The Girl Who Climbed Everest

by Sue Williams

  About the Book

  ‘I have shown myself that nothing is impossible. I’m just a girl from a small town in Australia, but I was always taught to believe in my dreams.’

  Alyssa Azar is unstoppable. When she was just eight years old, she walked the gruelling Kokoda Track alongside her father, Glenn. At twelve she climbed the ten highest peaks in Australia. Two years later she reached the top of Mt Kilimanjaro. Now, aged seventeen, she is climbing to the roof of the world: the summit of Mt Everest.

  The Girl Who Climbed Everest is the inspiring story of how an ordinary girl from Toowoomba in country Queensland has worked towards achieving her dream of climbing the world’s highest peak. Through passion, determination, and immense hard work, and with the unwavering support of her dad, Alyssa plans to become the youngest non-Sherpa female in the world and the youngest Australian ever to make it. She shares the extraordinary thrills and heart-breaking disappointments on the road to reaching her goal, and explains how she finds the courage and motivation to keep going in the face of overwhelming danger and adversity.

  Above all, Alyssa’s story shows us that we can achieve anything if we dare to dream big.

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE A HEAD FOR HEIGHTS

  1. Dad, Have You Ever Climbed Everest?

  2. The Push for Kokoda

  3. On the Track

  4. A Taste for Danger

  5. Looking for the Next Adventure

  PART TWO THE CALL OF THE SKY GODDESS

  6. Everest, the Rugged Giant

  7. Love at First Sight

  8. Everest’s First Dynasty: Edmund and Peter Hillary

  9. The First Trials

  10. Everest’s First Australians: Tim Macartney-Snape

  11. Dare to Dream

  12. Everest’s World Record-holder: Dave Hahn

  PART THREE THE ROAD TO MOUNT EVEREST

  13. Climbing Kilimanjaro

  14. Everest’s First Australian Woman: Brigitte Muir

  15. Setting the Goal

  16. Everest’s Youngest Australian: Rex Pemberton

  17. Climbing in Ice and Snow

  18. Everest’s Hero: Dan Mazur

  19. Pushing Your Body to the Limits

  20. Everest’s Most Unusual Champion: Bo Parfet

  PART FOUR THE FINAL COUNTDOWN

  21. Icefall on Manaslu

  22. Everest’s Best of the Best: Andrew Lock

  23. Aconcagua: The Last Practice Climb

  24. Everest’s First Australians: Greg Mortimer

  25. Ready to Risk Everything

  26. Everest at Last

  27. In the Event of My Death

  28. The Deadliest Year

  29. Touch and Go

  30. Cyclone Alert

  31. Triumph and Tragedy

  Picture Section

  Acknowledgements

  To Dad, for your unwavering belief and support,

  to Mum, for your example of strength, and to Brooklyn,

  Christian and Samantha

  ALYSSA AZAR

  It matters not how strait the Gate,

  How charged with punishment the scroll.

  I am the Master of my Fate,

  I am the Captain of my Soul.

  – INVICTUS, WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY

  Then there are the people who call others lucky:

  ‘She’s lucky, he’s lucky, they’re lucky, I’m so unlucky.’

  I believe people generally create their

  own luck - it’s called hard work.

  – WARRIOR TRAINING, KEITH FENNELL

  PART ONE

  A Head for Heights

  CHAPTER 1

  Dad, Have You Ever Climbed Everest?

  It happens just three days into one of the world’s most gruelling treks.

  Eight-year-old Alyssa Azar is almost halfway along the rugged Kokoda Track in the remote wilds of Papua New Guinea, and she knows that when she completes it – if she completes it – she’ll have the world record as the youngest person ever to do so. But suddenly, she stops dead. The mud beneath her walking boots oozes up over her ankle gaiters as she sinks into the quagmire and lifts first one foot, then the other, to try to free them, but makes no attempt to continue.

  The local porters look at her curiously. Over the past week they’ve learnt to expect the unexpected from this tiny little white girl, with her gap-toothed grin and mop of blonde hair tied into a rough ponytail. When she’d first been introduced to them as the youngest member of a new expedition along the historic trail, they’d shaken their heads in disapproval. She was far too young, and much too small, to embark on such an arduous challenge.

  But she’s already taken them by surprise many times, striding along the track through dense rainforest, heaving herself up giant steps hewn into the mountains that most fully grown adults have trouble with, scrambling up the steep sides of valleys and trotting down the other side. A couple of times, as they reach for her arms to try to guide her across a raging river crossing, or help her along a particularly precarious mountain ridge, she politely but firmly asks them to leave her be. She already has dark bruises on both elbows where the guides, terrified of losing such fragile cargo, grabbed her so hard she winced. She wants to do this with as little help as possible.

  Alyssa seems to be coping well. In every village they pass through she causes a sensation. Little children hide behind their mothers as they regard her shyly; it’s the first time they’ve ever seen a girl their own age who doesn’t share the same dark skin. Then, as she smiles back at them, they grow in courage, running over to touch her face and hair to check that she isn’t some kind of doll. Alyssa laughs and plays with them while the other trekkers in the party rest.

  But now, in the middle of the track, she has stopped and the guides stand back to see what’s going on. She looks over to her dad, Glenn, who is quickly catching her up. ‘What’s up?’ he asks casually as he draws level, trying to keep any note of alarm out of his voice.

  If she’s hurt herself, or suddenly decided she doesn’t want to go on, he doesn’t know what they’ll do. The only way back to civilisation is either to return the 40 km they’ve already slogged along, or continue onwards through the 56 km of mountainous country ahead of them. In his mind he’s already hauling her onto his shoulders and carrying her on the marathon that lies in wait. But she doesn’t look as if she’s injured, exhausted or ready to give up. He’s expected tears before now, either because the trek is much harder than she imagined, or because the conditions are so tough, with the oppressively steamy heat during the day and mind-numbing cold at night. But Alyssa has shown no signs at all of not being able to cope.

  ‘Dad?’ she asks softly.

  He moves closer to her. ‘Yes, mate?’

  ‘Dad,’ she repeats, ‘I was just wondering . . . Have you ever climbed Everest?’

  Glenn looks at his daughter with astonishment. He has no idea she’s even heard of Everest, let alone been thinking about it as they’ve all been struggling up this part of the track.

  He shakes his head. ‘No,’ he says. ‘No, I haven’t.’

  Alyssa beams. ‘Oh, okay,’ she replies. He has no idea why she looks so pleased. ‘I just wondered . . .’

  And then she pulls her boots out of some of the thickest, stickiest mud on the planet and stomps off, leaving her dad, motionless, behind. As he watches the tiny figure disappear through the thick leaves and branches of the overhanging forest, he feels, as well as his usual pride, a vague sense of foreboding.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Push for Kokoda

  The idea of walking the Kokoda Track was totally Alyssa Azar’s, and hers alone.

  When she first mentioned it to her parents at the age
of just six, they were horrified at the thought and dismissed it out of hand. ‘No,’ Glenn told her firmly. ‘You’re far too young. It’s tough for people even three times, four times, your age.’ Her mum, Therese, was even more aghast. ‘She first asked if she could go when she was six years old!’ she says. ‘That really concerned me. She was always so small for her age, but she was always so determined too. We tried to persuade her for a long time that it wasn’t a good idea.’

  Alyssa, however, wouldn’t budge. Born in 1996 in Townsville, Queensland, the second of four children, and then moving with the family to Toowoomba in the state’s south-east, she was always a kid who seemed to know her own mind. She idolised her dad, an army medic and fitness trainer who worked out at the gym regularly and, in his time off from work, loved nothing more than bushwalking around the surrounding countryside. Every Sunday Alyssa would beg to come with him, and the tall, well-built man striding out with his tiny five-year-old daughter scampering along at his heels became a familiar sight to locals.

  ‘I liked the outdoors,’ says Alyssa. ‘I liked the different tracks, some of the hills. Just being out there and discovering the places was all part of the fun for me, especially when you’re so little and everything else seems so big. It was always a great adventure.’ The walks were usually about three hours and gradually they grew longer and harder, eventually becoming four or five hours. ‘I just loved tagging along, being out there, walking, being with my dad and having adventures.’

  Despite her diminutive stature, she loved climbing trees and although she always made it to the top, sometimes she wasn’t quite so capable of getting down again.

  ‘When we lived in Townsville,’ says Glenn, ‘she’d climb a tree and couldn’t get down and you’d have to get her down. Then when we moved to Toowoomba, it was exactly the same.’

  Therese, an army mechanic and later a registered nurse, also became a regular rescuer. ‘Even when she’d just learnt to walk, a little toddler in nappies, I’d hear her calling me from the garden and I’d go out to find her in a small tree,’ she says. ‘I had to get her out, then she’d just get right back up. I worried all the time she’d have an accident. Other people were rescuing cats from trees. For us, it was always Alyssa.’

  Everyone noticed how much the little girl enjoyed heights. Glenn’s older sister, Tanya Azar, has a vivid memory of Alyssa as a tiny three-year-old on a trampoline. ‘She was jumping as high as she could go, with a Dorothy Dinosaur tail on,’ she says. ‘She was giggling and smiling. She was always racing around, hyperactive. She obviously so loved getting as high as she could.’

  From an early age, Alyssa simply loved heights. She scrambled to the highest point she could manage to have a view of her garden, her house, her neighbourhood . . . never worrying about how she’d manage to get down again. Toowoomba is Australia’s largest inland regional city, 130 km west of Brisbane and at an altitude of 700 metres, on the edge of the Great Dividing Range escarpment and the dramatic Lockyer Valley. It proved the perfect place for Alyssa to grow up.

  At six, Alyssa climbed her first local mountain, Tabletop. Just a few kilometres east of the city, it’s a flat-topped mound with an 11.5 km hike to the top, also 700 metres above sea level. ‘It’s not huge, but it’s a good climb,’ says Alyssa. ‘The first time Dad let me go up with him, I remember being really excited. We always did a lot of walking together but this was different. There are some large steps over the part known as the camel’s hump, and then there are a lot of boulders and loose gravel, so at some points you really have to scramble over the rocks.

  ‘I loved those bits. There’s one section right before you hit the top that was just scrambling and pretty steep, and for me that was the best part. Then when we reached the top, there were great views over the valley and I felt a real sense of achievement. I felt on top of the world!’

  From that point on, Tabletop Mountain became a favourite destination for Alyssa and Glenn, and they regularly walked and climbed the circuit with the family’s little black rescue Staffordshire bull terrier, Kimba. With her short legs, the dog wasn’t keen on the scrambling, and Glenn or Alyssa often carried her part of the way. Alyssa’s older sister, Brooklyn, accompanied them once too, but decided early on in the walk that it wasn’t her idea of fun.

  But for Alyssa, doing something physical out in the fresh air, surrounded by nature and enjoying a companionable silence with her dad, became her favourite way of passing the time. People they met along the way, however, didn’t always understand. One group watching the tiny girl skip her way down from Tabletop, sucking on the tube leading from the CamelBak water pack on her back, asked whether she was actually on oxygen. Another woman snarled at Glenn that making his daughter walk in such tough country was tantamount to child abuse.

  When Alyssa did settle down with a book, it was always about dramatic adventures. She liked a good Tashi story, a series of fabulous tales involving a character dispatching monsters, dragons and anything else that ever threatened him or the world at large.

  She much preferred sport, though, any sport, and excelled at gymnastics, tennis, soccer, cross-country, boxing – whatever was going. Glenn trained people in boxing and keeping fit, and ran boot camps, as well as working out himself, and while Brooklyn showed not the slightest interest in sport, Alyssa hung around the gym every moment she could, copying the way she saw adults and older kids train.

  When she was five years old, her grandmother Carmel Clark, Glenn’s mum, came to stay, and was woken by a noise in the backyard, just before daybreak. ‘I looked out and the sun wasn’t even up, but there was this little girl running from one side of the backyard to the other, with a stopwatch in her hand,’ she says. ‘She went back and forth, back and forth. She seemed to be timing herself and she’d look at her watch at the end of every lap. You could tell when she presumably beat her last time. She raise her fist in the air, and yell, “Yeah! I’ve done it!”’

  Alyssa developed into an active kid, who was quiet and thoughtful and didn’t talk a lot, but who put everything into whatever she happened to be keen on at the time. She also had a strong streak of stubbornness, something that would later serve her well.

  ‘I think the love of trekking came from her dad, and the ability to do such a solitary activity,’ says Therese. ‘But if I’m being totally honest, I think she has the stubbornness from me.

  ‘Personality-wise, she was always quite reserved, but just into everything. She’d walk in with one of my Tupperware containers, open the lid and, without any warning at all, out would jump a big blue-tongue lizard. She was always outside, and she was up for everything. When she started school, she’d get into school sports and all her teachers would pull me aside and say she really had a knack for gymnastics or ballet or soccer . . . Practically everything she did, she was good at. They all said, physically, she put everything she had into whatever she was doing, which was what made her so good at everything she tried. That was obvious from a very early age.’

  At her primary school, The Glennie, she quickly became known as a daring kid, afraid of nothing. ‘She was a natural leader,’ says Hannah Mason, who was in Alyssa’s gang of four besties. ‘She was the head of our group and we always followed her lead. She was always up to something, doing interesting things that were fun. Having adventures seemed to be part of her nature even when she was very young.

  ‘She didn’t have a wide group of friends; she mostly stuck to the three of us, and she wasn’t loud or anything. But when she decided she wanted to do something, she was always incredibly focused on what it was she wanted to do, and what she needed to do to get there. She was never afraid to take the lead and certainly had a lot more confidence than I did. Sometimes I’d feel a little bit inferior to her as she was so impressive and driven. She’d get excited by plans and dreams, and they were always much bigger and better than anyone else’s.’

  Alyssa was just pretty much absorbed in her own world, unaware of how others felt, and was intent on getting physical
whenever she could. ‘I liked the idea of becoming an athlete,’ she says. ‘I tried all the traditional sports and loved them all.’ Her determination showed through constantly. As a tiny five-year-old, she caused consternation at her first school carnival after a 60-metre race by complaining to officials about another runner veering into her lane.

  Regular activities were just never enough, however. When Glenn was asked if he’d like to lead an expedition along the Kokoda Track, Alyssa, then aged six, asked him all about it, and begged her parents to be allowed to take part. They would have none of it.

  Glenn devised a rigorous training regime for the participants in the months before they were due to leave, and Alyssa came along and watched them go through their paces. Sometimes she’d join in at the side, pretending she was one of them. And she never stopped asking if she could accompany the group.

  ‘The first time I met Alyssa was when I was asked to take the people planning on going to Kokoda on some walks deep in the bush,’ says Andrew Mills, a neighbour of the family and an experienced local bushwalker. ‘They’d been doing a lot of circuits around the streets of Toowoomba, but wanted to see how they’d fare in the bush. Glenn was leading that expedition, so I got to know him through walking his walkers, and that’s when I first met his daughter too. She always wanted to join in.’

  Before the group left for PNG, Alyssa grilled her dad on every step of the expedition, working out where they’d be and when, what hurdles they’d have to face, and how they’d surmount them. After their departure, and throughout their absence, she drew maps and told her mum, her friends and anyone else who’d listen what stage they’d be up to and what they’d be doing next.

  When Glenn returned, she listened spellbound to his stories of the places he’d seen and the people he’d spoken to along the way. She asked about every detail of the trek, memorising the names of each of the stages, the villages and the historic battle sites, poring over the souvenirs he brought back and treasuring each one. And when he set off on the next Kokoda expedition, after again refusing all her pleas to be allowed to come along, she hugged him hard and told him to remember plenty of stories for his return.