Mud, Sweat and Tears

by Bear Grylls

  So I went to see the colonel of the regiment and told him my decision. He understood, and true to his word, he assured me that the SAS family would always be there when I needed it.

  My squadron gave me a great piss-up, and a little bronze statue of service. (It sits on my mantelpiece, and my boys play soldiers with it nowadays.) And I packed my kit and left 21 SAS for ever.

  I fully admit to getting very drunk that night.

  CHAPTER 71

  Whatever doesn’t kill you, only serves to make you stronger. And in the grand scheme of life, I had survived and grown stronger, at least mentally, if not physically.

  I had come within an inch of losing all my movement and, by the grace of God, still lived to tell the tale. I had learnt so much, but above all, I had gained an understanding of the cards I had been playing with.

  The problem now was that I had no job and no income.

  Earning a living and following your heart can so often pull you in different directions, and I knew I wasn’t the first person to feel that strain.

  My decision to climb Everest was a bit of a ‘do or die’ mission.

  If I climbed it, and became one of the youngest climbers ever to have reached the summit, then I had at least a sporting chance of getting some sort of job in the expedition world afterwards – either doing talks or leading treks.

  I would be able to use it as a springboard to raise sponsorship to do some other expeditions.

  But on the other hand, if I failed, I would either be dead on the mountain or back home and broke – with no job and no qualifications.

  The reality was that it wasn’t a hard decision for me to make. Deep down in my bones, I just knew it was the right thing to do: to go for it.

  Plus I have never been one to be too scared of that old impostor: failure.

  I had never climbed for people’s admiration; I had always climbed because I was half-decent at it – and now I had an avenue, through Everest, to explore that talent further.

  I also figured that if I failed, well at least I would fail whilst attempting something big and bold. I liked that.

  What’s more, if I could start a part-time university degree course at the same time (to be done by email from Everest), then whatever the outcome on the mountain, at least I had an opening back at MI5. (It’s sometimes good not entirely to burn all your bridges.)

  Life is funny.

  You get focused, start pumping out certain vibes into the universe, and things often begin to collude in your favour. I have noticed that on many occasions.

  Within a month of starting to write sponsorship letters to companies about Everest (with no idea of how I was ever going to get on to an Everest expedition), I heard of an old military buddy planning to get together a new British team to try to climb the mountain’s south-east ridge.

  I had crossed paths with Captain Neil Laughton on several occasions, but didn’t know him well. He was an ex-Royal Marines commando, robust, determined and – as I came to learn later – one of the most driven men I have ever met.

  Neil had got very close to Everest’s summit, two years earlier – the same year that a storm hit high on the mountain, claiming eight climbers’ lives in twenty-four hours. Yet despite the very real risks, and the fatalities that he had witnessed first-hand on the mountain, he was 100 per cent focused on trying again.

  Many people find it hard to understand what it is about a mountain that draws men and women to risk their lives on her freezing, icy faces – all for a chance at that single, solitary moment on the top. It can be hard to explain. But I also relate to the quote that says: ‘If you have to ask, you will never understand.’

  I just felt that maybe this was it: my first real, and possibly only, chance to follow that dream of one day standing on the summit of Mount Everest.

  Deep down, I knew that I should take it.

  Neil agreed to my joining his Everest team on the basis of how I’d perform on an expedition that October to the Himalayas. As I got off the phone from speaking to Neil, I had a sinking feeling that I had just made a commitment that was going to change my life for ever – either for the better or for the worse.

  But I had wanted a fresh start – this was it, and I felt alive.

  A few days later I announced the news to my family. My parents – and especially my sister, Lara – called me selfish, unkind, and then stupid.

  Their eventual acceptance of the idea came with the condition that if I died then my mother would divorce my father, as he had been the man who had planted the ‘stupid idea’ in my head in the first place, all those years earlier.

  Dad just smiled.

  Time eventually won through, even with my sister, and all their initial resistance then turned into a determination to help me – predominantly motivated by the goal of trying to keep me alive.

  As for me, all I had to ensure was that I kept my promise to be OK.

  As it happened, four people tragically died on Everest whilst we were there: four talented, strong climbers.

  It wasn’t within my capability to make these promises to my family.

  My father knew that.

  CHAPTER 72

  The Himalayas stretch without interruption for one thousand seven hundred miles across the top of India. It’s hard to visualize the vast scale of this mountain range, but if you were to stretch it across Europe it would run the entire distance from London to Moscow.

  The Himalayas boast ninety-one summits over twenty-four thousand feet, all of them higher than any other mountain on any other continent. And at the heart is Everest, the crowning glory of the physical world.

  It was not until 9 May 1953 that her summit was eventually reached for the first time, by Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay. Many had tried before, and many had died – in pursuit of what was beginning to be deemed the impossible.

  By the 1990s, Everest saw the emergence of commercial expeditions attempting to climb the mountain.

  Climbers could now pay up to US $60,000 for the chance just to be part of an Everest attempt. But this also opened the ‘climb’ up to clients who lacked essential mountain skills.

  The pressure upon expedition leaders to justify the cost often meant that these people found themselves too high on the mountain, without the necessary experience, dangerously tempting disaster.

  Then, in 1996, the combination of a freak storm and climbers’ inexperience resulted in a fateful tragedy. On top of the eight lives lost in one night, the mountain took a further three lives the next week.

  But it wasn’t only novices who died up there.

  Among the dead was Rob Hall, one of the most highly acclaimed mountaineers in the world. He ran out of oxygen attempting to rescue a stricken climber. He collapsed from a lethal combination of exhaustion, oxygen deprivation and the cold.

  Somehow, as night fell and the thermometer plummeted, he managed to hold on.

  Rob endured a night at 28,700 feet with temperatures as low as minus fifty degrees centigrade. Then at dawn he spoke to his wife, Jan, from his radio, patched through to a satellite phone at base camp.

  She was pregnant with their first child, and those on the mountain sat motionless as he spoke to her, ‘I love you. Sleep well, my sweetheart. Please don’t worry too much.’

  They were his last ever words.

  The lessons were clear: respect the mountain – and understand what altitude and bad weather can do, to even the strongest of climbers. In addition, never tempt the wild, and know that money guarantees you nothing – least of all safety, when you climb a mountain as big as Everest.

  Since we were on Everest, many other climbers have succeeded on the ‘big one’ as well. She has now been scaled by a blind man, a guy with prosthetic legs, and even by a young Nepalese teenager.

  Don’t be fooled, though. I never belittle the mountain, she is still just as high and just as dangerous. Instead, I admire those mountaineers – however they have climbed her. I know what it is really like up there.

&nb
sp; Humans learn how to dominate and conquer. It is what we do. But the mountain remains the same – and sometimes she turns and bites so damn hard that we all recoil in terror.

  For a while.

  Then we return. Like vultures. But we are never in charge.

  It is why, within Nepal, Everest is known as the mother goddess of the sky – lest we forget.

  This name reflects the respect the Nepalese have for the mountain, and this respect is the greatest lesson you can learn as a climber. You climb only because the mountain allows it.

  If the peak hints at you to ‘wait’ then you must wait; and when she begins to beckon you to go then you must struggle and strain in the thin air with all your might.

  The weather can change in minutes, as storm clouds envelop the peak – and the summit itself stubbornly pokes into the fierce band of jet-stream winds that circle the earth above twenty-five thousand feet. These 150 m.p.h. plus winds cause the majestic plume of snow that pours off Everest’s peak.

  A constant reminder that you have got to respect the mountain.

  Or you die.

  CHAPTER 73

  At this stage though, with the greatest will in the world, I wasn’t going to be climbing anything, not unless I could raise the sponsorship.

  And little did I know quite how hard that could be.

  I had no idea how to put a proposal for sponsorship together; I had no idea how to turn my dream into one company’s opportunity; and I certainly didn’t know how to open the doors of a big corporation, just to get heard.

  On top of that, I had no suit, no track record and certainly no promise of any media coverage.

  I was, in effect, taking on Goliath with a plastic fork. And I was about to get a crash course in dealing with rejection.

  This is summed up so well by that great Churchill quote: ‘Success is the ability to go from one failure to another, with no loss of enthusiasm.’

  It was time to get out there with all of my enthusiasm, and commit to fail … until I succeeded.

  In every potential sponsor’s eyes, I was a ‘nobody’. And soon I had notched up more rejection letters than is healthy for any one man to receive.

  I tried to think of an entrepreneur and adventurer that I admired, and I kept coming back to Sir Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin.

  I wrote to him once, then I wrote once more. In all, I sent twenty-three letters.

  No response.

  Right, I thought, I’ll find out where he lives and take my proposal there myself.

  So I did precisely that, and at 8 p.m. one cold evening, I rang his very large doorbell. A voice answered the intercom, I mumbled my pitch into the speakerphone.

  A housekeeper’s voice told me to leave the proposal – and get lost.

  It’s not clear quite what happened next: I assume that whoever had answered the intercom meant just to switch it off, but instead they pressed the switch that opened the front door.

  The buzzing sound seemed to last for ever – but it was probably only a second or two.

  In that time I didn’t have time to think, I just reacted … and instinctively nudged the door open.

  Suddenly I found myself standing in the middle of Sir Richard Branson’s substantial, marble-floored entrance hall.

  ‘Uh, hello,’ I hollered into the empty hall. ‘Sorry, but you seem to have buzzed the door open,’ I apologized to the emptiness.

  The next thing I knew, the housekeeper came flying down the stairs, shouting at me to leave.

  I duly dropped the proposal and scarpered.

  The next day, I sent round some flowers, apologizing for the intrusion and asking the great man to take a look at my proposal. I added that I was sure, in his own early days, he would probably have done the same thing.

  I never got a reply to that one, either.

  Later that week, I was bicycling down a pavement in the City of London when I passed a company called DLE, which stands for Davis Langdon & Everest.

  Hmm, I thought, as I skidded to a halt.

  I took a deep breath, and then confidently walked into their ultra-clean, ultra-smart reception, and asked to be put through to the CEO’s office, saying it was both urgent and confidential.

  Once I had the CEO’s secretary on the line, I pleaded with her to help me get just two minutes of her boss’s time.

  Eventually after three attempts, due to a combination of pity and intrigue, she agreed to ask the CEO to see me for ‘literally two minutes’.

  Bingo.

  I was escorted into a lift and then ushered into the calm of the CEO’s top-floor office. I was very nervous.

  The two head guys, Paul Morrell and Alastair Collins, came in, looking suspiciously at this scruffy youngster holding a pamphlet. (They later described it as one of the worst-laid-out proposals they had ever seen.)

  But they both had the grace to listen.

  By some miracle, they caught the dream and my enthusiasm, and for the sake of £10,000 (which to me was the world, but to them was a marketing punt), they agreed to back my attempt to put the DLE flag on top of the world.

  I promised an awesome photograph for their boardroom.

  We stood up, shook hands, and we have remained great friends ever since.

  I love deals like that.

  CHAPTER 74

  So I got lucky. But then again, it took me many hundreds of rejections to manage to find that luck.

  I am sure there is a lesson in that somewhere.

  Someone had taken a punt and had faith in me. I wouldn’t let them down, and I would be eternally grateful to them for giving me that chance to shine.

  Once DLE were on board, a few other companies joined them. It’s funny how, once one person backs you, somehow other people feel more comfortable doing the same.

  I guess most people don’t like to trailblaze.

  So before I knew it, suddenly, from nothing, I had the required funds for a place on the team. (In fact I was about £600 short, but Dad helped me out on that one, and refused to hear anything about ever being paid back. Great man.)

  The dream of an attempt on Everest was now about to become a reality.

  So many people over the years have asked me how to get sponsorship, but there is only one magic ingredient. Action. You just have to keep going.

  Then keep going some more.

  Our dreams are just wishes, if we never follow them through with action. And in life, you have got to be able to light your own fire.

  The reality of planning big expeditions is often tedious and frustrating. There is no glamour in yet another potential sponsor’s rejection letter, and I have often felt my own internal fire flickering close to snuff point.

  Action is what keeps it alight.

  Funds secured, I then planned to head off for six weeks to join the British Ama Dablam Expedition, in the Himalayas.

  This was a dream climb for me, and I was offered a very cheap place on the team by Henry Todd, a well-known Scottish mountaineer, who would be organizing logistics for us on Everest.

  I knew that this was my chance to show both Henry and Neil that I was able to look after myself and climb well at high altitude.

  After all, talk is cheap when you are safely tucked up back in London.

  It was time to train hard and show my mettle again.

  Ama Dablam is one of the most spectacular peaks on earth. A mountain that was once described by Sir Edmund Hillary as being ‘unclimbable’, due to her imposing sheer faces that rise out among the many Himalayan summits.

  Like so many mountains, it is not until you rub noses with her that you realize that a route up is possible. It just needs a bit of balls and careful planning.

  Ama Dablam is considered, by the world-renowned Jagged Globe expedition company, to be their most difficult ascent. She is graded 5D, which reflects the technical nature of the route: ‘Very steep ice or rock. Suitable for competent mountaineers who have climbed consistently at these standards. Climbs of this grade are exceptionally stre
nuous and some weight loss is inevitable.’

  Ha. That’s the Himalayas for you.

  I look back so fondly on those four weeks spent climbing Ama Dablam.

  We had a great international team, including the very brilliant Ginette Harrison, who was tragically killed a couple of years later on another big Himalayan peak. (I have always counted it such a privilege to have climbed with Ginette – so shining, strong, beautiful and talented; and her subsequent death was a tragic and great loss to the climbing world.)

  Also on Ama Dablam with us was Peter Habeler, one of mountaineering’s greatest heroes, and the first man to scale Everest without oxygen, alongside Reinhold Messner.

  So I was in intimidating company; but I thrived.

  I climbed on my own for a lot of the time on the mountain, absorbed in my own world: earphones in, head down, working hard. All the time, Everest was still looming high above us, only ten miles to the north.

  I took quite a few risks up there in how I climbed – and I look back now and wince a little. I showed a pretty casual regard for ropes and clipping in, preferring instead to get up early, ice axes in hand, and get on with it.

  I remember at one time being on a sheer rock face, with a good four thousand feet of vertical exposure under me. I was precariously balanced on the two small front points of my crampons, humming a Gypsy Kings tune to myself, trying to stretch across to a hold that was just beyond my comfortable reach.

  It took a small leap of faith to jump, grab, pray it held and then carry on up – but it was a leap and an attitude that was typical of quite a few moments I had high up on Ama Dablam.

  A kind of nonchalant recklessness that isn’t always that healthy.

  But I was fired up and fearless, and I felt so grateful to be able to climb like this after my accident. I was strong again for the first time – and sleeping on the hard ice was perfect for my back.