Mud Sweat & Tears - Bear Grylls [78]
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