by Sue Williams
‘She’ll probably have a lot more strength than many other people, but that relative lack of experience is harder to overcome.’
His passion for Everest was first ignited back in 1985 when he heard Macartney-Snape talk about his ascent of Everest in the back room of a pub in Wagga Wagga, a country NSW city where Lock was working as a local policeman. He was swept up by the excitement and the romance of the idea of climbing big mountains. It was that which kept driving him forward up higher slopes ever since.
‘It became a passion for me,’ he says. ‘I needed to know whether or not I could climb these peaks and the only way to find out was by climbing them. I enjoyed the environment, and I like challenging myself in an environment where the outcome isn’t certain.
‘I like getting away into the wilds; sometimes you have a view to enjoy if not from the summit then at some points on the way up, and it’s a pretty special experience to share with a climbing partner if you have one.’
But as far as the difficulties of climbing 8000-metre mountains go, Lock knows them far more intimately than nearly any other human alive. Over his sixteen-year quest to conquer the top fourteen peaks, he’s survived harrowing experiences.
In 2009, after celebrating reaching the top of his last 8000-metre Himalayan peak, Shishapangma, following three earlier failed attempts, he and his climbing partner ran into trouble. It was getting dark, and they had to try to climb down a knife-edge ridge so steep, they were forced to do it ladder-style, facing the ground, knowing there were sheer drops on either side. Even worse, a blizzard had kicked off and the falling snow and wind had covered their knee-deep tracks so completely, they couldn’t work out the way back to safety. They had no option but to cut an ice ledge, sit on their packs for insulation and wait for dawn – with no cover, no food, no drink and absolutely no way of melting any of the constantly falling snow for water. As with twelve of the other peaks, he’d climbed with the minimum of possessions with him, and without supplementary oxygen.
It was the longest night of Lock’s life, sitting shaking in the -20 to -30° temperatures, trying to keep his fingers and toes constantly moving to prevent frostbite. All the time, he knew the clock was ticking on their chances of staying alive at such a high altitude. No words, he says, can ever describe such misery. ‘But if you’re ever going to an altitude of 8000 metres and over, the outcome is never certain. It’s so dangerous, and it kills people regularly.’
Eventually, the sun did rise, the weather cleared a little, and the pair managed to find their way back down to the highest camp. The mountaineering community were then able to celebrate his remarkable ‘Mountaineering Grand Slam’. It was ‘like winning fourteen Olympic golds, holding your breath at the same time!’, as Greg Mortimer described it.
There have been plenty of other near-misses too. Lock’s first summit of an 8000er was K2, at 8612 metres the world’s second highest mountain, on the border of Pakistan and China. He did it in 1993, in terrible snow and wind, but on descent the team leader and another member of the small five-person expedition fell to their deaths.
In 1997, he struck more trouble on a solo climb of the 8047-metre Broad Peak in Pakistan. He’d missed on his first try and his climbing partner went home. He, however, simply pushed on and tried a different route to the top. He reached the summit successfully but was forced to spend the night on the mountain when darkness fell and he was unable to get down. That was the first time he’d been forced to stay awake all night, knowing he risked perishing from exposure if he dropped off to sleep. Only with dawn was he finally able to safely descend.
That time was, he later wrote in Australian Geographic magazine, ‘a revelation; an insight into the inner strength we humans possess but so rarely draw upon in our regulated, sanitised, comfortable lives.’
Lock finally made the top of Everest via the South Col in 2000, after three unsuccessful tries, and climbed to the top again in 2004.
In 2012 he was forced to abandon his final attempt, solo and without oxygen, when he started suffering double vision and nausea and began hallucinating from Acute Mountain Sickness close to the top. It had been his dream to climb up one side, push through the unknown ‘no man’s land’ and descend via the other, but he was unable to get a permit from the Chinese government. At that point, having been crowned the Australian Geographic Society Adventurer of the Year three years earlier, he announced his retirement from 8000-metre mountains.
‘The more times you go up, the more chance you have of ending up dead,’ says Lock who, in his non-mountain time, works as a Canberra public servant in, rather ironically, risk management. ‘I’d achieved everything I wanted to, except that traverse. I’d wanted to do it because I thought it’d be fun. Once that opportunity was withdrawn, the motivation to go back was gone. I might go back one day for a charity expedition or as part of a specialist team, but not as something I’d do full-time. It’s too dangerous.’
It’ll be particularly dangerous for Alyssa because of her lack of climbing experience, he believes. Even though she’ll have oxygen cylinders, the help of Sherpas and will be able to follow fixed ropes over the route, Everest is still the highest mountain on earth and is perilous at every stage, particularly over the Khumbu Icefall, and up the Lhotse Face.
‘No one can ever guarantee success on Everest,’ he says. ‘Despite the volume of people going up, there are still the dangers of climbing, the altitude to cope with – even if you acclimatise well, you can still feel really bad – and the cold and the weather, and you only have a small window in which to steal the summit. Then there are the seracs, which you just can’t avoid. You take the chance every time you step on Everest of getting a block of ice the size of a house falling on your head.
‘For Alyssa, she’ll feel significant trepidation before she sets her first step on the mountain. She’ll still have lingering questions and doubts: Can she do it? Will she be good enough for it? So for her, going up and down won’t be a major chore. It’ll enable her to acclimatise and it’ll give her more confidence each time she goes up and down between camps successfully. It’s a long slog, but once she gets each stage under her belt, she’ll know what’s coming up, she’ll be faster and she’ll feel a lot more relaxed.’
Hearing that Alyssa would first climb Aconcagua, the highest mountain in South America, as her last preparation expedition before Everest, he says that will be good for adding to her experience, too. However, by the time she’ll arrive in Nepal for The Big One, she’ll have lost all the acclimatisation she’ll have built up in Argentina.
From all his years at the top, he does want to offer Alyssa some advice. ‘Generally, young people want to keep pushing themselves, but she should stop when she wants to. She should step carefully. Take her time. Don’t rush.
‘But most of all, believe in yourself. She does sound like a really focused young person and with the passion to do it for herself, rather than being pushed into it by parents, I’m sure she’ll have the physical capability. She should just take her time and not be afraid to turn around if the weather’s not good.
‘The mountain will still be there a week later if she goes down and sits out the storm. If she doesn’t, she might not be.’
CHAPTER 23
Aconcagua: The Last Practice Climb
‘The best possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice.’
– ERNEST HEMINGWAY
When Alyssa Azar returns from Manaslu at the start of November 2013, she only has two months until her final big climb before Everest: Aconcagua. The highest mountain in the Americas at 6960 metres, it’s one of the Seven Summits, and is in the mighty Andes in Argentina, close to the border with Chile, with a number of glaciers along the ascent. She’s excited, but nervous. She wonders if there’s anything she’s overlooked in all her training, any area in which she needs to do more work.
She asks herself who, apart from her dad, she could call on to give her an hon
est appraisal of where she’s at. One man’s name keeps coming up: Warrior Training’s Keith Fennell. She’s never met him but emails and asks if he’d be prepared to see her, and run her through a few of his trademark challenges to give her an opinion. He comes back to say he’d be delighted to help.
‘I’m thrilled,’ says Alyssa. ‘I know he’ll give me a really honest, down-the-line answer based on my ability. He isn’t going to be nice about it. He’ll look at me seriously and let us know what he feels. He was in the SAS and is an expert on fitness and mental toughness. He’ll see immediately where I’m at.’
Fennell has heard a lot about Alyssa from Glenn, but dads aren’t normally the best judges of their daughters’ abilities. ‘They’re seeing their kids through love goggles,’ says Fennell. ‘So everything they say you expect to be tainted.’ He invites her down to his home on the south coast of NSW for a day of training in mid-December, shortly after she turns seventeen.
She travels down, and the pair meet up and talk at length, mostly about her focus, her goal of reaching the top of Everest, and what she’s doing to get there. The next morning, he puts her through her paces.
First off, they do a tough CrossFit session, with Fennell watching her closely to see how fit, and how strong, she is. Then the pair throw on heavy packs and start up a steep escarpment. In this thirty-minute exercise, Fennell tells her, her heart rate will go through the roof, but he wants her to keep going, no matter what. She should imagine something’s happened on Everest, like an avalanche, and she’s rushing to get help, or that the weather’s closing in and she only has a small window of time to make camp. Every second counts. Every moment she might stop is a sign that she needs to improve her strength and endurance; it’s an opportunity for self-improvement, the chance to become a stronger person.
‘She understood what I was trying to do straight away,’ says Fennell. ‘I expected to beat her comfortably, but the difference didn’t really kick in until after twenty-five minutes and closer to thirty. At the end, she said to me that she had stopped three times for a total of two minutes, so she had 120 seconds of self-improvement possible. She was almost a little bit pissed off with herself. But I know how difficult that challenge is. Your calves, even the soles of your feet burn, there’s a lot of false crests, and soldiers have whinged while doing it. But I was very impressed. She was so determined, and so truthful.’
Next, he sets them both an eight and a half hour walk, with the last 2 km up and down ravines and across waterways. Again, he doesn’t expect her to be able to keep up with him. But she does. ‘Every time I turned round, she would be right there,’ he says. ‘And there was no whingeing. I’ve a good friend who’s a physical instructor, and while we were walking he asked me how long we had left. But Alyssa never did. It was very impressive. She’s still very young, and you’re not in the zone to have excellent endurance at seventeen. But her endurance was phenomenal. I thought she could go all day.’
Then he gives her a choice of activities. She can either be tied to a rope, abseil part-way down a 20-metre cliff and then be locked off and left to hang halfway down – or she can elect to be blindfolded, tie the rope herself and then step off the cliff backwards, to abseil down. Immediately Alyssa chooses the latter. Fennell smiles. He likes how she goes for the most challenging option straight away. ‘Good on her!’ he thinks. He then watches as she hooks herself onto the rope and steps cleanly off the edge.
‘That was very impressive again,’ he says. ‘I’d taken her sense of control away but she was very methodical and clinical with the rope and then, with the utmost confidence, took the next step. I’ve seen grown men, experienced men, baulk at things like that. But a seventeen-year-old girl with very limited experience . . . It was very inspirational for me to see someone who’s very driven and confident and has it together at that age.’
Alyssa chooses the blindfold option as she thinks it’ll be the most difficult, and the furthest out of her comfort zone. It will also prepare her for her time on Everest when she might well be forced to abseil blindly down a cliff, either at night in the darkness, with her goggles fogged or iced up, or suffering snow blindness, like the guy on her Manaslu trip. ‘Then you just have to visualise the path you’ve been up before, and trust you’re doing it right,’ she says. ‘It was a little bit scary, stepping off an edge when you don’t know where the edge is, but it was good to do it, and know I could adapt. You need to get over your fears. You need to be able to perform well, without being scared for your life.’
The pair also talk over a series of different scenarios on Everest. Fennell tells her how people have a plan, a performance line, but when things go wrong and the plan doesn’t unfold as expected, they can panic and things go from bad to worse. But if something goes wrong on Everest, she should simply figure out what to do to get back on track, back to that point on the line where she intended to be.
Also, there’ll be plenty of things thrown at her that she can’t control, but she’ll need to adapt quickly, reassess her position, and move on. ‘At seventeen, with limited life experience, that will be hard,’ he says. ‘But I talked to her about challenging possibilities, like a life-threatening avalanche happening, leaving her the only person still standing. What will she do? How long might she search for other survivors before going down to save herself? She needs to think in advance what she’d do, how she’d perform. I told her she has to think: I could die, lose fingers, lose toes. But she’s very aware of all that. She’s under no illusion that what she’s doing is very dangerous.
‘I’ve lived through very dangerous times in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in that too, you imagine your perfect performance line. It might be impossible at times to stay on that, but when you come off it, you need to stay focused and get back to it as soon as you can. I think Alyssa could really understand what I was saying and she gave me smart and measured and mature responses. Her mental toughness, level of competence and endurance is almost unbelievable for someone of her age. I thought, Wow! At times, she reminded me of some of the much older and more experienced men in the services. It was a bit of a surprise. She’s quite a special young girl, definitely a one percenter, someone who can make a big call. To say I was impressed is an understatement.’
With Aconcagua so close, and then Everest just around the corner in March 2014, Glenn and Alyssa sign up with a sponsorship company to try to raise more money. But it’s tough going.
Many companies don’t believe a seventeen-year-old girl could possibly climb Everest. The kind of people who’d usually sponsor such a venture also have at the forefront of their minds the attempt made in 2006 by fifteen-year-old Australian Christopher Harris to become the youngest kid ever to reach the summit. Climbing from the Tibetan side, as the Nepalese authorities don’t grant anyone under the age of sixteen a permit, he was sponsored by, among others, Australian Geographic, Dick Smith Foods and an investment company. Unfortunately, however, he was forced to turn back after suffering extreme breathlessness on the way to the top. He’d been accompanied by his mountaineer father Richard Harris, as well as filmmaker Mike Dillon to record his trip and . . . Lincoln Hall, who was there to write a piece on the youngster’s summit. It was on that fateful expedition that Hall was left for dead by his team, and later rescued by Dan Mazur.
Four years later, in May 2010, a thirteen-year-old American boy, Jordan Romero, successfully climbed with his paramedic father and stepmother, again from the Tibetan side. But everyone seemed to consider him an exception . . . and a boy.
As a result, there are few sponsors around for Alyssa’s attempt to become the youngest non-Sherpa female in the world to summit – the record is currently with American Samantha Larson, who climbed aged eighteen in 2007. Nima Chemji Sherpa is the youngest Sherpa female to have ascended, aged sixteen in 2012, and the youngest Australian is still Rex Pemberton at age twenty-one.
With Aconcagua costing $30 000 and Everest an extra $70 000, Glenn starts to feel nervous about the urgency of raising the
necessary cash. His business has been going well, to the point where he now has nine full-time employees. His adventure treks have also expanded to include the Overland Track in Tasmania, the Black Cat Trail in PNG, Mount Kinabalu in Borneo, treks in the Kimberley and dog-sledding in the Yukon in Canada. So when a good offer comes in to sell part of his business, the Fighting Fit gym, he accepts it.
‘It was a wrench, but I’d made a commitment to get Alyssa ready for Everest, so I had to get the money together,’ he says. ‘She was uncomfortable with it, but I said I was happy to do it. It’s been expensive to get to this point, but hopefully interest in her will grow. You never know.’
Alyssa is taken aback by her dad’s resolve. ‘I guess in a way I felt selfish and a bit bad but in some ways I think he was also glad and it was just time to sell,’ she says. ‘I’ve always had it in my mind that I’ll pay back all the money he’s spent on my trips one day. That’s from the first Kokoda trek, all the way to Everest. I’m determined to do that in the next few years. He’s shown so much loyalty to me, and I want to repay that loyalty.’
For Alyssa’s expedition up Aconcagua, Alyssa and Glenn choose a South African company. Another participant on the trip is Australian adventurer Stephen Bock who’s climbed in the Andes over many years, and also reached the summit of Everest in 2010 as part of an international climbing team.
Alyssa contacted him on social media twelve months ago, to ask him for advice about Everest. He was coached for his attempt by mountaineer trainer and expedition leader Joe Bonington, who grew up with climbing in his blood. As the son of British mountaineering legend Sir Chris Bonington, the man who led the 1975 Everest expedition that conquered the immensely difficult southwest face of Everest – a feat that has only been attempted three times since – he’s an acknowledged world expert.
