happening: a minor earthquake, not an infrequent event in Alaska, had set off a number of avalanches and what we could hear was the ice and snow cascading down the mountain towards us. I plucked up the courage to stick my head out of the tent, but a combination of the weather and probably the earthquake itself had brought an almost total white-out, with nothing visible more than 5 yards away. All we could do was sit there staring at each other, scared witless and mute, waiting to see if we would be eaten up by an avalanche.

  The rumblings slowly seemed to die away, and through a combination of fear and our exhaustion after our climbing efforts that day we must both have fallen asleep. When we woke in the morning and nervously crawled from our tent immensely relieved to be alive, we saw just how close we had come. An avalanche had ground to a halt no more than 50 yards away, for no reason that we could see, and had it not done so we’d have been buried with absolutely no chance of rescue, if not killed outright by being swept on down the mountainside.

  After that dreadful scare we flew up the mountain, following the cane-marked route as we neared the summit, but perhaps because we were so extremely fit we were also arrogant, assuming we knew everything when we really knew very little, particularly about the dangers of altitude sickness. We’d climbed very fast, reaching the summit in only just over four days, an incredibly quick time for what we mistakenly believed was a previously unclimbed new route up the mountain, but neither of us could understand why we kept throwing up. On reaching the top we didn’t feel it was a time for hanging around or emotion, so we just shook hands, took a couple of photographs and got the hell out of there. We were both scared, homesick and very tired, and the only thing on our minds was setting off back to base camp. The weather was frankly atrocious, and to be honest we shouldn’t really even have been on the mountain in the first place.

  It was a long way down, over several days. The closest we came to not making it was when I was out leading, trying to retrace our steps and find our tent. The weather remained ghastly and it was another white-out. The wind was howling around us and my eyelids were starting to freeze up, whilst the thick Mexican moustache that Steve had grown was crusted with ice. We wouldn’t survive much longer out in the open. I was sure I knew the right way, but Steve had other ideas and told me I was wrong. ‘Fucking bollocks,’ I hurled back over my shoulder, probably the only angry words I’ve ever used to him. And since we could hardly see anything what the hell made him feel so sure? It was just his gut feeling, he couldn’t explain it any more than that, but he was certain we were going in completely the wrong direction. I stared at him for some time, but he was clearly so full of conviction that I eventually decided to do it his way and we turned round and set off in the other direction. We’d only been walking a couple of minutes before we found our tent, and in my sleeping bag that night I decided that probably made us quits for our time on the Weisshorn.

  Neither of us knew it at the time, but we were about to enter our last year as climbing partners before our lives went different ways. After Alaska we made our way down through the United States, climbing in the Yosemite National Park, and then on to Mexico and Central America where we scaled 19,000 foot volcanoes. We’d both now finished our studies and had little to do, wanting nothing more than to climb in the moment. Neither of us really thought much about our futures then to be honest. We kept going into South America towards the Andes, bumming our way through Ecuador, Peru, Chile and Argentina, before finally ending up in Rio de Janeiro where all our gear was promptly stolen. After managing to obtain a loan of some emergency cash from the British Consulate we learned that Ronnie Biggs could usually be found in a nearby bar, so with little better to do before our flight home we went to seek him out. The former great train robber listened stoically to our sob story, bought us a drink and sent us on our way, probably none of us appreciating the irony of our complaining bitterly about some bastard who had pinched our stuff to a far greater criminal.

  We’d been away six months, and almost at once got student railcards and then managed to visit twenty-one European countries inside a week. It almost seemed as if we could have gone on in this way forever, but we were both starting to get the suspicion that we might need to start thinking about how we could earn a living. Before we considered settling down, however, we wanted one last binge, and settled on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, the highest peak in Africa. Prior to our departure though we both met the women we would end up marrying: Steve a young doctor and myself Claire, who was a first year law student at the time. I think I felt at first sight that she would be the one for me, and although I’m told she took rather more convincing we met a few more times before I left, and Claire rashly agreed to write to me at my base in Nairobi.

  Perhaps getting to Kilimanjaro was harder than actually climbing the mountain itself. In August 1981 we weaved our way on various buses through Europe to Greece, Turkey, Israel and down into Egypt. At the border with north-west Sudan we found it was closed due to civil war, so had to retrace our steps to Cairo and then catch a cheap flight for Nairobi. After a simple climb up Mount Kenya we headed off towards the Tanzanian border, only to be picked up by the Tanzanian police at the foot of the mountain. We were thrown into their pretty grotty cells and not even allowed to phone the British Consulate. We had some back issues of Playboy which we gave them in return for some beers. I had started to have visions of them taking us round the back of the police station and blowing our heads off, but eventually they decided that the simpler course of action was just to kick us back across the border into Kenya.

  Seeking a different route to our destination we took a local flight to Entebbe in Uganda, still riddled with bullets from the time in 197
6 when Israeli commandos had rescued the passengers of a French airliner from hijackers belonging to the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Amazingly there was a flight leaving for Tanzania, and we could secure seats for the equivalent of about £5 each, but since the airline cashiers had no change we each accepted a bunch of bananas instead.

  Kilimanjaro is a relatively straightforward and safe mountain to climb, the only real difficulty being the volcanic ash under your feet that turns it into a hard slog. You start off climbing through lush jungle with monkeys swinging from the trees above you, and as the sun rises each morning across the Masai Mara and National Park you instantly recognize that you are in the very heart of Africa. Once past 10,000 feet you rise above the tree line and enter a landscape of volcanic rock across a plateau, and it is only as you near the summit at 19,341 feet that the ice begins to appear. The main trick we found, at least so far as we were concerned, was to climb the mountain as quickly as possible, since for every day you spend on Kilimanjaro there’s a fee to be paid to the Tanzanian National Park. Having next to no money, we were likely to see the inside of a police cell again unless we got up and down sharpish.

  The final route to the top is marked with bamboo wands and is more of a hike than a climb. Once there we back-slapped and took more pictures, but we’d been away again the best part of two months and were desperate to get back. I think we were also both missing our new-found loves, and once home my thoughts would pretty soon be turning in an entirely new direction, one that would become a parallel obsession and dominate my life from then on.

  Everest is special. Ever since June 1921, when the first British Reconnaissance Expedition approached the mountain through southern Tibet, it has become an obsession for so many people, myself included. Indeed, even before then it was so, from the mid-nineteenth century when it was established with certainty as the highest peak in the world and then given the name that has endured to this day, although many people prefer the local Tibetan Chomolungma, or ‘Holy Mother’. That year men first climbed high onto its slopes, and they really were the first, since the Tibetans considered the British slightly quaint and dangerously mad. They simply could not understand why anyone would wish to risk their lives so pointlessly as they saw it, venturing into the home of a goddess and demons.

  The following year, in May 1922, George Finch, while testing the use of supplementary oxygen on a mountain for the first time, attained the height of 27,300 feet, becoming the first man in history to climb above 8,000 metres into what is truly considered to be the ‘Death Zone’. At the end of the next expedition, on 8 June 1924, it is quite possible—in my perhaps romantic view very likely—that George Mallory and Alexander ‘Sandy’ Irvine reached the summit, but they never returned and we will probably never know for certain. Finally, following the hiatus of the Second World War, having approached the mountain from the south through the now open Nepal, after the closure of Tibet in 1950 due to Chinese annexation, at 11.30 a.m. on 29 May 1953 Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay achieved the summit at 29,029 feet.

  I first went to Everest as a relative youngster in 1979, going out under my own steam. I had a trekking permit but couldn’t afford one to climb, so was unable to join either the German or Yugoslav teams on the mountain, the only two there at the time. Things have changed so much since then. Unable to do anything else I went climbing by myself around the 18,000 foot Base Camp, heading off towards the gateway between Nepal and Tibet. Although it did not seem it I was higher than I’d ever been before and I had my first serious experience of altitude sickness, only just managing to stumble back disorientated and nauseous. I’d been very stupid going out alone and not appreciating the physical challenges at such height even just trekking, and that could easily have been the end of me then and there.

  But I’ve reached the summit of Everest twice, in October 1993 by the now more frequently climbed southern route, the one taken by Hillary and Tenzing, and in May 2011 by the northern route followed by Mallory and Irvine. Between them, those two trips show what has changed over even such a relatively short passage of time (and what has stayed the same), as well as how very different roles and responsibilities alter how you feel and behave.

  The story of my first proper expedition to the Himalayas and attempt to scale Everest began in September 1992. I was reading an article in the Daily Telegraph about a Venezuelan climber who had just returned from Broad Peak, an 8,000 metre mountain in the Karakorams of Pakistan. That expedition had been organised by a company called Himalayan Kingdoms, and at the bottom of the page I noticed a small advert which said they were planning to take a small group of climbers to Everest next year. I stared at this for quite some time. It was years since I’d been on a serious climbing expedition, but this was my childhood dream come back to me. The more I thought about it, the more excited I became. This might be my one and only chance to take on the world’s highest mountain. I knew that to arrange my own expedition could cost up to £250,000, even assuming I could get the permits to do so. Here was the chance to do it for a tenth of the price, certainly still a lot of money but I could probably scrape it together.

  For the next hour I sat in a company board meeting, but I’ve absolutely no idea what it was about and I know I was in a complete daze. All I could think about was Everest, and the moment the meeting was over I shot out and called the number for a Steve Bell in Bristol, who apparently ran Himalayan Kingdoms. The news was heart-breaking. Not only had all the places on the trip already been taken, but so had all the reserve slots. Maybe I’m just not very good at taking no for an answer, but in desperation I asked if I could drive over some time and buy him lunch to talk about it face to face. I know that turned out to be one of the most important lunches I’ve ever bought anyone in my life.

  Steve couldn’t offer much encouragement. Even if I could get on the trip, which as far as he could see there was no way of doing, I would certainly need to reacquaint myself with high-altitude climbing beforehand. He suggested I make a trip to the Pamirs in Russia and climb the 23,400 foot Lenin Peak. I didn’t need any convincing that he was right about this, after my experiences at Everest Base Camp in 1979 and on Mount McKinley the year after. I didn’t yet really understand in detail the effects of altitude sickness, or hypoxia (deficiency of oxygen reaching the body tissues), and what can be done to cope with them, and knew that if I was to have any chance of success on Everest this would be essential.

  My trip to Lenin Peak never happened, as the demands of everyday life intervened. My father had been suffering from leukaemia and we all hoped that he was in remission, but suddenly the illness returned with a vengeance. On 22 October my second daughter, Camilla, was born, but later that same day my father’s doctor phoned me to say his condition had deteriorated so sharply that they estimated he had only four days to live. I certainly can’t imagine being confronted with more cruelly conflicting emotions in the space of barely a few hours. As soon as Claire came home with our new baby my father insisted on coming round to see his granddaughter, and that evening he somehow took my brother and me out to the pub for what would obviously be our last drink together. The talk was all of company business, pensions, wills and probate, and even if I hadn’t known how near the end he was it would have been pretty obvious from the fact that he couldn’t touch his beer. Two days later he was dead.

  The next six months were all about family and work. Even the thought of Everest was pushed aside by the combination of grieving and giving some order to the family business, imposing a structure that would work in the years ahead after my father’s death. Then in June 1993 Steve Bell phoned me out of the blue: someone had been injured and suddenly there was a vacancy on the expedition. Did I still want it? Did I hell! The only question was whether I could afford the time away. I discussed it with my brother and a fellow director, and asked them if they could cope without me if I was gone for nearly three months. As it turned out they seemed remarkably complacent about the prospect, being so kind as to add that they’d posit
ively welcome getting rid of me for a while, so I got right back to Steve and told him I was coming before anyone changed their mind. ‘Right,’ he answered, ‘you’ve got two months.’

  I knew exactly what he meant by that. I reached the conclusion that with my lack of experience in recent years I should put any thought of the summit out of my mind and just treat the expedition as a training exercise, but I still had to throw myself into a concerted fitness programme, running and rowing to build my upper body strength and work on my cardiovascular system, to ensure that my heart and lungs could cope with the Himalayas. I hoped I was ready when on 8 August I drove to Heathrow to meet some of the rest of the team and catch our flight out to Nepal. I knew that at that time, by the end of 1992, only 485 climbers had reached the summit, although ten times that number had tried, and the mountain had claimed the lives of 115 of the very best in the world, including Britain’s Pete Boardman and Joe Tasker. And there are so many ways to die; avalanches, crevasses, exposure, frostbite, even drowning in rivers, the dangers always increased by extreme altitude. I think any climber who looks at Everest knows that although their fate will partly depend on their skills and experience, every bit as much remains in the lap of the gods.

  The whole group only came together when we arrived in Kathmandu. I soon knew that I was entirely comfortable with Steve, a former marine officer, as a superb leader with supreme organizational abilities, which is always vastly important. Not just that: unlike many in such positions on previous expeditions, he was not only a competent climber but one of the very best in the world. I won’t list everyone else on the team, but they included the actor Brian Blessed, a great bear of a man (as I am sure he would be the first to admit), and Graham Hoyland (who became my close friend), a film cameraman and sound recordist who was on the trip both to climb himself and film Blessed for the BBC. The only woman there was Ginette Harrison, a doctor, who later became involved in a battle with Rebecca Stephens, the first British woman to climb Everest, as to which of them would be the first British woman to reach the summits of the highest mountains on the world’s seven continents. Apart from that we had a computer operator, accountant, banker, lawyer and a professor of physics. One had been running 30 miles a day to get fit, and I suddenly felt a bit of a fraud, seeing this as a training exercise whereas for the others it was their big and possibly only chance.