by Sue Williams
Tim Macartney-Snape
Australia’s best-known and most acclaimed mountaineer, Tim Macartney-Snape, spent his youth climbing all over Australia, first in the Victorian Alps at the age of fifteen, and then, after his HSC exams, hiking and climbing in the NSW Snowy Mountains and Koscuiszko in his own inimitably challenging version of a schoolies week celebration.
Koscuiszko and its surrounding peaks held him in such thrall that the next winter he returned, this time on skis. ‘But I faced ferocious conditions – a fierce blizzard and boilerplate ice [ice so hard, it’s impossible to pierce],’ he says. ‘For me, it was a very valuable part of my mountain apprenticeship.’
It was all great training in preparation for one of the biggest challenges of his life: a historic attempt on Everest in 1984 – twenty-five years before Alyssa Azar would tackle the Aussie 10.
Back then, everything was against him and his four fellow Australian climbers. Everest figured much less in the public consciousness than it does now, and it was hard to raise money for expeditions. In addition, they were planning to climb by a new route from the Tibetan side that no one had ever attempted before – without oxygen cylinders. Few took the tiny team of just five people seriously, and even fewer imagined they had any chance at all of success.
But Macartney-Snape, together with Greg Mortimer, Lincoln Hall, Geoff Bartram and Andy Henderson, planned to give it the best they possibly could. ‘I wanted to do it because I had this dream,’ says Macartney-Snape today. ‘It was something I found really exciting. And I knew that with enough drive and passion and excitement, we might be able to pull it off.
‘If Alyssa’s going to succeed, she’ll really need that same inner drive and excitement at meeting her challenges too. I hope she has it. Without that kind of passion, she won’t ever get beyond Everest Base Camp.’
For their expedition, the little band arrived in Beijing, China, in July 1984, drove to Chengdu and then flew to the Tibetan capital, Lhasa. From there, they were driven over the rocky road to the base of Everest, having to jump in boats to cart their gear over sections that were flooded by the monsoonal weather.
Their climb started badly. They hauled much of their gear up to a camp they made higher up, but were then forced down by heavy snowfall, raging winds and the bitter cold. By the time they were able to climb up again to be reunited with their equipment and stores, rats and birds had eaten much of their food, an avalanche had ripped some of the tents to ribbons and their climbing gear was so completely buried by snow they were unable to locate it.
As a result, Macartney-Snape was forced to continue the climb in cross-country ski boots, while Mortimer and Hall were nearly buried by another avalanche. Then Hall developed respiratory problems. They were forced to retreat back down the mountain.
It wasn’t until late September that the bad weather broke temporarily and the five set out again, but then had to shelter for four days in a makeshift snow cave when the monsoonal gales returned. Soon after, Bartram started suffering a violent headache, blurred vision and dizziness and, recognising all the symptoms of a cerebral oedema, or fluid on the brain, had to descend. And then they were four.
In another break in the weather, they continued up through the snow, ice and shifting rock. Hall was the next to hit trouble, unable to keep his hands and feet warm. Having lost parts of his toes after being stuck on a ridge in a snowstorm for two days on an earlier climb, he took shelter and decided not to continue.
The remaining trio then pushed on, battling freezing temperatures, exhaustion, and air so thin it took all their efforts to keep breathing. Adversity struck again when Henderson broke a crampon. He was forced to take off his outer mittens to try to repair it, and felt his fingers instantly freeze. He knew he was now suffering frostbite and couldn’t continue. The last two went on, stopping every few steps to struggle for breath, knowing the summit lay just before them.
Finally, at dusk on 3 October 1984, Tim Macartney-Snape and Greg Mortimer made it to the top of the world. ‘It was the hardest day of my life, but the view from there was absolutely incredible,’ says Macartney-Snape. ‘It was hard to believe we’d made it.’
It was even harder to believe, however, they might make it down again alive. After twenty minutes on the summit it was dark, and the pair climbed down to join Henderson, still nursing his fingers, and then further down to meet Hall, who’d been working hard to set up sleeping bags and melt ice on a burner for them to drink. By the time the sun rose again, Henderson’s hands were frozen in a curled position and Mortimer was behaving erratically, showing signs of either extreme exhaustion or, even more worryingly, cerebral oedema.
The little group started down the mountain, Mortimer at one point suddenly catching a crampon in his trousers, tripping himself and rolling down the slope towards a sheer drop before just managing to stop himself by plunging his ice axe into the snow. They finally reached the base intact – although Henderson later lost parts of all his fingers – much to the astonishment, and acclaim, of the rest of the international climbing community.
The fact that such a small, unassisted group had successfully climbed an uncharted route, and without oxygen tanks, conferred on them an unrivalled place in the history of Everest. As one climbing veteran declared, ‘The Aussies pulled off the mountaineering coup of the century!’
Now, pondering Alyssa’s dream of making it to the top of Everest, Macartney-Snape says it’s still a very tough call. ‘For a young person, it’s a long time away from home. In addition, you’re not so physically aware of yourself as when you’re older, and not quite as well versed in pacing yourself. Then there’s the challenge of having sound judgement about the weather and what the conditions are likely to be in deciding whether to go up or stay put, while all the time resisting the pressures from sponsors and other people’s expectations. She has to make her own decisions, and her own choices in the mountains.’
But despite those considerable hurdles, Macartney-Snape says he would encourage Alyssa to follow her heart. ‘I love it when young people decide to follow adventurous pursuits,’ he says. ‘It’s sad when they don’t. So many of them spend so much time on computers now, and while it’s wonderful that the digital revolution has put so much information at our fingertips, we have to be reminded that the virtual world is only a product of the real world, and is so much poorer than the real world. That’s the world that’s really fascinating.
‘It’s great when youngsters like Alyssa want to get out there and experience real life and the rewards of challenging themselves. It’s wonderful that they do, and gives me so much more hope for the future that people are still inspired to do things like climb Everest.’
In 1990, six years after Macartney-Snape’s ascent, he returned to Everest with the idea of being the first in the world to climb the mountain from its true start in the sea, at the Bay of Bengal, to its summit. It took him three months but, attempting the summit solo, without oxygen, light-headed, dehydrated, plagued by bouts of diarrhoea and nausea, and nearly falling to his death at midnight when stopping to adjust the movie camera he carried, he finally made it.
In 1993, he was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for services to mountaineering and international relations.
As a veteran of so many Everest adventures, he’s now keen to offer Alyssa the benefit of his experience. ‘Be very, very careful up there,’ he advises. ‘Listen to yourself and your own feelings and what your body’s telling you. Be mindful of what’s happening to you. Don’t rush into things, and if you’re not feeling good, get down.
‘Be mindful of changing conditions as the weather is still the single biggest factor on the mountains. The weather has caused a lot of fatalities because conditions can get bad and everything gets more difficult. That’s when it’s easy to compromise yourself, get lost and get cold and stumble. But if you know it’s getting bad, get back down. That’s sometimes a hard decision as you’ve spent so much money and time and effort getting there, but that’s
when people die. And that’s failure on all fronts!’
Having been in so many life-and-death situations himself, and survived, Macartney-Snape is keen to neither overstress nor downplay the risks. ‘It’s good to be afraid, but you need to be able to control your fear and still find yourself loving being there,’ he says. ‘Be aware of what’s around you, and enjoy the experience, and love it.
‘Because if you’re not loving it, it’s time to leave. You can always come back again later, but if you make the wrong decision when you’re there, you might not be able to.’
CHAPTER 11
Dare to Dream
‘The greatest battle is not physical but psychological. The demons telling us to give up when we push ourselves can never be silenced for good. They must always be answered by the quiet, steady dignity that refuses to give in. Courage. Suffer. Keep going.’
– UK WRITER GRAEME FIFE
With Alyssa Azar back on course with her Everest dream, it was now Glenn’s turn to falter.
He’d been working hard as a partner in the adventure company in Brisbane, while still managing to continue running, from there, his Fighting Fit gym back in Toowoomba. The demand for the trips was increasing every year, especially for the Kokoda Track over the Anzac weekend, and in just one year the company led no fewer than thirteen trips over Kokoda. At one point, they had a total of 120 people on the track at once, in six different groups, with Glenn helping to organise the whole expedition and leading one of the parties.
Some of their clients were high profile, too, including former Australian cricket captain Allan Border, rugby league’s Mal Meninga, Sunrise TV host David Koch, the Brisbane Lions rugby team, the Hawthorn AFL team, and the heads of the National Australia Bank. Even future prime minister Kevin Rudd and future treasurer Joe Hockey joined them on a trek in 2006, and formed one of the most unlikely friendships in history.
Hockey didn’t seem to appreciate Glenn’s sense of humour too much, though. ‘I remember sitting and having a conversation with Joe Hockey at 4.30 one morning,’ Glenn says. ‘Someone was talking to him and the light was shining in his eyes off their head torch and he got a bit annoyed. He said, Can you turn your light down, it’s shining in my friggin’ eyes – but not in quite such polite language – and it’s giving me a headache. In the army, when someone says they’ve got a headache, it’s a really common line to say that a head like that should ache. So I said it without thinking, and he really got the shits and walked off. I thought, Oh, well – there goes my chances with him!’
As well as all the people wanting to go to Kokoda, there was also a growing number signing up for his Everest Base Camp treks and the new hike Kyle Williams had pioneered with Glenn and Alyssa, the Aussie 10. He had plans for expanding even more in the future, with a few vague thoughts about possibly taking a group over to climb Africa’s highest peak, Kilimanjaro.
But, somehow, the money didn’t seem to be coming in. ‘I’d been working as hard as I could, but we just didn’t seem to be getting the financial rewards,’ Glenn says. ‘I couldn’t understand it. But I carried on working, harder and harder. Then the Global Financial Crisis hit and in 2009 everything fell apart. I’d never had a lawyer look at my agreement with the company, I’d just joined on a handshake. A lot of people lost a lot of money and I lost everything. I was on the border of becoming bankrupt.’
In 2010, Glenn moved the family back to Toowoomba and decided to start all over again. ‘I met with a couple of friends of mine who own big businesses and I met with my accountant and the lawyers and they drew a line and said, This is what bankruptcy could look like. It’s borderline as to which way you go. But if I’m really bad at one thing, it’s quitting; I’m not a good quitter. I thought the only way was to fight my way out of it, and I knew overcoming setbacks like that can only ever make you stronger.’
The gym was still going extremely well, with a large number of regular clients and his boxers winning four Australian titles, five Queensland titles, three national Golden Gloves titles, and numerous regional competitions. So Glenn took a long, hard look at the kind of programs he was offering, and decided to increase them.
‘For a long time, I just taught boxing and did fitness training at the gym,’ he says. ‘But now I was really desperate so I started a boot camp and called it Overhaul. It was a real military-style boot camp, the way we did it in the army. I ran it as an eight-week program and thirty people signed up for it, which is what we lived off for the next two months.
‘People did that program a few times and then I created another boot camp program. Slowly, I started to advance that business. There are two things that make people achieve things in life: inspiration and desperation. For me, it was desperation. They say that’s a really good motivator and it was. This was about survival. But it taught me a lot about being knocked down and then having the courage and strength to get up and start again, and I think seeing that was also a great lesson for Alyssa. She could see from my example that you have to work hard to achieve the things you feel are worthwhile, you have to dare to dream, and then work hard to make your dreams a reality. I think she’s always taken that lesson to heart.’
Then Glenn also started his own adventure company, Adventure Professionals, and this time made sure everything was drawn up by lawyers. He started organising trips again, but this time through his own company: Kokoda, Base Camp, Aussie 10, and yes, maybe one day soon . . . Kilimanjaro.
Alyssa also had her mind on Kilimanjaro. She’d wanted that to be her first big expedition after Kokoda but, because of the age limit, she’d been forced to put it aside. But now she was dreaming again about the Tanzanian peak, and talking about it to her dad, hoping it could be scheduled in as her next adventure, in 2011, when she’d be thirteen.
She was back in hard training and started keeping a diary of her workout routines, her goals and how she planned to reach them. Everything now was geared to Kilimanjaro, with the thought that it would be a great step on the eventual road to Everest. Together with Glenn, she devised a cross-training program, involving three boxing sessions a week plus exercises like squats, sit-ups, push-ups and burpees. She was also running three times a week, and on weekends put on a weight vest or carried a backpack weighing 10–15 kg and did a three-hour bushwalk with Glenn and any of his clients who might be in training for one of his expeditions.
There was also a mental training element to her life now. She wrote out even more inspirational quotes and put them everywhere. She started reading more, too. Glenn gave Alyssa a book he’d read and really enjoyed, Warrior Training: The Making of an Australian SAS Soldier by Keith Fennell who, as a member of the SAS, was deployed on many missions around the world. It gave an insight into the training and mindset of SAS soldiers, and talked about what makes high-performing individuals and teams tick. She devoured the book in two days, then immediately started reading it again. If she was going to succeed at the kind of challenges she wanted to set herself – Kilimanjaro, Everest and the rest of the world’s biggest mountains – it was this kind of mind-training, as well as all the physical stuff, she believed she needed.
As well as getting into the gym by 5.30 every morning, returning after school and then trekking every weekend, she started the long process of making sure her mind was fit enough for the work that lay ahead. ‘Without the right mental approach and determination, it doesn’t matter how physically strong you are,’ she says. ‘You’ll just never be strong enough. That book, Warrior Training, just struck such a chord with me. I felt like I’d been waiting to learn the kinds of lessons about building up your mental toughness. It was the one gap in my armour and I was now able to start filling it.’
When Glenn finally agreed to take her to Kilimanjaro, she was over the moon. Her mum Therese was not so sure. ‘I thought after Kokoda and Base Camp and the Aussie 10, she might have got it all out of her system,’ she says. ‘But no, she hadn’t. Several times, I considered saying, No, she shouldn’t do it, but I’d have felt pretty guilty.
Naturally I felt nervous about the idea of her going over to climb a mountain in Africa, but I knew Glenn wouldn’t let her come to any harm.’
Glenn knew the Aussie 10 had whetted Alyssa’s appetite again, and he was always keen to support anything she wanted to do – within reason. He knew how much she wanted to climb Kilimanjaro and it did seem another good candidate for him to add to his adventure company’s trip list. He also knew, on the other hand, that he was likely to receive criticism again as a parent for allowing a young girl to do something so potentially dangerous.
‘But I’ve always felt strongly that we shouldn’t mollycoddle kids,’ he says. ‘In my opinion, a lot of parents are too precious. I think sometimes that even though they don’t realise it, they’re helping their kids fail. We have to help our kids live their own lives and encourage them to really achieve their own dreams, however big.
‘I knew she would ask about Kilimanjaro again, and sure enough, she did. I was determined to make it possible for her. But it is an expensive trip. It costs a few thousand dollars just to get there. So I told her to wait a little while and then we’d put it on in July 2011 when she was fourteen. She was impatient, but she knew she’d have to wait till we could afford it.’
One evening, he was asked to give a public talk about leadership and military teamwork models. During the talk he said how necessary it is to encourage kids to do adventurous things, rather than try to put an invisible ceiling over their heads, and described some of the adventures he’d undertaken with Alyssa.
‘You know,’ he declared a tad flippantly, ‘if she ever wanted to climb Mount Everest, I’d support her. I wouldn’t want her to do it, but I would fully support her if she wanted that enough. It’s not always about what you want to do as the parent, or what you want your kid to do. It’s about their dreams, and helping to make them come true.’
Glenn didn’t think any more of it, but unbeknownst to him, there was a young girl listening from outside.