by Ben Fogle
What is more telling is that by the time he’d reached the other end and I’d realised just what such a challenge involved, the idea had been well and truly scrapped. With a new ring on my finger and a wedding to organise, I was delighted to be at Ben’s side as he undertook his challenges. As his wife I would have the best seat in the house, but there was no way I was actually going to do them.
For Ben, however, actually participating in adventures is part of his DNA. My bold spouse is always on the lookout for a feat that will inspire the nation. When Ben announced he was going to row the Atlantic, everyone looked at me incredulously, not believing you could actually row across an ocean that only the most hardy sail across.
In the first few years of our marriage, Ben dabbled with extremes – facing the bitter cold walking to the South Pole and enduring the intense desert conditions walking across the Empty Quarter. Part of me was hoping that this thirst for adventure would cease as our children started needing him more. I was banking on the fact that he’d never get bored of talking about the life he’d led up until this point, and that I could continue to brush the ‘E idea’ under the carpet.
The first time I knew he was serious was on a Sunday afternoon as we walked across the Chiltern hills. The lives of new parents tend to revolve around their children, leaving the parents little time for each other. We’re at the stage where every conversation is hijacked by an eight-year-old.
‘But Mummy, won’t you get put in prison if you kill that traffic warden?’
‘Mummy, what is resting bitch face?’
So last year, we made a conscious decision to try and have an hour when we walk and talk, just the two of us, every weekend. Since Ben is away for most of the year, the reality is that these walks happen once a month. Not ideal but good enough (which as every parent knows, is the gold standard).
Spring was just casting her delicate fingers over the winter-hewn hills. Around us new life was emerging from the rich earth, and blossom buds were tentatively bursting from naked trees. ‘So I think I’ve found a way to do Everest,’ Ben started. I glanced at him and at that moment my stomach lurched, because for the first time I knew he really meant it.
Ben and I don’t have the kind of relationship where he tells me what he’s going to do. I’d never have signed up for that, but as a couple we’re absolutely terrible at conflict and so, over the decade that we’ve been married, we have worked out how to tackle potentially sensitive conversations without it resulting in an argument. We don’t always achieve this, but amazingly, this time it worked.
I’d been told by a therapist that potentially difficult conversations are best had while walking. Raising your heart rate is good for the body and mind, and the fact that you’re looking ahead rather than looking intensely into each other’s eyes takes the edge off it. As we dipped into the Hambleden Valley, he told me his plan; that Kenton Cool, the rock star of the climbing world, had agreed to guide him, that he’d found a sponsor so that we didn’t have to re-mortgage our house. He told me about why he’d always wanted to do it and, while he recognised such a feat would always be dangerous, what he was planning to do to mitigate that risk.
We returned home, our cheeks red from the chilly spring breeze, the dogs exhausted and me understanding that Everest was now a reality.
There was only ever one contender when it came to who could help us achieve this dream: Kenton Cool. I had known Kenton for several years after we had met through a mutual friend, Sir Ranulph Fiennes. He had told me that should I ever decide to do some climbing, we should consider teaming up together. Five years passed before I gave him a call to ask if he would help Victoria and myself with our Everest dreams.
Kenton set out a two-year plan for our Everest attempt. Respect of the mountain and a dedication to the project would ensure we had the best chances of summiting. He wanted to break it up into three phases. The first would involve an Alpine expedition for Victoria to give her a feel for the mountains. After all, while I was still a relative novice when it came to mountain climbing, Victoria was a mountaineering virgin. Green. Once she had become familiarised, we would then head to Bolivia for a three-week training programme in the Andes. This would then be followed by more training in the European Alps, before the final stage which would be a pre-Everest expedition to Nepal.
Kenton is one of Britain’s most respected mountaineers who has an astonishing 12 summits under his belt. His climbing formula has been tried and tested so, although it would mean a huge amount of time away from family and work, I was committed to the plan.
The idea behind the programme was to build up our confidence using crampons, ice axes, ropes and harnesses. By the time we reached Everest, they needed to be second nature. We had to move efficiently and safely. It would also give us a chance to familiarise ourselves with mountain living. Once again, while I had plenty of experience of camping in the wilderness, for Victoria this would be a whole new experience.
Finally, it would also give us two years to get to know one another properly. To understand one another and to recognise our behaviours. The idea being that by the time we reached Everest, we would be able to know when something wasn’t right; we would understand the nuanced behavioural changes that may be a result of altitude sickness.
For someone who has embraced the slow life, I am quite an impatient person, and the two-year plan was a pretty big commitment. To be honest, it was probably tailored more towards Victoria’s inexperience, but we were a team and I relished the time we spent together.
In 2017, tragedy struck our tiny corner of West London. Just a few hundred metres from our house, Grenfell Tower caught alight and took more than 70 lives with her – some were friends. This tight-knit community was torn apart. It is still hard to think about. We pass the charred remains of that tragic building every day and we think about those lives lost.
It turned our little community upside down, but in those awful days and weeks after the inferno, a team of volunteers from the British Red Cross descended on North Kensington. It was both terrible and beautiful to see the same vehicles I had seen so often in faraway lands, now parked on my own street.
When Nepal was devastated by an earthquake back in 2015, the Red Cross had been one of the first aid agencies on the scene. I had long admired the Red Cross and decided that if I was going to climb Mount Everest, it would be in support of their incredible, heroic efforts at home and abroad. The countless volunteers across the world who selflessly dedicate their lives to improving the lives of others is true heroism, way greater than standing on the summit of any mountain.
Marina had given the green light. Kenton had agreed to help us prepare for Everest. We had agreed to support the British Red Cross and Victoria was fully committed to the expedition.
Now all we had to do was learn how to climb.
CHAPTER TWO
Preparation
After a long summer in the Austrian Alps, I left Marina and the children and headed to the other side of the world, to La Paz in Bolivia, where our team would have a crash course in mountain climbing. Kenton had designed an expedition that would take us up four Andean peaks in ascending order, culminating in Illimani at just under 6,500 metres (or three-quarters of the height of our ultimate goal, Everest).
I had only met Victoria a handful of times, and although I had known Kenton for a few years, we were all comparative strangers. This would be a great opportunity to get to know one another, and also to see if we were suited to mountains.
I had made it very clear to Victoria that she had to be 100 per cent sure that she wanted to take on the highest mountain in the world. I knew the risks involved. Everest required respect and commitment. The two-year plan we had embarked on would take us away from families and work for long stretches, so we had to both be fully invested. I felt a sense of responsibility that would be mitigated by Victoria’s full commitment and devotion to the expedition. While mine was a childhood dream to climb Everest, hers was more about the ‘challenge’.
Our little minibus hurtled through the empty streets. La Paz really is an astonishing city. In the bowl of a valley, it is surrounded by towering snow-capped peaks. We explored the city for a day or two to acclimatise, even visiting the Witches’ market with its dried llama foetuses, snakes, herbs and spells. There is something rather overwhelming in the enduring practice of witchcraft and folklore remedies.
We left the city for the peace and tranquillity of Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world. I had first come here as a 19-year-old. I never forgot the haunting beauty of the lake with its floating reed islands and the fishermen’s iconic boats. We spent a day sailing the lake on a reed boat, stopping at the Island of the Sun for an afternoon hike. Slowly, the three of us were getting to know our different personalities and discovering how we might work as a team: Kenton, the slightly laid back and forgetful mountain guide (so forgetful he had failed to pack a headtorch and a satellite phone for the final peak); Victoria, the vegan and ex-Olympian; and me, the romantic daydreamer.
On the face of it, we were a pretty unusual trio.
Our first summit to tackle was in the Cordillera Real, a mountain range situated a couple of hours from La Paz, where we hiked to base camp. For Victoria, it was her first proper camping experience. Not only was she learning the new art of mountaineering and acclimatising to the thin air, but she was also a camping virgin. On top of this was the difficulty in catering for a vegan in meat-loving, milk-drinking South America, where the local idea of a vegetarian is having half a portion of meat.
It had been many years since I climbed in crampons with ropes and harness. It was like becoming a student again as Kenton taught us the basics of rope work and how to plant our crampons in the ice. Testament to my climbing inexperience were the tattered, torn hems of my climbing trousers, where the sharp blades of the crampons had slashed through the material.
For 10 days we yomped, trekked, hiked and climbed across the Andean peaks until we reached our final challenge, Illimani. Victoria had struggled with the food and had been suffering from an upset stomach, but Kenton felt confident that we had the strength, stamina and resolve for our first 6,500-metre peak. After all, this was the main event. This was what we had come halfway around the world for. Leaving without an ascent would not only have felt like failure but also bad karma for our ultimate goal, Everest – more than two vertical miles higher.
I was halfway up the mountain when I got the call from Dad.
‘It’s Mum,’ he said. ‘She’s in the ICU in an induced coma.’
The call came as a bolt from the blue. Why now, when I was stuck on the other side of the world?
I felt as helpless as I was clueless. I didn’t know what to do. My instinct was to drop everything and head home as quickly as possible, but that was easier said than done when you are clinging to an icy mountain in the isolated nation of Bolivia.
Dad explained that Mum had fallen ill after a routine injection. The needle had pierced an artery and she had bled internally for 12 hours until she passed out. The hospital had placed her in an induced coma. She had a tracheostomy tube cut into her neck and she was in the intensive care unit, being cared for by four nurses, day and night.
‘I’m coming home,’ I told Dad.
‘There’s nothing you can do,’ he reassured me, ‘she’s unconscious, she won’t even know who’s there.’
If all went well, we would summit the following day and I would be home within three days.
‘She would want you to continue,’ he added.
It was a knife-edge decision. My instinct was to head straight home, but even I could see the pointlessness of returning to a mother who was in an induced coma. Things weren’t good, but Dad’s reassuring tone implied that she was in the best hands and that three days wouldn’t make a difference. I still don’t know if I made the right decision, but I decided to carry on. Dad had implored me. He told me it was what Mum would have wanted me to do.
At midnight, we packed up our rucksacks and headed off for our first big summit together. Under torchlight we trudged and zig-zagged up the snowy, icy flanks of Illimani. She was a brute to climb. Starved of oxygen, cold and hungry, we battled on until dawn when the mountain was illuminated pink. The power of that sunrise was incredible. I could feel the sun charge my energy – it felt like new batteries had been placed inside me.
The three of us marched on in silence. Heads bowed to the mountain, each of us in our own misery. The suffering on a high mountain is largely invisible. It is the nakedness of that suffering that makes it harder to grasp. You end up hating yourself and beating yourself up for feeling as you do.
It is completely unlike running a marathon in which the physical drain is obvious. Here, the exhaustion is invisible. It creeps up on you and renders you useless. It is impossible to fight it; you simply have to endure it. Suffer it and deal with it.
‘That’s it,’ came an exclamation from Victoria, ‘I’m out.’
It was 6.30 am and we were just a few metres from the summit. Kenton and I were incredulous. She had endured more than six hours of climbing and hardship, only to declare her quitting a matter of minutes from the summit. It was as unexpected as it was illogical, but then mountains have a strange effect on people. Irrationality is the norm and unreasonable behaviour becomes commonplace. It is one of the reasons solo mountaineering is so dangerous. Without another perspective, it’s difficult to gauge right from wrong. Kenton’s surprise soon turned to exasperation.
‘Get some bloody food in you,’ he berated her. ‘You have no energy because you haven’t eaten anything.’
She had ‘bonked’, as the cycling term refers to it. She had used up her reserves and was running on empty. Kenton was right, but I could tell she didn’t like his style. Victoria is not at all precious, but she has also spent her post-Olympic years trying to exorcise the ghosts of always being told what to do. She popped some nuts into her mouth and less than 20 minutes later we summited the highest peak that Victoria or I had ever climbed.
The summit was bittersweet. We had succeeded, but my mind and focus were elsewhere, back in Britain, worrying about my mother. The expedition had also opened a slight rift between Victoria and Kenton.
I spent the next few months visiting my mother’s bedside each day. Slowly, she recovered and three months later she was discharged from hospital. She had defied the odds, and not only could she walk – something my father had warned us might not be possible – but she also had control of all her senses.
Meanwhile, Victoria was worried about the expedition. She had been unimpressed with Kenton’s slightly laissez-faire approach. His lack of headtorch and failure to pack a satellite phone had rankled her. It had bothered me too, but I’d put it down to a one-off error.
Victoria is a harsher critic and I had to try and convince her that not only was Kenton still the man for the job, but also that Everest was still the right challenge for us.
We had both struggled in Bolivia. Victoria had displayed worrying physiological stats and had struggled in the thin air at 6,500 metres, the same height as Camp 1 on Everest. We would be going several vertical miles higher.
Bolivia had been my first real mountain test. It had pushed me physically, but I had also been inadvertently pushed mentally – worrying about both Victoria and my mother. I am a worrier. I wish I wasn’t, but I am. I worry about everything. Worry and guilt are my two worst traits.
I’m one of those people that never really enjoys a party I host, because I’m so busy worrying about whether my guests are having a good time and guilty that they have made the effort to come to the party in the first place.
I often feel guilty. There is often no sensible or rational reason for it. I had always been worried (there we go again) that I woul
d worry about Victoria. I felt a guilty responsibility for her being in the mountains in the first place, even though our decision to try and climb Everest had been very much a collaborative one.
Taking on Mount Everest was a massive task. We had to want it, but we also had to enjoy it. There was no point taking two years out of our lives, and the sacrifices that come with that, to climb one of the most dangerous mountains in the world, if we didn’t really enjoy it.
Life is way too short to spend that amount of time doing something you aren’t really committed to. I got the impression that Victoria had already dedicated enough of her life to cycling, which had never really been her passion. She had simply gone with the ride and discovered she was pretty good at it. She had impressed Kenton with her stamina and mental drive in Bolivia, but she hadn’t impressed herself. We had both seen her ability to beat herself up. But I wanted Victoria to persevere. I could see the life-changing beauty that lay ahead for her, if only she would embrace the challenge.
Our second training expedition would take us into the heart of Nepal and the Himalayas. Kenton wanted to get us used to the high mountains of the Everest region, to introduce us to the food, the sherpas, the equipment and the landscape in which we would spend upwards of two months in our ultimate quest.
It was early January 2018. Kenton and Victoria had gone ahead of me. I thought it would be good for the pair of them to have an extra week to re-bond and connect. We needed absolute trust and confidence in one another, and it was the perfect opportunity for the two of them to spend time together.
I joined them a week later, at the foot of Imja Tse, a 6,000-metre snow peak in the Himalayas of eastern Nepal that is popular with trekkers. It was given the name ‘Island Peak’ by members of the 1953 British Mount Everest expedition, because it is surrounded by a sea of ice. Renamed Imja Tse some 20 years later, it is still called Island Peak by most trekkers and climbers today.