Mud Sweat & Tears - Bear Grylls [79]
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.
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