would pay the price. That was petrifying. But it was also exciting. I was my own god up there. I felt completely alive in a way that I never had done before. I felt afraid – and I felt free.
I found a quiet seat on the train where no stray eyeballs or selfie cameras were likely to find me and excitedly pulled my phone out of my pocket. How long did it take to drive to Snowdon? I’d go up it again. Do it solo. The next weekend I had free. That’s it, it was decided. I wondered if I could remember the exact route we’d taken twenty years ago. It wasn’t one of the normal tourist routes. It was … I didn’t know. Well, what was the toughest way up? I opened up my web browser and typed in S.N.O. … I stopped. Snowdon? Really? I was seventeen when I’d done it. I was thirty-seven now, and a completely different man. I could walk up Snowdon in silk slippers. It just wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t give me what I needed. So what would? What’s the ultimate Snowdon? I went back to the web browser on my phone and deleted S.N.O. … In the place of those letters, I pecked out a new word.
E.V.E.R.E.S.T.
As the train wobbled to a start and began to rattle out of the station towards home, I excitedly scanned the results on Google. One page leapt out at me. A Wikipedia article: ‘List of people who died climbing Mount Everest’. I began reading.
Mount Everest, at 8,848 metres (29,029 ft), is the world’s highest mountain and a particularly desirable peak for mountaineers. Over 290 people have died trying to climb it. The last year without known deaths on the mountain was 1977, a year in which only two people reached the summit.
Most deaths have been attributed to avalanches, injury from fall, serac collapse, exposure, frostbite or health problems related to conditions on the mountain. Not all bodies have been located, so details on those deaths are not available.
The upper reaches of the mountain are in the death zone. The ‘death zone’ is a mountaineering term for altitudes above a certain point – around 8,000 m (26,000 ft), or less than 356 millibars (5.16 psi) of atmospheric pressure – where the oxygen level is not sufficient to sustain human life. Many deaths in high-altitude mountaineering have been caused by the effects of the death zone, either directly (loss of vital functions) or indirectly (unwise decisions made under stress or physical weakening leading to accidents). In the death zone, the human body cannot acclimatise, as it uses oxygen faster than it can be replenished. An extended stay in the zone without supplementary oxygen will result in deterioration of bodily functions, loss of consciousness and, ultimately, death.
Why did people die on the mountain every year? There must be something special up there. And what was this ‘death zone’ they were going on about? What did a death zone actually look like? What would it feel like to tackle one? It sounded as if you only got a certain amount of time to climb the mountain before you ran out of oxygen – that climbers used ‘oxygen faster than it can be replenished’. So it was like a race for your life. I felt my heart lurch with excitement. I scrolled down the page to the seemingly endless list of fatalities. The deaths started with the very first expedition to attempt to climb the mountain, undertaken by a British team in 1922. Seven Nepalese guys, who I guessed were helping them get to the top, died on the same day in an avalanche. Two years later, there was a Brit, Andrew Irvine: ‘Disappeared; body never found; cause of death unknown’. He was twenty-two. With him, another Brit, the famous George Mallory. ‘Disappeared; body found in 1999; evidence suggests Mallory died from being accidentally struck by his ice axe following a fall.’
As I kept scrolling, the deaths mounted up. Wang Ji, China, 1960, ‘mountain sickness’; Harsh Vardhan Bahuguna, India, 1971, ‘succumbed after falling and being suspended above a crevasse during a blizzard’; Mario Piana, Italy, 1980, ‘crushed under serac’. My eyes flicked across to the column that noted the causes of death. There were hundreds of entries, page after page: avalanche, avalanche, fall, fall, exposure, exposure, exposure, drowning, heart attack, high-altitude pulmonary oedema (HAPE), high-altitude cerebral oedema (HACE), exhaustion, organ failure due to freezing conditions. And these people were from all over the planet: Australia, Germany, Taiwan, Canada, Bulgaria, South Korea, the United States, Vietnam, Switzerland … Finally, I reached the end of the list. 2017. This year. Six deaths. An Indian, a Slovakian, an Australian, an American, a Nepalese and a Swiss guy. Causes of death? Everything from altitude sickness to ‘fall into a 200m crevasse’.
Of all the names I’d seen on that page, I’d only heard of one: George Mallory. I knew, of course, that Hillary had been the first man in, up on Everest’s summit, but why was Mallory so famous? I clicked on his name and began reading the article about him. It turned out that he’d taken part in the first three expeditions to the mountain, the first a reconnaissance expedition in 1921, the second two being serious attempts to ascend the peak in 1922 and 1924. He was last seen alive just 245 feet away from the summit, and it remains unknown whether he reached the top before his death. He’d served in the military, as a second lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery, and fought at the Battle of the Somme. I noticed his age on the day he died.
Thirty-seven.
‘But Ant, you said Mutiny was your last thing.’
It was the following morning, just after 7.30 a.m., and I was disappointed to discover that 5 Hertford Street £60-a-shot whisky gives you exactly the same hangovers as the stuff from Tesco at £6.99 a bottle. My wife Emilie was at the counter with her back to me, preparing breakfast for our one-year-old boy. I’d forgotten I’d made that promise to her. But she was right. Mutiny, the TV show I’d filmed the previous year, re-created the 4,000-mile journey across the Pacific Ocean in a twenty-three-foot wooden boat undertaken by Captain Bligh and eighteen crewmen following the mutiny on HMS Bounty in 1789. That had been a tougher-than-expected sell when I’d first run it past her. Looking back, the idea was borderline insane. Together with the nine men I was responsible for, we’d braved wild storms, twenty-foot waves, starvation, dehydration and the onset of madness, and I’d only just made it back in time for the birth of the amazing boy – named Bligh – whom Emilie was now spooning mashed bananas into.
‘Well, I actually said Mutiny was the last stupid thing I’d do,’ I told her. ‘Everest isn’t stupid. Hundreds of people do it every year. It’s just a holiday, really. A camping trip.’
‘And how long will you be gone on this camping trip?’
‘Er, it takes about six weeks, give or take.’
‘Six weeks?’
‘Yeah, because you need to acclimatise. The air up the mountain is so thin you’ve got to give your body a chance to get used to it. So you go up a little way, rest and get used to the altitude, then you go down, rest some more, and then you go up again, but a bit higher.’
‘Sounds annoying.’
She was still in her pyjamas and had her hair pulled back in a loose ponytail. I often think of the word ‘angelic’ when I see Emilie. She has a perfect, heart-shaped face – her cheekbones are wide and high, and her chin forms the cutest little bump. Her eyes are large and dark green, speckled with brown that sometimes, in the right light, seems to glisten like pale gold. She has exactly the kind of face you’d imagine on an angel.
‘It’s just being careful,’ I told her. ‘It’s the safest way of doing things.’
I took the spoon off her and began feeding Bligh myself.
‘I’m not up for taking any risks up there, babes. This isn’t for a TV show or anything, so there’ll be no drama. It’s just a bit of fun. An old pal of mine from the military takes people up there every year. He’s got a company that does it. Proper professional outfit. Here you go …’
I unlocked my phone. The website of my friend’s organisation, Elite Himalayan Adventures, was still on my web browser from when I’d last looked at it. I passed it over to her and she picked it up warily. I’d spent the rest of my train journey the previous night reading pretty much every page of it. Elite Himalayan Adventures specialised in expeditions up the world’s fourteen highest mountains including Kangchenjunga on the border of Nepal and Sikkim, K2 in Pakistan,