Mud Sweat & Tears - Bear Grylls [81]
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 strenuous 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.
Climbing with attitude, though, is dangerous. (I try to be way safer nowadays, for the record.) But I got away with it, and was ascending fast and efficiently.
After three hard weeks, I found myself huddled on the summit of Ama Dablam.
I was beat. It had taken a lot to make that final summit pitch. I knelt there, cowering from the wind, and glanced left through my goggles.
Through the swirling clouds I watched the distant summit of Everest reveal herself.
Like a restless giant. Snow pouring off the peak.
Strong, detached and still six thousand five hundred feet above where I was now, I realized