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William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Copyright © Ben Fogle 2018

Ben Fogle asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Cover images © Mark Fisher

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008319229

Ebook Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9780008319205

Version: 2019-02-19

Dedication

To the Sherpa people,

the real heroes of the mountain

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

TIMELINE

AN END AND A BEGINNING

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE: FAMILY

Marina – Home

CHAPTER TWO: PREPARATION

CHAPTER THREE: RESPONSIBILITY

Marina – Saying goodbye

Marina – Am I worried? Not yet

CHAPTER FOUR: BAGGAGE

CHAPTER FIVE: LOSS

CHAPTER SIX: COLLABORATION

Marina – The media

CHAPTER SEVEN: FEAR

CHAPTER EIGHT: RISK

Marina – The icefall

Marina – Risk

CHAPTER NINE: DIFFERENT ENDINGS

CHAPTER TEN: Positivity

Marina – Summit fever

CHAPTER ELEVEN: ADVERSITY

Marina – Breaking radio silence

CHAPTER TWELVE: SUMMIT

Marina – The summit

Marina – Life after Everest

THE END

EPILOGUE

PICTURE SECTION

OUR CHARITIES

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Also by Ben Fogle

About the Authors

About the Publisher

Timeline

13/4/18 – ARRIVAL KATHMANDU

14/4 – LUKLA (2,800 metres)

15/4 – NAMCHE BAZAAR (3,400 metres)

16/4 – TRAIL TO PANGBOCHE (4,100 metres)

17/4 – PUJA CEREMONY, PANGBOCHE MONASTERY (with Lama Nawang Pal)

18/4 – TRAINING CLIMB (to 5,000 metres)

19/4 – CLIMBERS’ MEMORIAL, LOBUCHE (4,950 metres)

20/4 – KHUMBU VALLEY

21/4 – BASE CAMP

26/4 – RETURN TO BASE CAMP AFTER ASCENT TO LHOTSE FACE ABOVE CAMP 2 (6,400 metres)

30/4–3/5 – ROTATION TO CAMP 3 (7,200 metres)

4/5 – VIC LEAVES

7/5 – TRAINING HIKE

8/5 – SCHOOL ASSEMBLY SATELLITE CALL

16/5 – 7.30 AM EVEREST SUMMIT (8,800 metres)

18/5 – LEAVE BASE CAMP FOR HOME

An End and a Beginning

Dear Ludo and Iona,

Life is about the journey not the destination.

Live it brightly. Live it brilliantly and live it wisely. Don’t waste it. Not one single day.

Add life to your days not days to your life.

Dream.

Dare.

Do.

Live for the now, not the then.

Be spontaneous.

Smile.

Go with your heart. Instinct is often right.

Take criticism on the chin and use it usefully.

Life is there to complete, not to compete. Although it will sometimes feel like a competition, don’t get swept up by it. It’s not a race.

Be magnanimous in victory and graceful in defeat.

Be humble and try not to grumble.

Confide. Don’t divide.

Reach don’t preach.

Be caring and considerate.

Be principled but open-minded enough to be pragmatic.

Try and be the shepherd not the sheep.

Remember, you aren’t just a face in the crowd. You’re unique.

Despite a planet of seven billion. There is no one else like you.

Your personality will be shaped and moulded by the company you keep and the experiences you have.

Be comfortable with who you are. Don’t try and be what others want or expect you to be.

Listen, be curious and learn.

Wealth is all about how YOU interpret it. Money will not buy you happiness nor love.

Experiences WILL make you richer.

Travel will broaden your mind.

People will judge you, but don’t let that judgement define you.

Don’t let failure defeat you.

Insecurity will creep up on you throughout life, try not to listen to it.

Be confident, never arrogant.

Give.

Share.

People will be outrageous and provocative. Try not to be outraged or provoked.

Don’t live life through a screen. Live it for bikes and hikes, not likes and swipes.

Routine is far more dangerous than risk.

Some days you will feel a little down. The highs and lows are human nature.

Your life should be filled with light and shade, it is these ups and downs that remind us what is important in life.

Fortune really does favour the brave.

Be brave.

Take risks.

Live your life.

Smile.

And don’t forget to look UP.

Love Daddy

Ring ring … ring ring … ring ring …

It’s 4 am and I’m in a hotel room in Toronto, Canada. I’m here for my grandmother’s 100th birthday. Her 100th birthday! I still marvel at that. I cancelled everything to be here for this, including leaving my family in Austria.

I hate calls in the night. They make me nervous. They are almost always bad. No one calls with good news at 4 am. Maybe it’s a wrong number. My heart is pounding.

‘It’s Dad,’ says the voice on the line. He’s in the room next door. Why is he calling me?

‘Marina has lost the baby.’

I struggle to comprehend what he is telling me. I only left Marina yesterday, eight months pregnant and healthy, while I flew to Canada.

And why is he telling me this? I look at my mobile. It’s switched off.

‘It’s not good, she might not make it either, you’ve got to get back.’

My world imploded. It’s funny how we never realise how happy and lucky we are until it’s gone. I had the perfect, happy life and in that single phone call I saw the happiness disappear. It was like a little bomb going off in my life.

Not only had I lost a baby that I had been longing to meet, but I also faced the reality of losing my beloved wife, Marina. My soul mate, my best friend and the mother to my children.

I wasn’t ready to become a widower.

The next 12 hours are a bit of a blur. By the time I had thrown on some clothes, Dad had booked me a plane ticket to London. I raced to the airport and was on a flight by 6 am.

It was the worst flight of my life. And I’ve had some bad flights.

For eight long hours, I would have no contact with the outside world. I sat in my seat and imagined what was happening. My sister-in-law, Chiara, warned me in a call before my flight that Marina was bleeding so profusely that she might not make it. Please God, don’t take her from me. I am not a religious person, but here I was, 30,000 feet up, calling on the heavens to hear my prayers.

I sat there with tears streaming down my face. How could I cope? I couldn’t imagine life without Marina, the lynchpin of our family. The fun and the happiness. The glue. She was the family. We would be lost without her. The children, what about the children? What did they know? Ludo was four and Iona three. How would I tell them? How could I tell them?

My happy life flashed before my eyes during that endless flight. Our wedding in Portugal, the honeymoon in the Outer Hebrides, the family holidays, dancing in the kitchen. How could life ever be happy again? How could I go up from here?

As the plane touched down at Heathrow, I turned on my phone. How I was dreading this moment. Rain drizzled down the oval plane window as I called Chiara, who was still a further 1,000 miles away in Austria.

‘She’s still in intensive care … but they have stopped the bleeding … she’s going to live.’

I burst into tears and jumped into a taxi to Luton where I caught a flight to Salzburg in Austria. Those 12 hours were like a foggy nightmare. It was like I was living someone else’s life. This was the kind of thing that only happened to other people, not us.

In Salzburg, I can remember the shafts of bright light streaming through the hospital windows as I walked up the white corridor. I walked into a large room bathed in Alpine summer sunshine, net curtains blowing in the gentle breeze from the open windows. I could just make out the mountains in the distance. It was ethereal. Beautiful and calming.

In the middle of the room was a bed surrounded by nurses in starched white uniforms, their smiles dazzling. White. Bright. Warm.

I walked over to the bed. Marina’s blonde hair spilt over the pillow, her face was drained of colour. Everything was white. Clinical, but calm and soothing.

I held her hand and she opened her eyes. She smiled. I love her smile, it’s so beautiful. It’s infectious. Tears rolled down my cheeks. She looked at me and squeezed my hand.

‘Do you want to meet him?’

Him. My baby was a boy. We had deliberately not found out his sex. Marina wanted to have a surprise, something to look forward to at the end of labour. A boy, another little boy. A son.

Wait. What does she mean, meet him? I knew he had been stillborn.

‘I think we should meet him to say goodbye.’

I like to think of myself as a pretty stable, well-prepared individual, little surprises me and I am rarely flummoxed. ‘Expect the unexpected’ has always been my mantra; but now, here, in this faraway hospital in a strange land, I was being invited to meet and to hold my dead son.

One of the nurses appeared with a baby blanket. She held it in her arms gently and walked through the shafts of sunlight. My heart raced. Nothing, I mean nothing in my life had prepared me for this.

She handed me the little bundle. I cupped him in my arms and peered at his little face. He was so beautiful. He looked like he was asleep.

‘What shall we call him?’ Marina smiled.

‘I think we should call him Willem.’ Tears splashed onto his little cheeks.

Here was a little boy I had longed to meet but would never get to know. For eight months, I had imagined a complete family of five. Suddenly, those dreams had been shattered.

It can be difficult for those who haven’t experienced this unique form of bereavement to understand how painful it can be, to lose someone you never knew, but I felt like I was suffocating.

I stared at little Willem and made a resolution there and then that I would live the rest of my life for the two of us, that I would relish every day. I would always smile. I would live it to its full. For little Willem, I would live my life even more brightly, seizing the moments and the opportunities and pursuing my dreams.

Little did I know it, but in that dreadful moment of tragedy and disappointment was the germ of a journey that would turn my life around and lead me up to the top of the world.

Up.

‘Always look Up,’ my late grandmother used to say. It was good advice. It is too easy to go through life looking down.

It is almost a symptom of modern society, to look down, both physically and metaphorically. Travel on the commuter train, bus or tube each morning and they are full of people looking down. Down at their phones, their newspapers, their feet, anywhere but up, for fear of making eye contact. Walk along most streets and they are full of people looking down at their phones, their feet, the pavement.

It is like we have evolved into a downward-looking species.

I remember once on a visit to New York, a taxi driver pointed out that he could always spot a tourist because they were the ones looking up. That observation is so symbolic. You see, to New Yorkers, those magnificent vertiginous skyscrapers were just another part of their landscape. Complacency meant they never looked up and admired the city that others flocked to.

Can you imagine how much we miss out on by looking down? Those chance encounters, opportunities and sights. To my mind, we have become an increasingly pessimistic, negative and angry society. We have become suspicious of success. Social media and the press will often pick on the negative, downward-facing stories and opinions.

Where is the Up? The positivity, the optimism and the celebration? I’m sure if more people looked up and smiled, we would be in a happier world.

If there is one thing I encourage my children to do, it is to smile. Not in a needless, fake kind of way, but in a positive karma kind of way. A smile has a natural way of lightening and lifting the head.

Take a look around you. Downward-facing frowns? Lift your head and smile.

Introduction

It was a hot summer’s afternoon in 2016 and I was in a crowded tent at Goodwood House in Sussex. My wife Marina and I had been invited by Cartier to join them for lunch at the Festival of Speed. I made my way to our table and peered at the name card next to me.

Victoria Gardner.

I’d never heard of her, which was just as well, as she wasn’t there.

Thirty minutes passed and, after I’d finished my starter, a young girl appeared, apologised profusely for her lateness and sat in the chair next to me.

I recognised her instantly: Victoria Pendleton, the heroine of British cycling. Two-time Olympic gold medallist and umpteen-time world champion. I was dizzy with excitement. I had followed her career closely and admired her ability to excel at sport while not becoming a slave to it. I had always liked the way she spoke her mind and appeared to ruffle feathers by breaking convention. I admired her individuality in a sport with a reputation for unquestioning conformity.

I had long thought that Victoria would make a great adventuring companion if ever I met her. For several hours, we chatted. I told her that if ever she wanted to embark on an expedition or an adventure, I would love to explore some ideas. Without hesitation, she accepted, and in the inauspicious and unlikely surroundings of that marquee, we hatched a plan that would take us to one of the wildest, most dangerous places on earth, on a journey that would change our lives forever.

For several years, I had been travelling the world to spend time with people who had abandoned the conformity of society and followed their dreams into the wilderness. Each one had inspired me to do more with my own life, but each time I found myself returning home and plugging back into our ‘vanilla’ society. Safe. Risk averse. Conforming. Restricting. Angry.

I have always wanted more. I have always wanted to shake the manacles of expectation. Over the years, I have dipped in and out of it, but I have always returned to the safety of home and complacency.

I had been looking for something to shake my foundations and reconnect me with the wilderness.

The modern world is a complex one. Aged 44, I sometimes worry I can’t keep up with it. Technology and communication have advanced at breakneck speed. Never have we been bombarded with so much information. Never has society been held up to such scrutiny.

What’s more, we have become increasingly polarised. World politics is the manifestation of our fractured society. You are either in or out. For or against. Yes or no. Up or down.

Negativity is a blight on society. It might just be the rose-tinted retrospective reflection of my childhood, but I’m sure when I was younger everything was more positive. Negativity was the realm of Eeyore, the donkey from Winnie-the-Pooh. Eeyore was in the minority with his pessimism and gloom.

Today, there seems to be a bubbling undertone of resentment and anger that is contagious. It seems to manifest itself in this fast-paced, downward-looking burden. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

You can live your life Up.

I have always tried to look Up. That doesn’t mean I haven’t looked back, far from it, we can all learn a great deal from our past. From the highs and lows, the good decisions and the bad. The successes and the mistakes.

You see, looking Up has become something bordering on the spiritual. I am not religious, but that doesn’t mean I don’t look up.

‘Do you believe in God?’ asked my son Ludo one morning.

‘I don’t know,’ came the answer that surprised me. I’d probably describe myself as an atheist. I’m open-minded. I’ve been into the various churches of God over the years. I don’t have a particular calling to a specific ‘god’ per se, but that is not to say I don’t believe in a higher calling.

It’s just that mine is a little wilder. The wilderness is my religion. Nature. The flora and fauna. It is my church. I feel the same connection to a higher being when in the wilderness as many do in a church. My god is not specific. It’s the trees and the mountains and the rivers and the waterfalls. The wilderness heals; it soothes and calms.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to get too philosophical here, but it is important to understand my calling, because the wilderness in all her cloaks has a powerful spirituality. Of course, there are plenty of cultures who have long revered the sun and the moon and the power they have over us, and there are many pagans who also have a deep connection to the land and the earth.

Mine is less structured. It’s difficult to define, but I find the wilderness has an almost magnetic pull over me and perhaps it is the reason for this story. The call of the wild has helped mould and shape me into the man I am today. My relationship with the wilderness has never been one of battle or war. It has never been Man versus nature, but Man with nature. I’ve tried to find the careful balance of harmony, of mutual respect, of collaboration.

We have such a complex relationship with nature. In some ways, we have tried to tame it and control it: look at our cities and townscapes. We have beaten nature into submission, sanitised it and suppressed it. It’s almost as if we are terrified of it. Scared of its power over us.

I have never been fearful of the wilderness. Respectfully wary, and often humbled by it, but I’ve always loved being close to mother nature. She has a way of simplifying life.

Nature has the power to strip us back to our basic instincts. It’s no wonder there are movements around the world for rehabilitation and therapy in the wilderness, to use the forests and the woods as a way of treating ill health.

Forest schools are increasing in popularity and many nations, from Japan to Norway, have become popular destinations for forest bathing, in which people lie on the forest floor and stare up at the canopy above.

There is already scientific evidence of the healing virtues of the flora and fauna around us. It has always been perfectly obvious to me that we have a closer affinity to water, trees and mountains than we do to skyscrapers, roads and cars.

It feels like we have the very basics of our existence upside down. Rather than living in the concrete, grey cityscape and ‘escaping’ to the countryside for holidays or breaks, we should live closer to nature and ‘visit’ the cityscapes.

Of course, cities hold the key to work and opportunity, but once again we seem to have our principles and priorities slightly skewed. Do we work to live, or live to work?

I have always been attracted to a hand-to-mouth existence. A small-scale subsistence lifestyle has always seemed more compelling than the intensity of the materialistic, commercialised culture in which most of us in the Western world have chosen to live. Connected to the grid, we are slaves to money. We must pay taxes, mortgages and fees. The governments rely on a working society to generate income and therefore tax.

For the last six years, I’ve been working on a TV series about people who have dropped out of society and started a new life disconnected from the state. They have cut themselves off from ‘the grid’, severed their connection to electricity, water, gas, phone and in some cases money.

For me, expeditions have been my own, short-term opportunity to live off the grid. Expeditions have given me a chance to test my resolve and pique my resourcefulness. When I’m back at home, a cultural lethargy envelops me. When something goes wrong with the electrics or the car or the drainage, I will, by default, call in someone else to help.

The fully functioning circular economy relies on everyone having a skill. We have become reliant on a collective taskforce in which we all have mono skills rather than the universal multitasking multi-skills of old.

My late grandfather built his own house on the shores of a Canadian lake. He dug the foundations, installed the pipework and the electrics. He cut the wood, roofed the house and fitted the windows.

I like to think of myself as a well-rounded individual, but I wouldn’t know where to begin when it comes to building a house. I can sail, scuba dive and speak fluent Spanish, but I don’t understand electrics and I can’t even hammer a nail properly. Which set of skills are more useful? The latter of course; the problem is that society no longer requires them and we have lost the connection to our basic knowledge.

The wilderness requires resourcefulness; it forces us to connect with an inner self that once relied on survival skills to exist. When pushed, it’s amazing how adaptable we can become. The problem is that so few of us ever get a chance to test ourselves. We tend to take the easy option and avoid hardship. For me, expeditions have always been a way of reconnecting with my inner wildman.

The first time I really challenged myself was when I was marooned for a year on a remote corner of a windswept, treeless island in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. I had volunteered to be a castaway for a year on the island of Taransay, as part of a unique social experiment by the BBC to celebrate the millennium.

A group of 36 men, women and children were given 12 months to become a fully functioning community. We were given all the materials we would need to build accommodation, install water piping, a wind turbine and fencing. We put up polytunnels to grow fruit and veg in the inclement Scottish weather and we reared pigs, sheep and cattle. We built a slaughterhouse, harvested crops and became a simple, thriving off-grid community.

I learned so many new skills during that year: farming, building, teaching. In many ways, it converted a group of underskilled urbanites into a well-rounded, multi-tasking community, in which we all shared our different skill sets and knowledge for the betterment of the whole.