The Girl Who Climbed Everest

by Sue Williams

She didn’t know what to do, and became even more withdrawn. ‘I think it was a bit that I was different, doing all this trekking and having adventures, and a bit about jealousy,’ she says. ‘It’s hard for me to understand why, but bullying can be pretty common in school. This was mostly over the internet, rather than in person, which is sometimes even harder to deal with.

  ‘I suppose everyone at that age is figuring out who they are and I had sort of made that decision and I knew exactly what I wanted to be doing. But obviously a lot of other people didn’t like it, didn’t like me and didn’t like all the attention I was getting.’

  In addition, Alyssa was starting to garner more attention from her teachers, concerned that her life was so different from those of their regular pupils. While other girls were asked up on the school stage during assembly to be congratulated when they did well at any hobbies, like ballet or horseriding, Alyssa’s boxing triumph was ignored, perhaps because they didn’t want to encourage such sports among girls. Alyssa, however, felt slighted. As well, her teachers felt that she needed more balance, to spend more time with friends, to be a kid. She had completely different ideas.

  ‘The school wanted me to get involved in other things and I just wasn’t interested in that,’ she says. ‘They weren’t used to someone like me who didn’t want to socialise. I don’t think they really knew how to handle it. So I spent a lot of time in the office talking to teachers, which was just a nightmare for me.

  ‘I kept thinking, Is it that big a deal, just wanting to come to school to do my work and go home for training? I remember thinking I wasn’t harming anyone by being such a loner, so what was the problem? But obviously they thought it was a problem, or that I had problems, and I couldn’t seem to convince them otherwise.’

  To add to the mix, there was trouble brewing at home. Alyssa’s family had always been an isolated little group, since the children never saw their grandparents on their mother’s side, and rarely their grandparents on their father’s, something that had helped make young Alyssa even more self-sufficient. But Therese and Glenn had been gradually becoming more distant with each other, Therese busy with their eldest, Brooklyn, and the two younger children, Christian and Samantha, as well as her own career, and Glenn tied up with his work at the gym, leading the adventure treks, and with Alyssa’s training. Now, however, Therese wanted to move to Wagga Wagga in country NSW to take on more study, and neither Glenn nor Alyssa wanted to go. In the end, Glenn stayed behind in Toowoomba, living in a small room off the gym, and Alyssa pleaded to be allowed to stay with him.

  ‘The business was going through a bit of a slump at the time, and I couldn’t afford to rent another place,’ says Glenn. ‘But Alyssa begged us not to make her move. So finally I made her promise to stay for one term down there with her mum, her sister and her brother. She agreed, packed her bags and went down there. But the next time I went there to visit, she had her bags packed, ready to leave. She knew exactly what she wanted. So we had to let her come back with me.

  ‘We lived together in that room, the size of a small living room, with no cooking facilities and not much else beyond two beds, a microwave and a TV. We showered at the local pool and survived on either microwaveable food or take-outs. If I had to go away, Alyssa stayed at a friend’s. I think that really created damage to our family, and after that Alyssa was never as close to her mum, while I was never as close to Brooklyn. It was very sad. I was always determined to be completely different from my dad and to do better than my parents had with us, but here I was, repeating the same cycle. We both loved our kids and spent many years ensuring we reversed that damage as best we could. And even though our relationship didn’t survive, we are really close to the girls.’

  To distract herself from the difficulties at home and trouble at school, Alyssa threw herself even more determinedly into her training, getting ready for the trek to Everest Base Camp. She boxed as hard as she could, trained with heavier weights and ran faster and further than she’d ever done before. To prepare for her first venture into serious altitude, she and Glenn also researched an altitude centre that had just opened in Brisbane, where athletes could train in a chamber of thin air as if at altitude. They went over one day with a friend who was into competitive cycling, and checked it out. From then on, they visited once a week for a few months to run on a treadmill in thin air to get themselves used to the kind of altitude they would face in Nepal.

  Alyssa also started paying more attention to mind-training. Glenn had always put up little motivational messages and positive-thinking notes around the house – his dad used to do it too, he said, but never stuck to them – and now she started doing the same. She began writing down phrases she read that she liked, and maxims she came across that she believed could serve her well in her life.

  ‘A determined person doesn’t find it hard to succeed,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘they find it hard to stop trying.’ ‘Don’t tell me the sky’s the limit when there are footprints on the moon.’ ‘Wanting something is not enough. You must hunger for it.’

  In any spare time she had, she read books about Everest climbers, watched documentaries about their exploits and expeditions, and sat and gazed at photographs of Everest. She simply couldn’t wait to get going.

  ‘I think in some ways, it was easier for me to focus on my next adventure, instead of worrying about what was happening with school and at home,’ says Alyssa. ‘There was nothing I could do to change things or to help them, they had to work it out themselves. So I just kept concentrating on my training, physically and mentally, what was coming next, and what I could control.

  ‘And while getting that boxing title was a thrill, I was still very focused on the next big trip Dad and I were going to do. Everything else was secondary to our trip to Everest Base Camp. I was counting the days. I just couldn’t wait to see Everest for myself.’

  PART TWO

  The Call of the Sky Goddess

  CHAPTER 6

  Everest, the Rugged Giant

  ‘There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.’

  – FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

  Mount Everest: the highest point on earth and a sight that strikes wonder into anyone who sees it, and terror into those planning to climb. A brooding triangular hulk, dwarfing the other giants of the Himalayan range, it stands a majestic 8848 metres above sea level, with its summit carved in two by the international border between Nepal and Tibet. It’s a snow-covered, cloud-draped peak that has captured people’s imagination since time began.

  The Nepalese name for Everest is Sagarmatha, meaning Goddess of the Sky, while Tibetans know it as Chomolungma, or Goddess Mother of the World. It wasn’t until 1865, with both countries closed to foreigners, that it was christened Everest by the Royal Geographical Society, after the British surveyor-general of India.

  Everest first caught the attention of the wider world in 1921 when a British expedition set out to reach its peak, not knowing whether humans could survive in such rarefied air over 8000 metres. They discovered a possible route from the Tibetan side and returned the next year, managing to climb to 8326 metres – the first time anyone had ever been recorded as being so high.

  One of that expedition’s members, expert mountaineer George Mallory, was completely captivated by the view of Everest towering above him. He wrote in his journal: ‘. . . like the wildest creation of a dream, Everest, a rugged giant, a prodigious white fang, a colossal rock plastered with snow. From a mountaineer’s point of view, no more appalling sight can be imagined.’

  In 1924 the group returned and, just 245 metres from the summit, Mallory and engineering student Sandy Irvine left their team members to strike out alone. They were never seen again.

  Seventy-five years later, in 1999, Mallory’s frozen body was found by a new expedition sent out to find the pair. It seemed he’d been roped to Irvine when one of them slipped, sending both to their deaths. No one will ever know whether they died on their way to the top, or were the first to conque
r Everest and perished on their way down. Intriguingly, Mallory’s snow goggles were in his pocket, which might suggest he was descending at night when he fell, and nowhere to be found was the photograph of his wife – something he’d pledged to leave on the summit.

  After the Second World War, Nepal opened its border to outsiders, and in 1950 Tibet came under Chinese rule and was closed off to foreigners, so the race to reach the top of Everest resumed via the southern Nepalese side. Finally, it was a team from the British Commonwealth who made it, and on 29 May 1953 Edmund Hillary, a New Zealand beekeeper, together with local Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, were the first officially to go where no man had gone before.

  ‘We looked around in wonder,’ Hillary recounts in his book, View from the Summit. ‘To our immense satisfaction, we realised we had reached the top of the world!’ In typically understated Anglo-Saxon fashion, Hillary then stretched out his arm to shake Tenzing’s hand, but the Sherpa threw his arms around him in an almighty bear hug.

  Seven years later, a Chinese and Tibetan team summitted Everest via the northern ridge for the first time, and in 1979 China opened Tibet back up to overseas climbers. Since then, there have been all manner of milestones. The first woman, Japanese Junko Tabei, climbed the summit in 1975, Italian Reinhold Messner and Austrian Peter Habeler were the first to climb without oxygen in 1978, and Tim Macartney-Snape and Greg Mortimer were the first Australians, reaching the top in 1984 without oxygen via a completely new route. In 1990, Sir Edmund Hillary’s son Peter summitted Everest, the first father and son to make it. Seven years later, in 1997, Brigitte Muir became the first Australian woman.

  Over 4000 climbers have now made it to the top of Everest, helped by advances in weather forecasting and knowledge of conditions and routes, better equipment and communications, warmer lightweight clothing and well-run commercial expeditions. At the start of each climbing season these commercial outfits all pitch in to pay for Sherpas to put up ropes along the route and ice ladders over crevasses, but getting to the top is still never an easy feat.

  Only a little over a third of the climbers who attempt the summit make it, and a 2006 report in the British Medical Journal put the death rate of those who try at one in ten. Of course, some years have been much more tragic than others. In 1996 fifteen people died, eight of those on a single day due to a terrible storm that engulfed the higher reaches. In 2006, eleven lost their lives, and in 2012 eleven perished, making climbers, superstitious at the best of times, even more nervous about expeditions in any year that ends in a figure divisible by six. Then, in 2014, 16 Sherpas died in an avalanche and, in 2015, 24 died on Everest in an earthquake.

  The causes of climbers’ deaths on Everest vary hugely. Most have been caused by exhaustion, particularly when people give their all to get as close to the summit as they can, but just don’t have enough strength left to climb down safely. ‘You have to remember, the peak is only halfway there!’ says Brigitte Muir.

  Some have had heart attacks: a complication of altitude is that the blood becomes thicker, making people more susceptible to heart problems and strokes, as well as to frostbite. But even tiredness can be lethal. Depleted of energy, many tend to stumble, make bad decisions, and act with less care than they should. As a result, accidents claim more lives. There are few other places on earth where a broken leg can prove fatal. Teammates may have only enough energy to get themselves down; helping someone else who is significantly disabled down to safety in time to save their life may be impossible.

  While some who die are given a rough mountain burial, which involves being covered in stones by their fellow climbers, others ask in advance for their bodies in such cases to be pushed over crevasses. When either is too difficult, a number are simply left where they fall. It’s not unusual for climbers to come across frozen, mummified corpses just off the main routes to the top.

  Altitude-related illnesses, also known as acute mountain sickness or AMS, can also become extremely serious, extremely quickly. Its effects can start being felt generally over the altitude of just 3000 metres – well under half the height of Everest. It’s for this reason that Everest is such a long slog. Anyone attempting the climb usually has to allow two to three months for their body to adjust to the altitude, so they stay at Everest Base Camp for a while, then climb to Camp I, then back to base, then back up to Camp I again to spend some time there, then down to base for a rest, back up to Camp I, then on to Camp II and back down to base . . . in a long series of ups and downs called ‘rotations’. Although it can seem an almost endless grind, it’s absolutely necessary. If a climber doesn’t acclimatise well or quickly enough when gaining altitude, the body doesn’t adjust to the reduced oxygen and changes in air pressure and the results can be deadly. And, of course, the higher the climber goes, the riskier it is.

  ‘Unfortunately it is difficult to get experience of what it is like climbing above Camp III (8300 metres) without climbing Everest,’ Dr Andrew Sutherland, a medical advisor on Everest expeditions, told the British Medical Journal. ‘Climbers invariably do not know what their ability above 8300 metres is going to be like.’ Some people are simply affected much worse than others, and there’s no way of predicting how anyone will fare at a high altitude until they get there. In addition, climbers who cope well one time, may find the next time they don’t, and may be at a loss for a reason why.

  People can have headaches and bouts of vomiting as a result of hypoxia, a lack of oxygen reaching the body’s tissues, or experience loss of appetite, breathlessness, and an inability to get warm. In severe cases, they may have impaired cognitive function and slurred speech, and can suffer a cerebral oedema – fluid on the brain – or a pulmonary oedema, a potentially lethal build-up of fluid on the lungs. If the person doesn’t realise they’re experiencing symptoms of AMS and doesn’t descend fast enough, it can develop rapidly. Hallucinations can follow, which have led to some even jumping to their deaths, believing they can fly.

  In the so-called Death Zone, above an altitude of 8000 metres – on Everest or on any other of the world’s fourteen mountains above that height – the atmospheric pressure is about a third of that at sea level, with only about a quarter to a third of the normal rate of oxygen in the air. Humans simply can’t survive for more than a couple of days in this zone; no amount of acclimatisation or extra oxygen will stop the brain swelling or the lungs filling with water.

  If a normal sea-level dweller were to be dropped by helicopter into that altitude, without acclimatisation, they would only be able to stay conscious for three minutes at most. Even climbers who have gone through the proper acclimatisation are generally so weakened, it takes them around forty-five minutes to walk 100 metres, and they often have to breathe three to four times more rapidly than they would normally – something that contributes hugely to exhaustion levels. Onlookers sometimes find it hard to understand why some people turn back within 50 or 100 metres of Everest’s peak. It’s because, while only a small distance, it will take the kind of effort they know might kill them.

  ‘All the time you’re in the Death Zone, your body is actually slowly dying and deteriorating,’ says famed American Everest conqueror Dan Perfet. ‘So you have to limit how much time you spend there, especially on the summit. You really don’t have much option; you’re living on borrowed time.’ To stay more than twenty minutes on Everest’s summit is generally considered perilous.

  Then last, but certainly not least, there’s the weather. Up on Everest, it’s a different type of weather entirely. The winds can gust at up to 281 km an hour, pretty devastating considering that the fiercest catastrophic level of hurricane at sea level, Category 5, is only 252 km an hour. From late October until the end of January there are almost constant hurricane-force winds blowing more than three out of four days and, for one day in every four, routinely a hurricane at least of a Category 1 magnitude. The jet stream, as the westerly wind at the summit is known, is said to sound like a large plane taking off a few metres away, and eases off sometim
e in April or May, giving climbers a short window to the summit. Australian Andrew Lock, one of the most accomplished mountaineers on the planet, and one of the few men to have climbed all fourteen of the world’s mountains over 8000 metres, describes Everest as having ‘a summit perpetually shrouded in wind-thrashed cloud’.

  In addition, on Everest’s summit, the temperature can drop as low as -41° C, but generally tends to fluctuate between -35° and an almost balmy, by comparison, -20°. During the windy winter months of December to the end of February, the wind chill factor is constantly around -100°. Throughout the summer monsoon season, from the start of June to the end of September, there is almost daily snowfall.

  Besides the regular dangers such weather extremes on Everest present, they can also trigger avalanches, with the risk to climbers of being crushed to death, swept over edges or buried alive under hundreds of tonnes of falling snow. Changing temperatures can also cause shifts in icefalls and walls, and send blocks or columns of ice, called seracs, hurtling down the sides of the mountain. These may range from the size of a large TV set up to the mass of a twenty-storey apartment building. As well, crevasses can suddenly open up beneath mountaineers’ feet to create dizzying gaps in the earth hundreds of metres deep, and a glacier can, in a moment, be transformed from a stable pathway into a deathly slippery slide.

  And while those ropes and ladders can be a godsend, they can also be treacherous. Many experienced climbers avoid them like the plague – there are a number of ropes that are frayed and decayed, and some ladders aren’t fixed firmly enough into moving ground – and a wrong choice has sent many a summit hopeful to their death.

  Many of those who die on Everest perish as a result of a combination of factors. For instance, American Scott Fischer, an extremely competent climber and guide on one of the fateful 1996 expeditions, died of a mixture of frostbite, exposure and AMS during the storm that lashed the top of the mountain, and a massive drop in barometric pressure.