But over that cup of tea he’d planted the seed in my mind. There were several motivating forces that I found compelling. I had often wondered if I could climb the mountain from the northern and notoriously far harder side, which has all the romance of the great between the wars expeditions, when Nepal was closed and the only approach was from the north through Tibet. I’d also always had ambitions to lead a Himalayan expedition myself, such as Hunt did with Hillary and Tenzing in 1953. Now, at the age of fifty-four, I suppose perhaps I also wanted to see if I could recapture my youth. Were my climbing days over or was I still in the game? The simple fact was that I’d never climbed the North Face before and it appealed, captured my imagination more than anything else ever has, before or since.
So I was desperate to return, but this time I wouldn’t be going solo. I wanted to lead a small group, including Graham who’d agreed to manage the expedition and remain at Base Camp and Advanced Base Camp in charge of the logistics. We had been firm friends ever since that expedition back in 1993 and he is one of the men I admire most in the whole world. I trusted him completely. An incredibly well-read individual who can recite long passages of poetry, he is a genuinely sensitive soul (unlike me, you might say). Everest has been a life-long obsession for Graham, throughout the many years he has worked at the BBC, and he actually played a major part in the discovery of George Mallory’s body in 1999. His passion for a return to the mountain had ignited my own desire to lead such an expedition to Everest.
Over the year everything took to arrange I pulled together a diverse team of what I suppose you might call typically Alpha males, with a wide mix of experience and skills and a range of ages from thirty to sixty-five. I’m an unusual adventurer in the sense that I make my real living out of the family chemicals firm, which means I don’t have to take a salary or expenses out of Cold Climates, the company through which I run these expeditions. The advantage for me is that I get a free trip through organizing it. Apart from climbing the mountain there would also be two other key objectives: to raise £1 million for Alzheimer’s charities and to conduct research on the effects of altitude on the body, in order to help British and American soldiers operating in war zones at high altitudes. Because of this the Duke of Edinburgh agreed to be our patron.
I’d first met Malcolm Walker, the CEO of Iceland Foods, the year before on a helicopter fly-in to the North Pole. After that experience he’d admitted to me his own ambition from an early age had always been to climb Everest. I said I’d be willing to take him there in 2011 and we shook hands on it on the spot. His company also ended up sponsoring the expedition. Malcolm is short and slim, and has a tendency to strut around like Napoleon. He can be a bit of a bruiser but charm the pants off you the next moment, both tight as a duck’s arse and yet extraordinarily generous. I think he probably wouldn’t disagree with much of this assessment of him. Malcolm’s son Richard also decided to come along with his father, but although he’d achieved the Gold medal for the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award neither of them had any relevant climbing experience, so we agreed that we should climb Mount Kilimanjaro as a training exercise for Everest.
Justin Packshaw, a former British army officer and businessman, had escorted my daughter Camilla on a trip to the North Pole, when she became the youngest woman ever to ski the last degree to get there. Justin was very supportive and caring towards Camilla, and I had no qualms whatsoever about adding him to the party when he agreed to come along. Graham Duff, otherwise known as Duffy, a former Red Arrows pilot, jumped at the chance as he’d missed out on the opportunity to take part in a previous Everest expedition with an RAF team. I’d first met Duffy at RAF Valley after I had helped a group from there reach the South Pole. The quid pro quo for this had been that I’d get a ride in a fast jet, and Duffy was the pilot who flew me over my house in the village of Box in Wiltshire, at such breakneck speed my eyeballs nearly popped out and my stomach did a loop the loop. Later on I was told that down below the windows shook in their frames.
Sir Charles Hobhouse, a farmer based near where I live, was up for the challenge too. He had a lot of mountaineering experience, having climbed around the world including mountains in North and South America and in the Alps. Then there was Rodney Hogg, an experienced climber who also worked at the BBC, a veteran of the South African Defence Force elite Parachute Regiment and the kind of man who actually claims to enjoy triathlons.
Rikki Hunt, an entrepreneur from the Swindon area who I have known for years, signed up to achieve a lifelong ambition; although he goes by the name of Rikki Hunt, his full name is John Richard Hunt, named after the John Hunt of Everest fame. He already had four of the seven continental summits under his belt. There was to be just one woman in the party, Gina Waggott, whose role was to look after communications at Base Camp and Advanced Base Camp. Gina also worked at the BBC and was Graham’s recent and rather younger girlfriend. I called her Ginger Spice (because of her dramatic red hair naturally) and she, only half-jokingly I think, named me Old Spice in return.
Then there was Dr George Rodway who joined the trip with two aims: both to climb the mountain himself and to conduct the medical research we planned, on which he was a leading American authority. Finally there was Yorkshireman Al Hinkes, well known in British mountaineering circles as being the first British man to climb all fourteen 8,000 metre peaks in the world; he joined late in the day specifically to look after Malcolm and Richard Walker. George and Al effectively lifted a great deal of the responsibility off me from both the medical and climbing points of view, which left me free to concentrate more on the organization and planning. That made twelve of us in all.
Each member of the team had their own personal goal. Some were aiming very clearly for the summit, others targeted the North Col, some simply wanted to reach Base Camp. In many ways I felt the pressure was off me as I had reached the top before, but this time I would be leading a group and my personal aim and responsibility was to get each and everyone up (to where they wanted) and back down again safely to as close as you get to sea level in Nepal. Everyone was having to fork out about £28,000, which is a lot of money in anyone’s book, more than on the average trip. Partly as a result of my previous experience on the mountain, we had made a number of decisions that made our venture more expensive. We would be employing a greater number of Sherpas than usual and would also take a lot more oxygen. After losing most of our supply in the avalanche in 1993, I’d been forced to make my ascent on little more than the equivalent of a single bottle, an experience I was determined not to repeat if I could possibly help it. Malcolm and Richard contributed considerably more as they were also paying for Al Hinkes and a dedicated Sherpa for each of them. This is extreme adventure, which people are prepared to buy; I don’t feel at all uncomfortable about that. It certainly doesn’t mean for a moment that it is without danger.
The men who attempted to climb Everest in the 1920s had mostly been through the experience of the Great War, which few if any of us can properly fully comprehend. In many cases they had lost almost all their friends in the trenches, and often they felt a sense of bewilderment at how they were still alive themselves. This did not mean life was cheap for them, but rather ineffably precious, yet they were prepared to sacrifice themselves for something that seemed genuinely worthwhile. Almost certainly the motives for climbing Everest from a sense of duty and nationalistic pride have diminished, but in other respects I honestly don’t believe they have changed.
If you spoke to virtually any climber, when they were on the South Summit or just coming up to the top of the Third Step on the North Ridge, and said, ‘look, if you carry on, there is a 50 per cent chance you won’t come back’, I suspect most would continue. At this point on the South Summit you can see the Hillary Step and the final summit beyond, and it’s here traditionally that people have to make the decision. Am I strong enough, do I have enough oxygen, is the weather going to hold? Up to this point there has been relatively little exposure and descending should be straightfo
rward, but after this it is different. Many decide that the answer is no and turn back, they know clearly that they should, as did Bourdillon and Evans climbing two days before Hillary and Tenzing on their same expedition in 1953. Others decide to go forward. I think I would always do so having reached this far, and that would remain the same on my second attempt, even when I had already reached the top before, and also if I try to do it again as I definitely shall. It’s purely a personal achievement. I’ve never really done anything for a record, I’ve always found the record comes after. You are pushing yourself, pushing your knowledge and your equipment. The record is a secondary thing. Many people will never break a record because they don’t want to push themselves, others will on a regular basis because their bottom line is further than a record. Perhaps I’ll just push myself a bit further than other people when that final point to make a decision becomes clear.
Most trips have one truck up to Base Camp whereas we had four. Most expeditions take about twenty yaks to Advanced Base Camp, we had a hundred and fifty! Usually a team has just the one toilet; Malcolm wanted a toilet and shower of his own, having made it perfectly clear he didn’t want to rough it any more than was strictly necessary. Some exceptionally experienced teams don’t use oxygen at all, but we had so much we could have used it from take off from Heathrow.
We also had the best quality food, wines and beer, along with the most magnificent mess tent with our own chef, and Malcolm Walker had masterminded specially prepared meals with researchers at Loxton Foods. I’d found it a bit of a problem back in 1993, when I took nothing with me from the UK and ate only local food, which seemed to consist mainly of eggs—fried, scrambled or boiled—together with the usual rice and pasta everyone ate. Perhaps it hardly mattered that much as everything tasted of the kerosene fuel used for cooking anyway. This time, thanks to Malcolm, the menu at Base Camp included wild Scottish salmon and Catalan chicken. Although this might sound decadent the aim of having genuinely appetizing meals did serve the very serious purpose of helping to stave off the weight loss that can so easily set in at extreme altitude—in 1993 I lost nearly 30lbs in total. I think it is pretty certain that no other Everest expedition has ever eaten as well as we did that time. However, I know for a fact that just because we had fantastic food and some home comforts at Base Camp, it didn’t make climbing Everest any easier. When I was trying to force oxygen into my lungs as I climbed up the mountain I didn’t for a moment give any thought to all that fine food. We were also all given special food bars impregnated with leucine, an amino acid that helps provide protection from the effects of altitude sickness.
Apart from good food, I knew from direct experience that the other key ingredient for a successful trip was the inclusion of experienced Sherpas. We decided to take with us ten Sherpas this time, who between them had summited a total of thirty-four times. I was delighted and thrilled that my good friend Ngatemba, with whom I had reached the top back in 1993, agreed to join us as Sirdar, the title given to the one amongst them who takes overall charge of the Sherpas. Over the years we have become solid friends, sharing a deep bond thanks to our time spent on the mountain together. Ngatemba’s son, Rinchen, was responsible for overall logistics.
Technology had of course undergone a radical transformation since 1993, when we actually needed a runner to go up and down the mountain with messages. This time we had laptops and satellite phones. Such access to outside information also brings with it the ability to use much more sophisticated weather forecasting, which genuinely does mean a reduced chance of disaster. Previously climbers might be acclimatized, see no winds on top and think ‘let’s have a go’. But you need five reasonably clear days to reach the summit and get safely back, and people would set off and then the weather close in, which happened in 1996 as Jon Krakauer relates in his book Into Thin Air. Fifteen climbers died. Now there are meteorologists who will give you forecasts specifically for Everest. They know the mountain very well, have huge amounts of data for the different heights, can see in real-time what is coming in, and say if you leave at a given time you’ll have no wind on the summit and reasonable weather to get down again in one piece. We also had all the high-tech clothing you can imagine, which was lighter as well as being much warmer than it used to be.
Despite all these modern innovations the one unchanging and essential item for me was my ‘Z’ stone, the lucky bead that I’d bought in Namche Bazaar and worn round my neck ever since. I’m genuinely convinced my lucky bead helped me reach the summit that first time. I may seem like a tough nut on the exterior, but deep down I do have an unwavering faith in something far bigger than myself, even if I’m not entirely sure what that is. I certainly wasn’t going anywhere near Everest again without my lucky bead.
For any expedition it’s essential if possible that the members of the team get to know one another properly before departure, and Malcolm Walker had hosted a dinner for us in London which was a good way initially to break the ice. It wasn’t long before there was a real feeling of camaraderie and excitement amongst us about our forthcoming big adventure. When we flew into Kathmandu it was wonderful to see the faces of the first-timers as they absorbed the new culture, met the locals and tasted the food. The place had changed so dramatically since my first expedition there in 1979: there were far more cars on the roads and I could see a cloud of grey pollution hanging over the city. It took us over an hour to travel the one mile in from the airport. The Bagmati River was dirty. Kathmandu had become a seething, squalid mass of humanity.
We had decided to overnight in the same hotel I had stayed in for my 1993 expedition. The next morning, bags unpacked and repacked, we prepared for the first part of our journey. The porters, as usual, took our loads. What struck me at once this time was the fact that most of them carried mobile phones, which seemed an incongruous sight to me. We drove out of the city, now on paved roads that ran all the way to the Chinese border and Tibet. We set off for the village of Nyapul situated alongside the Bhotekhosi River, where we were greeted by our Sherpas for the acclimatization trek, and crossed the river via a 160-foot-high suspension footbridge. We then trekked up a trail path that led us through farms and fields of crop plantations to the village of Pangla at an altitude of 4,725 feet. In the afternoon it started to rain steadily so we hastily put up the tents.
At the end of the acclimatization trek, while waiting to go into Tibet the next day, a Sherpa rushed in to give us the terrible news that one of the trucks carrying our equipment to Base Camp had crashed, gone off the road and down a steep bank where it landed in a ravine. The truck was a complete write-off and the driver and co-driver needed to be rushed to hospital in Kathmandu. We’d been due to meet our trucks here at the border into Tibet and my immediate thought was ‘This expedition is over’. Luckily, everyone pulled together and we managed to get all the equipment into another truck we were able to hire. We were in a terrible rush, as it was essential we cross the border on time since our group entry visa was only valid for one day, our entry having already been delayed whilst the Chinese kept the Tibetan border closed during a celebration of the Dalai Lama. We finally did it, but it was an utter nightmare: twelve people, ten Sherpas, unloading trucks, four lots of checks. That night I was deeply relieved that no one had been seriously injured or even killed. I began to feel it was maybe a good omen for the expedition as a whole.
If the border town of Zhang Mu was like something out of Blade Runner, then Nyalam was similar to Seven Years in Tibet. It seemed to me the big difference yet again was the sight of so many Tibetan people walking about with mobile phones. When we reached Tingri, a village 45 miles north of Everest at 14,500 feet, most of the party were given their first real taste of the dangers faced on an expedition to the mountain. A Swedish climber told us he’d been forced to retreat there after suffering from altitude sickness at Base Camp. Tingri itself is just a tiny village, with hundreds of dogs and desiccated goats hanging outside shops. We stayed in the only ‘modern’ hotel, which means that
they had a plank and a hole for a toilet. The interior of the building was also rather interesting, the walls consisting of yak dung covered by whitewash. Malcolm Walker was none too happy: ‘What have you got me into?’ he complained.
Unlike Base Camp on the southern side of the mountain, where you have no alternative other than to trek in, approaching from the north a truck can take you and your equipment all the way to Base Camp just before the Rongbuk Glacier. Arriving there things got a lot worse when we met a group who’d just had the sad job of burying one of their Sherpas. Graham, our ever-practical expedition manager, decided now was the time to pose this essential question to the team: ‘What shall we do with your body if you die?’ I looked around at all these macho men whose faces had suddenly turned varying shades of white and ashen grey. In my own case I knew exactly what I wanted to happen in the event of my death: if possible my body should be transported home to England and buried in a box in Box, my village. My last wish: to be laid to rest in the church’s graveyard.
Sadly, Everest is littered with so many corpses because of the often sheer impossibility of transporting bodies back down the mountain. Also, of course, at such altitude there is very little decay, and bodies that have been there decades look virtually as they did in life. If so inclined you can find plenty of photos that people have taken and posted online, but it is certainly not something I would ever do and most climbers strongly disapprove of this, finding it deeply repugnant. You needn’t spend very long considering the feelings of those who have lost someone they knew and loved to realize how wrong this is. Everest is truly a place where people can’t but help reflect on the meaning of life and death, but this macabre voyeurism just isn’t necessary or right.
No Such Thing as Failure Page 5